The Element of Fire
Rich and epic Historical Fiction set against the backdrop of the Great Famine. Perfect for fans of Winston Graham and Ken Follett.Boston in the 1850s is the hub of the universe: gateway to America’s temples of commerce and learning; liberal, sophisticated – the very best place in all of the New World for a woman to be.After being ripped from her homeland of Ireland, thrust into the harsh and unforgiving landscape of Australia, it is here that Ellen O’Malley hopes to find the stability of a new life and a new love; Lavelle, the man who adores her.But Ellen, desperate to shake off the Old World, is driven by her own demons to put everything at risk. And Boston, on the brink of Civil War, seems only to mirror her own conflict, to sound the knell of her own battle for survival.A powerful and compelling tale of lives and loves dislocated, The Element of Fire captures emotions as timeless as life itself.
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BRENDAN GRAHAM
The Element of Fire
HarperCollinsPublishers The News Building 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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This edition 2016
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 2001
Copyright © Brendan Graham 2001
Brendan Graham asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Although this work is partly based on real historical events, the main characters portrayed therein are entirely the work of the author’s imagination.
Fair-Haired Boy - Words and Music by Brendan Graham © Brendan Graham (world exc. Eire) / Peermusic (UK) Ltd. (Eire)
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Source ISBN: 9780006513964
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007401109 Version: 2016-01-19
Dedicated to the memory of
‘The Coot’, Fr. Henry Flanagan O.P., Newbridge College (1918–1992) Sculptor, musician, teacher, friend
CONTENTS
‘The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th’ earth …’ ‘An Anatomy of the World’ JOHN DONNE (1572–1631)
1848 – Ireland
It was a grand day for a funeral.
A grand August day, Faherty thought.
The coachman, a thin, normally talkative fellow, with a tic in his left eye, held back now. Cap in hand, he waited, a respectful distance from the graveside.
He had brought them here, deep into the mountains and lakes of this remote Maamtrasna valley. The red-haired woman, her twin daughters, one dead, one alive; the son, and the orphan waif, silent as a prayer, beside him.
The silent one was a mystery to him. A week ago – the first time he had brought the woman back here from the ship at Westport – the girl had appeared out of nowhere and attached herself to them, running near naked alongside his carriage for miles. Not a word out of her mouth, not even begging.
He wouldn’t have stopped if it hadn’t been for the woman. She had taken pity on the girl, saved her from almost certain death. Since then, all through the last few days, she had been like a shadow to the woman, quiet as a nun. God knows, he decided, seeing the woman kneeling over the grave – settling into it the tiny white flowers of the potato plant – someone would want to watch over her. It was surely a strange thing to do – potato flowers on a grave. The way she ran down from the hillock here. Ran, barefooted to the bare-acred field, on past the tumbled cabins and, like that, snatched up a fistful of the flowers from the derelict potato beds. Before that the child’s shawl – ‘Annie’s shawl’, she called it – must be another one she lost – twined it round the hands of the little dead one, like rosary beads.
Now her fine, emerald-green American dress was ruined with kneeling in the clay, but she didn’t seem to notice. Just kept repeating the child’s name over and over: ‘Katie! Katie! Oh, Katie a stór!’ Faherty wondered what she had been doing beyond in America, with her three children here? Not knowing whether they were dead or alive. He watched the shape of her stretch backwards. She was hardly the thirty years out – a fine woman. He turned his head slightly, so as not to be watching her that way.
Out of the corner of his good right eye, he glanced back along the curl of the valley, with its lake of green glistening islands. There wasn’t much here for her – a few patches of hungry grass. Not a beast in a field. Hard to get a morsel of food out of a place like this – even before the potato rot. Nothing but rocks and stones and water everywhere, as Faherty saw it.
The sun was bothering him, causing his left eye to jump even more.
Hard on her though, sailing all this way to find them, and then one of them up and dying, just when she thought she had them safe. Hard on the little one left too – she must be only the nine or ten years, same as the other little one they were burying. A split pair they were – one taken, one left behind, the two of them the spit of the mother, hair like it was spun out of hers.
The boy was a biteen older, maybe two or three years. Distant from the mother – for leaving them, Faherty supposed. Didn’t look like her either, dark, must have taken after the father. But then, what else could the woman have done? Her husband already put into this spot and their cabin thrown down. What had she left here, only the
