probably go round the whole family now. Might as well get it all over with, anyway. The older they are when they get it, usually the worse they are. As for Aggie, keep bathing her in tepid water to get the temperature down. I can make up something at the surgery to help there, and something for the cough too if Tom or Joe will come and fetch it. She probably won’t eat much, but give her plenty of fluids and keep the lamps turned low and the curtains drawn.’
By the next day, despite the doctor’s medication and Biddy bathing her down, Aggie was raving. The sheets were damp with sweat, the coughing shook her whole body and the rash had broken out that day too. Aggie was ill for over three weeks. Christmas had come and gone by the time she was in any way recovered. By then, the clothes hung on her frame gaunt from lack of food, and her legs were shaky and slightly wasted. Finn and Nuala had succumbed and she helped nurse them, though both recovered much quicker than she had.
The little ones weren’t right over it when Tom and then his father caught it. Aggie was run off her feet tending to them and helping Joe with the jobs around the farm, until he too was taken sick. With the whole family ill, Aggie had no time to reflect for any length of time on the night she was raped, although she was relieved not to have to see Bernie McAllister, not sure at all how she would treat him when they did eventually meet.
She made one important decision, however: she was finished with the dancing. She would tell her mother she was tired of it. She knew Biddy wouldn’t mind. She had said more than once that Aggie was too old to be prancing about the place when she could be such a help at home.
When her mother too became ill, Aggie’s life grew harder still and she didn’t know whether she was coming or going. Tom and her father were nowhere near better, but at the very least the cows had to be milked twice a day. Then there was the house to tend, the others to nurse, and Finn and wee Nuala to see to as well.
All in all, January had drawn to a close and February begun before the house regained a sense of normality. It was the middle of the month, just after Nuala’s first birthday when Aggie realised she hadn’t seen her monthlies for some time. She had been due the middle of December, a week after the incident with Bernie McAllister, and when it didn’t happen, if she had thought of it at all, she put the absence down to how ill she had been. In January she had been too busy to give any mind to it at all. But now, in February, she faced the dread possibility that she was carrying Bernie McAllister’s child and she was filled with horror and shame.
Only a few days later, Biddy now up and about, at last missed the dress Aggie had asked Tom to destroy. Aggie knew her mother would miss it – she hadn’t that many clothes that she could lose any of them – and she had no option but to tell her that she had torn the dress so badly that she had burned it.
Biddy could hardly believe her ears. ‘You took it upon yourself to destroy a dress?’
Aggie knew she was for it whatever she said or did, but she tried. ‘It was so badly torn, Mammy. I couldn’t have worn it.’
‘It was for me to be the judge of that, surely,’ Biddy said. ‘Tears can be mended and if it had really been beyond redemption then it could have been made up into a dress or two for wee Nuala. Did you not think of that?’
‘No, Mammy,’ Aggie said softly.
‘Then maybe the bamboo cane will help you remember in future.’
Aggie had expected the beating to be a severe one. Finn was so unnerved by the flailing cane that he ran out into the yard, crying for his father. Thomas John came in and took the cane from his wife’s hand.
‘Whatever the child has done,’ he said, ‘she has had enough punishment.’
Aggie slumped to the floor and Thomas John helped her to her feet. ‘What was all that over?’ he demanded of his wife.
‘Oh, madam here ripped her dress,’ Biddy said, ‘the good one that she wore to her dancing class. And instead of telling me and letting me fix it, or use the material to make up something for Nuala, she put it in the fire and burned it. She has admitted it so.’
Thomas John rubbed his chin, for that was indeed puzzling behaviour from his daughter. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I will own that you would be annoyed but there was no need to beat her so badly. Anyway, she has even less clothes now for you have that dress almost whipped from her.’
Biddy, now that she was calmer, saw that Thomas John was right. There were huge rips in the material. She looked at her daughter, trying to remain standing with her father’s support, then said to Aggie grudgingly, ‘All right, maybe I did go a bit too far. Go on into the room and take off your dress. I will put some goose fat on your back and you will then do well enough.’
Aggie did as her mother said, glad to lie down for she was in extreme pain. She had been beaten before many times, as all her brothers had, but seldom so severely. Later, when Biddy saw her daughter’s back, crisscrossed with open stripes, blood squeezing from them, she felt sorry for her. It had been a bold thing to do right enough, but she was a grand help to her and had never given her a minute’s bother till now.
‘Stay in bed for now,’ she said as she rubbed the fat well in. ‘After that we’ll see.’
Aggie sighed in relief and yet she still said, ‘Are you sure, Mammy?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I’m sorry, Mammy.’
‘So am I, child dear,’ Biddy said. ‘It was such an odd thing to do. I mean, what possessed you to burn a dress? You’ve never done such a thing before.’
‘I’ve never had it near ripped from my back and then been raped,’ Aggie might have said. She didn’t, of course. What she did say was, ‘I don’t really know why I did it. I was so annoyed with myself because I really liked that dress.’
‘So, what happened?’
Aggie decided to stick to a semblance of the truth. ‘It was the day you went to the Lannigans’ and I was coming home from dancing when I fell on the road in the dark and tumbled over the remains of a rusty iron fence and into a thick briar bush in the bottom of a ditch. I’d heard the dress tear on the fence, and then it was ripped to bits on the briar bush before I managed to get myself free. When I got home and looked at all the jagged rips and all, I just threw it into the fire, I was so cross.’
‘But didn’t you have your shawl on?’ Biddy asked.
Aggie had to think fast. ‘Yes, but it fell off as I tipped forward. Anyway, after that I was ill and sort of forgot all about the dress.’
‘All right,’ Biddy said. ‘We’ll say no more about it now. You’ll not do such a thing again, sure you won’t.’
‘No, Mammy,’ Aggie said fervently. ‘I think I can promise you, hand on heart, that I will never do such a thing again.’
Biddy was satisfied but Aggie breathed a sigh of relief, glad that she wasn’t expected to move anywhere because she didn’t think she could have done so. As it was, she had to lie on her stomach to sleep, and despite the cold couldn’t bear even her nightdress or the bedclothes to touch her skin.
Sometime during the night she was woken with drawing pains in her stomach, similar to those she had each month. ‘Oh, praise God,’ she breathed in thankfulness. She would endure any amount of beatings if it would also beat out the child she knew she was carrying. However, after a time the pains in her stomach eased and on checking herself, she saw that there was no blood and she lay in the bed and thought of what she was to do, her mind in a wild panic.
She knew that Biddy would soon tumble to what was wrong, for there would be no pads left to soak in the bucket. She was also aware that she had got away with it so far only because first her mother had been so busy with them all so ill and then was taken bad herself, but time was against her now. That last beating would be nothing to the beating she would have to endure if her mother tumbled to the fact that she was having a child, and her unmarried. She would kill her altogether then. Aggie shuddered in fear, for her mother’s true rages were