I found some deeply unsettling diary pages in the national archives of Ireland
Personal Diary of Sean P O’Sullivan – Collection agent to Baron Witherfield
Jan 4th Year of our Lord 1848 – Noon
I have stopped to shelter from the rain under a large oak whose canopy covers a fork in the road. My horse needed the rest, it has been a hard ride on bad roads with worse weather from Roscommon town. If my reading is correct the right fork would take me to Kilnacranog and the left further west all the way to Galway. There is no signpost, I am relying wholly on a map provided by my employer. The Baron owns a large swathe of Ireland yet has never bothered to set foot here. I take my orders from an office staffed by his underlings in Dublin. In truth it was some underpaid cartographer who made the map, I doubt my employer could even pronounce Kilnacranog. I wondered if people spat at the cartographer as they did me? Probably not, he could make his maps without much input from people, I had to extract money from them.
With so many dying from hunger you would think the Baron would forego collections, but he had no such notions. People were entries in a ledger to men like him. As I tied up my horse, I spotted two of those ‘entries’ were lying in a ditch with a small stream near a low stone wall. A mother and child, it’s impossible to tell if the child was boy or girl. The child has a green fabric neckerchief fastened around its neck. They must have fallen from exhaustion on the road and died. Someone with a little strength left clearly pushed them into the ditch as something resembling a burial. I sat on a stone wall and ate some of my provisions. Fresh bread, good cheese and lovely salted butter. But I couldn’t be a glutton, had to make the provisions last. Most of the country is dead or close to it and anyone fit enough has already left on the boats to the Americas. The United States mostly, but a cousin of mine on my mother’s side ended up in Buenos Aires.
It might seem cruel or improper to eat while the starving dead look at you, but I need to keep my strength up. I’m not going to let me or Molly end up like the two unfortunates in the ditch, and to do that I had to serve men like Baron Witherfield. The dead’s problems are over. I can only concern myself with mine and Molly’s welfare. Have to be cruel to some extent in these times to survive. There’s no other way.
I’d rather not go to Kilnacranog, never heard of the place. I want to keep going west all the way to Galway. Maybe even further west, with Molly across the ocean. I had enough for a ticket for me and the child, but only a little extra to get set up over there. But why should I leave, I was doing well enough here. The famine would pass eventually and there is good money in the collections business these days. It’s the only thing there is good money in these days. When the famine ended I might be a rich man myself, if I played my cards right. Had to make a better future for Molly. There was a big scalp in Kilnacranog, a big red number in the Baron’s ledger and if I collected I got a nice commission, a big step on my way to making that future.
After I finish my lunch I will rest up here for a few minutes to gather my strength. Maybe the rain will let up, then I’ll take the right fork to Kilnacranog
Jan 4th Year of our Lord 1848 – Afternoon
I am flummoxed and aggravated. The rain never let up, but I had to get moving so I took the right fork toward Kilnacranog some two hours ago according to my silver pocketwatch. I must have gotten turned around in the rain, as I have found myself back at the same bloody fork in the road. I know it to be the same place by the two corpses. The child with the green neckerchief and the woman. But I could swear they had been in the ditch before. Reading back from not two hours ago I see it confirmed by my own handwriting. Someone must have dragged them out of the ditch and lay them on the ground near the stone wall. Perhaps a death cart would come through to collect them. Odd in these times, but perhaps someone feared they would contaminate the stream.
I have tied up my horse to a branch, she looks as tired as I am. I have pulled myself atop this stone wall to write. How the hell did I get turned around, I’m usually like a bloodhound for direction when there was money to be had. And there was money in that collection job in Kilnacranog. With all the wandering I was hungry again. I took out my provisions, I still had a decent amount, so I ate up some of the bread, most of the butter and the cheese. I saved just a little. There would be somewhere to get food and lodgings in Kilnacranog but I knew to keep some in case I got lost again.
I was closer to the bodies this time. Outside of the watery ditch they didn’t look as decomposed, fresher, maybe dried out a little. The child I could see now was a girl, hard to tell her age. The pairs’ dead eyes seemed to watch me jealously as I ate, it was my imagination I suppose. Oddly they were holding hands, someone dragged them out of the ditch and put them hand-in-hand lying there on the ground. It was disquieting, but maybe someone thought it was a nice gesture. I had seen far more disturbing sights than this and been unperturbed. Not two days ago in Roscommon town I passed a grave with at least eighty bodies piled in a huge pit, it was impossible to tell where one body ended and another started, just a singular mass of flesh. So why then if that sight bothered me so little, was I so unsettled by these two? I suppose it’s the personal nature of it. A mass of bodies is just that, a mass, not a person with a name or a true face, just flesh, easy to look past. But a mother and child hand-in-hand, they were people, they had loved and had dreams but died by this roadside.
I put away what little food I had left and checked my pocket watch. I had taken the watch in part payment from a man who owed someone some money. First collection job I ever did, the boss said I could keep it as a bonus. Had the thing two years, it was solid silver. Worth a few bob if I was ever in trouble and needed to pawn it.
It’s 3.22pm, January, sundown would be in a little over an hour. Have to get moving, I’d trust the map, have to make Kilnacranog before nightfall proper. I’ll take the right fork again. I will write some more when I am in my lodgings.
Jan 4th Year of our Lord 1848 – Nightfall
I am sat terrified and exhausted. I am unsure if I am losing my mind or some malicious actor is toying with me, skulking in the shadows. I will only stay here long enough to scribble these notes in case I do not survive the night. I have taken my flintlock from my pack but in this damp and rain I give the powder fifty-fifty odds of firing at best. Not odds I’d want to bet my life on. And I had to see my tormentor to shoot at him first. I will explain with haste.
I once again took the right fork trying to make Kilnacranog before night. But once more I was turned around and found myself back at the fork in the road. But this time the bodies of the Woman and the young girl were no longer lying on the ground. They were sat propped up against the wall, still holding hands. But their faces look almost alive, like they had died not hours ago, the young child could have been sleeping. Their clothes now clean and ordered. Gripped in the Mother’s left hand was a small oil lantern burning away. It illuminates the fork in the road and my diary as I write this. My horse is unsettled and looks gaunt. I will finish what is left of my rations and leave this place. I have to make it to Kilnacranog. I have to rest and then get that money. If this is my last entry I leave all my earthly possessions to my daughter Molly.
Jan 6th Year of our Lord 1848 – Night
I will try to relay what I experienced two nights ago at the fork in the road, although I do not expect any who read this to believe it.
Once more on the road to Kilnacranog I was turned around. This time in a warren of tiny roads that had not been there before. The rain let up but was replaced by a dense fog. I could not even see past the nose of my horse, such was the poor visibility. I was exhausted to the point of breaking and as was the horse. Eventually I saw the glow of a lantern ahead and made toward it.
I arrived at the same fork in the road with the low stone wall. The fog was a little lighter so I could see a little further. Sat on the stone wall beside the glow of the lantern were the figures of two people, one large, the other small. The smaller figure was kicking its legs back and forth. I put my hand on the flintlock that I had now secreted in my large coat pocket. My hands trembled. Through the gloom the figures came into view. A pretty young woman with dark hair and what I presumed to be her daughter were sat on the stone wall. They had with them the old oil lantern. I was shaken to my core, were these the same two who had been dead hours before, was I losing my mind.
‘Hello,’ the little girl greeted me with a warm smile.
She had lighter hair than the woman. Her face was a little sunken on account of the hunger but otherwise clean and ordered. The same pretty green neckerchief was fastened around her neck.
‘Am I dead?’ I blurted out. It was the only explanation I could think for what was happening.
The little girl laughed with a playful little cackle and the blood ran cold in my veins.
‘Don’t laugh at the man dear, it’s rude,’ the woman told her in a soft voice.
The young girl stopped laughing and gave a sheepish grin as an apology.
‘No, I don’t think you’re dead. Do you feel dead?’ the woman asked in her soft buttery voice.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Have I lost my mind?’ My voice trembled as I spoke.
‘Probably a little, but haven’t we all in these times?’ She replied to reassure me, it had the opposite effect.
‘Stay a while,’ the woman gestured to the wall.
Every fibre of my being told me to ride away as fast as I could. But I was exhausted and something at the back of my mind told me I shouldn’t refuse the woman’s request. I dismounted my horse.
‘Do you have any food?’ the little girl asked.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘I ate all my provisions, I’m sorry.’
The child looked crestfallen, but the mother’s face showed no change.
‘Where were you headed that you finished all your supplies?’ The woman asked.
Behind her sunken face she looked to be a great beauty. Not in the manner of some pampered noblewoman, only made beautiful by powder and expensive dresses. No, this woman looked like she had been fashioned this way from clay or mud, or some sculptor had hewn her from a dark rock.
‘Kilnacranog,’ I answered. ‘I’ve tried three times but I got turned around each time. I’m lost. It’s supposed to be the right fork of the road.’
‘What’s in Kilnacranog?’ the woman asked.
‘A man I need to meet.’
‘Does he want to meet you?’
‘I doubt it. He owes my employer money?’
I sat down on the wall as far away from the pair as I could. The little girl kept kicking her legs. The woman tilted her head at a strangely unsettling angle, almost inhuman. Her eyes were so dark brown they were almost black. A little smile cracked across her face.
‘Who’s your employer?’ she asked.
‘It’s not important and I’m not at liberty to say,’ I answered her politely.
The smiled slipped from her face and her eyes bored into me, her lips pursed. My physical faculties were still working, I was not frozen under some spell, I could have mounted my horse or run into the fields. I still had my free-will about me. I gripped the flintlock in my pocket.
‘It’s important enough that you’re out here in the dead of night a long way from home. And I’d say you are at liberty to say whatever you like, and of course you are at liberty to leave this fork in the road any time you please,’ a smile returned to her face as she responded.
‘I don’t know that I am free to leave any time I want. I’ve tried three times now.’
‘Aye, and always by the right fork, never the left. I expect the left fork will take you all the way west to Galway. And if you boarded a ship you could keep going west or any direction you liked. Boston or maybe even Buenos Aires.
I began to visibly shake, I had to steady my left hand on the wall.
‘Comerse el mundo, as they say,’ the woman gave out a little laugh at whatever she found so funny about the Spanish words. I didn’t understand them.
I didn’t respond for a long time, I couldn’t, she knew me somehow. After a long pause I started to speak.
‘I have to get to …’
‘Kilnacranog, you said already, for your employer,’ she interrupted.
‘Yes.’
‘Whose name is? You can tell me, I can keep a secret.’
‘Baron Witherfield’
The woman’s face lit up with glee at hearing the name.
‘Well, isn’t that convenient for both of us. You see I am something of a collection agent myself and Baron Witherfield owes me a great debt. So any debt this man in Kilnacranog might owe him is in truth owed to me. And I am more than willing to waive this man’s debt.’
I paused, I was frightened. My guts turned. I knew not what this woman was, but I knew enough to know I should not insult her or call her a liar. I took some time to consider my words.
‘I presume it is not money he owes you?’ my voice trembled as I asked.
The woman grinned from ear to ear and shook her head in the negative, she looked pleased I had worked it out.
‘You don’t want to owe me anything I assure you, and the Baron has run up quite a debt. I suspect he doesn’t even know it, I don’t think I show up in any of his ledgers. But one day I will come to collect, I always collect.’
‘Do I owe you anything? Personally I mean.’ I asked terrified of the answer.
‘Not yet, you did what you must to survive in these difficult times. It is only that you had a mouth to feed other than your own that you have not accrued a debt to me…as of yet. But I suspect you have more than enough now, no?’
‘I have enough, I have more than enough.’
‘I thought so, I thought so,’ the woman gave a little cackle.
‘Are you and your daughter hungry?’ I asked not even sure if it was her daughter or if they were people at all.
The child’s ears pricked up. The woman stroked the little girl’s hair and smiled at her, the girl gave a beaming smile in return.
‘I’m not hungry at all. But the girl certainly is. She’s not mine, I’m just taking her under my wing for a time, trying to see that she survives these difficult times. I see great things in her future, once the yoke of starvation and oppression are cast off of her I think she will do just fine.’
‘I don’t have any food but…’ as I spoke I fumbled in my pocket and produced the silver pocket watch I had taken on my first job. ‘…maybe you could sell this and the girl could eat for a few weeks at least. Silver is worth a lot more than paper money these days,’ my voice was cracking as I spoke.
I held out the heavy silver pocket watch to the woman. My right hand tremored like an elderly man, I had to steady it with my left. She didn’t take it herself, instead she gestured to the girl who snatched it with glee and admired it in the lamp light.
‘I suppose we’ll be going now, places to be,’ the woman’s voice had returned to a much softer tone. She picked up the oil lantern. ‘Come on you,’ she said to the little girl who hid the watch in her dress.
I was rooted there in place as the woman and girl climbed down off the other side of the wall. They hopped over the stream into the field just past it and disappeared into the molasses thick fog. I could just see the glow of their lantern.
From deep inside the fog I heard the woman speak to me, ‘I hope we never meet again. Don’t you have somewhere you need to be?’ The light from the lantern faded.
I jumped down from the wall and mounted my horse. Ahead I could just see the fork in the road. I didn’t hesitate for a second, I took the left fork and rode until morning. This time I was not turned around.
I sit writing this in my lodgings in Galway city, I have sent for my daughter Molly and all the funds I have at my disposal. I have booked two births on a ship bound for Buenos Aires. We’ll make do with what little we have. I will ask my cousin to help find me honest work. We will leave this place and never return.
ITEM CODE: 44693
Item donated by: Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno
Condition: Very poor. Partially burnt.