Not the Same Sky Read Online Free Page B

her life, as well, of course, as being a wife and mother. So she understood this rash departure from the world of realism. Now, with her husband’s decision, she would be better supported mentally, if not financially, in her endeavours. They would be able to say to each other at night, ‘And were you happy today?’ and it would mean did you scale an inch today, and can you see the mountain ahead? It would not mean happy as in some vague non-esoteric sensation.
    His mother then lost a daughter. People said this as if she’d mislaid her. It was a better word than dead, it gave some possibility for hope. They did not say that both the mother and father had a dead daughter, no, simply that the mother had lost one, as if her battle to keep her daughter by her side had been fruitless. His mother then wandered into Swedenborg’s New Church, where she found comfort in a sermon about the state of new infants in heaven. She was thus able to continue writing, as opposed to spending her days in hopeless mourning.
    Charles grew up affected by these events. When he had learned his languages well, he translated two works of Swedenborg’s into English, perhaps to know better what gave his mother hope. He trained as a surgeon, perhaps to finish his father’s work. He took a once-off job, or so he assumed, as surgeon-superintendent of the St Vincent , a ship that was to take two hundred and fifty-one emigrants to New South Wales, nine of whom were Irish.
    This job could be his adventure before life. It was the first time he had met an Irishman. He did not have to necessarily know these Irish—they made up a small number of his passengers and looked the same as his others, in skin at least, if not in eyes. He enjoyed the job. It created in him somewhere a dangerous straying from the steady tread towards that Somerset village. But this would be his one adventure before steering himself back towards that desk. It might make him more attractive to the wife he wasn’t yet searching for.
    His successful superintendship was talked about, and the talk made the rounds, becoming part of the plan, which was now well made by the public servants who were no longer going to their clubs and home to their wives and remaining shtum . The plan could no longer be upset by loose talk. Already ships had gone and there was a list of further possible surgeon-superintendents to be approached.
    So Charles found himself here, at Plymouth, with a job to do and around two hundred Irish girls to meet. He wondered what condition they would be in. He had been filled in on the state of things so far—a local shipping officer had met him in his office, and further instructions had come by post. He was told that ships had gone and arrived, and while the reaction to the girls was anything but desirable, this was a minor thing to be borne in whatever way it could. It didn’t matter much. It didn’t matter at all in Ireland.
    By now it was known that one year’s potato crop had not died and so hope should have been tentatively possible. But so many were gone, and dead, some never even buried. Their voices warned against hope. It is now known that never again was there a single day in which all the potatoes, those dug and those still in the ground, absorbed a silent disease and burst forth quietly into rot. But that is hindsight. The gathering up of girls from every county had begun and would continue.
    Charles had been given a map of where all these girls came from, the ones on his ship and the ones already gone. But he was not told what the girls in Ennis, in Listowel, Dingle, Ennistymon, Scarriff, Loughrea, Gort, Portumna or Tuam said the day they were told. Nor was he told if they differed in what they thought and felt. That perhaps was the worst thing. He had seen names, dates of births—some of them only probable dates of births—addresses of workhouses at the time of departure, but there was no mention of their reactions in the notes sent to him.
    Nor did