The Convictions of John Delahunt (26 page)

I bent over Helen and kissed her pale forehead. She lifted her arm and laid it over the back of my head. Mary brought in a chair and placed it beside me. I sat, leaned over the table so my face was close to Helen’s, and stroked her hair. The basin across the room was in my eye-line. At a point along the rim the yellow cloth ruffled up, but the gap into the bowl was too shadowy to see.

I wondered what they were going to do with it. The fire burned in the hearth behind me. Were they just waiting for us to leave before they put it in there?

Helen’s eyes were closed and her breathing had become steady, as if she was drifting to sleep.

There would be a long back garden attached to this house. Plenty of room for a stillborn graveyard. Helen’s eyelids fluttered open.

Maybe they were going to hand it over to us as we left, concealed in a small box, and tell us to take care of it ourselves.

A tear gathered, and trickled over the bridge of her nose. ‘I’m sorry, John.’

I told her she had nothing to be sorry about.

Helen continued to suffer over the next several days in Grenville Street, and, for the most part, she was confined to bed. Mrs Redmond had given her a bottle of laudanum to bring home, telling her to take three drops with each meal. She also gave her a thick glass syringe with a leather plunger. Twice a day, Helen had to inject herself with tepid water while squatting over the chamber pot – to remove blood clots and other fragments that might have remained. I waited on the landing while she did so. She dreaded it, for the sting was excruciating, and she began to take a dose of laudanum an hour before each rinse.

She abstained from food and even water as much as possible, and would lie in bed for hours in a stupor. The more alert she was, the greater the pain. At night she suffered insomnia as a result of being bedbound during the day. Once more, laudanum was the solution. The sedative allowed her moments of feverish sleep. She would squirm in the bed and speak nonsense. Sometimes she would push the tangled bedclothes off when it became too hot, or open her eyes suddenly and look at me as if I was a complete stranger.

One night she began to speak about her family. She said we would have to tidy the room because her mother was coming to visit tomorrow. They were going to make plans to celebrate her brother Arthur’s commencement.

I reached over to shake her shoulder. She sat up and sought out my face in the gloom. ‘Arthur never liked you,’ she said. Then she lay back down again.

It fell to me to look after the household, though that only meant bringing in supplies and keeping the place relatively tidy. With my college fees, the rent, and the trip to the midwife, only fifteen pounds remained of the Cooney reward money. I became frugal with my purchases, selecting cheaper bottles of wine and secondary cuts of meat.

I began to wonder how much the Castle might give for information on a back-street abortionist.

One afternoon in late June, I was reading a textbook by the windowsill. The sash frame was open a few inches, and sounds from the street drifted from below: children at play, carts trundling by, housewives in conversation.

Lyster stood on the pavement across the road looking up at our room. He wore a light flat cap and a waistcoat over a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. His hands hung down by his waist. I paused at the window and regarded him. How long had he been standing there? He continued to stare at me for several more seconds, then put his hands in his pockets and walked away. Still standing over my chair, I watched until he reached the corner and disappeared.

Helen was in bed, lying on her side, sore and lucid. She asked what had caught my attention.

‘Lyster was outside looking up at our window.’

She raised her head from the pillow, then reached across for the laudanum on her bed-stand. ‘Him again.’

That night, her sleep was feverish once more. She pushed herself up on her elbows and looked around the darkened room with glazed eyes. ‘John, where’s that bloody rag?’

I told her she hadn’t been bleeding for more than a week. ‘Go back to sleep.’

She swung her head towards the hearth. ‘No, the one in the fire.’ Her eyes seemed to gain focus. ‘I saw you burning a bloody rag in the fire.’

I reached out and brushed her cheek. Her eyes didn’t waver. I said it was gone; all burnt up.

She nodded, laid her head down and drifted back to sleep.

Helen got through the first bottle of laudanum in less than two weeks. I bought her another, which only lasted ten days. When the liquid was nearly gone she reduced the dose, taking only a couple of drops at a time, and she complained that she could hardly feel any effect. When there was less than a teaspoon left, it had to be sloshed about so enough could collect on the dropper. Once or twice I saw her lick the glass wand, like a child licking jam from a knife. She asked me to go to Boileau and buy some more.

‘Why don’t we wait to see how you’re feeling in a few days?’

Helen was hunched over her desk, scraping the nib of her pen in a spiral over a sheet. The ink had long since run dry. She shifted in her seat. I thought she was going to argue, but instead she nodded. ‘I’ll try.’

When the bottle was empty, I gathered it up with some other rubbish to throw on a tip in the back yard. Helen stopped me. ‘There might be a dose in it yet.’ She filled it with water and left it on the table to soak for half an hour, then drank directly from the bottle.

The sediment and residue inside the glass was more potent than she realized. After a few minutes, I noticed her breathing had become quick as she sat at the kitchen table. She said she didn’t feel well and leaned forward on her elbows. One of them slipped from the edge and her head dipped, as if she’d dozed off for a moment.

She giggled and stood up, tipping the chair over, and walked towards the bed with an unsteady step. I put my arm around her waist in case she fell.

Helen tried to pull away. ‘Mrs Redmond said you’re not to touch me for a month.’

She laughed again, but there was no mirth in her eyes, and she struck the top of my hand with her balled fist.

‘Helen, please.’

She broke free of my grasp, crossed the room and fell face first on the bed. She lay perfectly still, with her face between a pillow and the covers, and her feet still on the ground. I picked up her ankles and placed them on the mattress, then put my hand on her back. Her breathing was shallow, as if she struggled to fill her lungs, but there was no distress on her face. I pulled tangled hair away from her mouth and nose and turned her so she lay on her side. She weighed very little.

Two days later, I lounged on the bed, sitting against the headboard with my shirtsleeves rolled up. Helen shivered beneath the blankets beside me, wrapped in a shawl, a cold sweat on her forehead. ‘It’s no use,’ she said. ‘I need more of the medicine.’

I put my book down on my stomach. ‘Are you not feeling better at all?’

She said she was feeling worse. ‘I ache all over.’

‘That’s because of the laudanum.’

She began breathing heavily through her nose, signalling another wave of nausea. She scrunched her eyes, then abruptly pushed back the covers and pulled the shawl from around her shoulders, allowing it to slip on to the floor.

I put my hand on her forehead. During these flushes she liked it as she said my fingers were always cold. I spoke to her softly. ‘Try to give it another day.’

She kept me awake during the night with her incessant scratching. The skin beneath her knees and on the inside of her thigh had become red and inflamed as if infected with scabies. The itching drove her to distraction and she couldn’t help herself.

The rhythmic rasping set my teeth on edge. Mostly I was disturbed by the way she held her breath while doing it, then finished with a long sigh and heavy panting.

‘You’re just making it worse.’

‘I know.’

‘Does it not hurt?’

She said it stung like anything. But after a few minutes she started again. I reached over beneath the covers and took hold of her wrist.

The following morning she felt wretched again. Her teeth chattered while she spoke. ‘You’ll have to get me some more.’

I asked what of her original ailment, had that not healed?

She didn’t reply. Beneath the covers she continued to shiver. I lay down beside her and draped my arm over her shoulders, but she twisted them and turned away. ‘I can’t breathe when you do that.’

I rolled over and sat up at the edge of the bed.

Her voice came over my shoulder. ‘Why won’t you get it for me?’

I said it was for her own good.

She began to kick off the covers, and I thought she was having another hot flush, but instead she got up. ‘I’ll go to Boileau myself.’ In her nightgown she walked to the shelf behind the table and pulled down a round tin tucked back in the corner. She lifted the lid, saw that it was empty and looked at me.

‘Where’s the money?’

It was in my pocket.

‘What are you doing with all of it?’

I said it wasn’t very much. We only had two pounds left. She looked back into the empty tin. That brief physical exertion had left her drained, so she went to sit at the desk. ‘What happened to it?’

‘College fees, the midwife, I had to bring the rent to Mrs Travers a week ago.’ I said the truth was we couldn’t afford bottles of laudanum; soon we wouldn’t be able to afford much of anything.

She folded her arms in her lap, and rocked slightly with her weight on the balls of her feet. She thought for a moment. ‘You don’t have anything to take to the Castle?’

‘No. Well …’ I waited for her to glance up at me. ‘Apart from Mrs Redmond.’

She looked down at the floor. Her eyes had become glassy; her shoulders continued to move back and forth. ‘And how much would that bring?’

I brought the information to Fownes Street in late July. When I asked how much it was worth, Farrell had to check the handbook. He pulled a ledger from his desk: an alphabetical register of crimes with a payment schedule attached to each. This particular crime was first on the list. It was five pounds for the initial report, ten if there was a conviction. But he doubted they’d arrest Mrs Redmond straight away. In cases like this the police would bide their time, wait for some troubled girl to go down the steps in Dominick Street, then swoop in and catch the midwife red-handed.

It meant our coffers were full for the rest of the summer. Helen no longer felt any pain from her operation, but she continued to take laudanum. It got to the stage that she was lucid only for a few hours each day. After a dose she would lie in bed, or wander around the room in her nightgown. She’d stand by the window and I’d pull her away, saying people on the street below could see her. She’d look at me quizzically, as if wondering why that would matter.

One evening she brought me the bottle while I sat at the dinner table. She said, ‘Why don’t you try it?’

The taste was so bitter I had to resist spitting it out. I remained in my armchair for an hour looking into a candle flame. I didn’t notice any effect.

The new college term began in the middle of September. On the day before classes started, I brought my armchair to the window to catch the afternoon light, and placed an opened book on my lap. My eyes scanned the pages for a few moments, before drifting to the passers-by on Grenville Street. As they crossed the road, their forms expanded and bent because of warps in the windowpane.

Helen sat at the desk, working on her manuscript, some of the pages charred and blackened at the edges. She made notes and annotations; occasionally she would strike out a whole section, write a new paragraph on a fresh page, and insert it into the sheaf.

She wore her fingerless gloves and held the pen awkwardly between stiff fingers. As she bent her head over the desk, a distinct line of scalp could be seen in the parting of her hair. Helen put aside the pen and reached for the small bottle at the side of the table. She leaned her head backwards, then held the tip of the glass over her protruding tongue. Two drops fell almost immediately, but she waited, as if parched with thirst, for a third.

‘That’s enough for today,’ I said. I brought the bottle to the shelf above the dining table. As I pushed it between the salt cellar and money tin, the canister scraped over the wood and the coins inside rattled. Helen finished the page she was working on before getting up. When she was halfway to the shelf I said, ‘Leave it, Helen, or I won’t buy you any more.’

She paused, but only for a second. ‘This isn’t where it goes.’

She carried the bottle to the cold fireplace. ‘It’s kept here,’ she said, placing it among some other items on the mantelpiece – her hairbrush, and a small music box with no key.

It had been well over a year since I had set foot in the cobbled quadrangle of Parliament Square. The college was much as I remembered, though construction of a new building had commenced next to the Fellows’ Garden. The paths were busy on the first day of term. Youthful first-years with full satchels walked about, unsure of themselves. Older students were more comfortable, catching up with friends after the summer break, walking and laughing in groups. The route I took was a familiar one, to a demonstration room in the science building. A work-table and lectern stood at the front, and six concentric benches rose in tiers, split by a staircase going up a central aisle. I went to sit in the back row.

At ten minutes to the hour, other students began to drift in while chatting together. A few cast glances in my direction, but I ignored them. They all took their seats close to the front. In my day, we scattered about the benches at random, but in this class about twenty were bunched together in the first three rows. I considered gathering my books and going to join them, but what did it matter?

Professor Lloyd entered and the murmur of conversation quietened. He welcomed the class back, trusted we had an enjoyable summer. He noticed me sitting alone in the rear, but made no comment before starting his lecture.

While Lloyd spoke, he kept his arms tightly folded in front of his chest. But he’d disengage his left arm to make expansive gestures, or turn the page of his notes, or stroke at his clean-shaven chin. When he did so, he always kept his right arm pressed against his ribs, as if nursing an injury. Once the left hand had completed its motion, it would burrow back into the crook of his elbow.