It is hard to say that I feel better, but after three square meals I am physically stronger.
The doctor who met the boat came looking for me this morning to tell me that the administrator wanted a word. I rode back through the island with him on his cart, and he pointed out the armed guards posted on the edge of the village nearest the Lazarettos. ‘There are shifts of them night and day,’ he said.
I looked at them in surprise. ‘Guards? What are they guarding?’
‘Against folk in quarantine straying into the village or trying to escape. It’s a dreadful thing, the typhoid, son. The authorities’ll do anything to keep it contained.’
There were children playing among the houses in the village as we went through it, and they stopped their games to watch us pass. Dark eyes filled with caution that made me feel like those lepers they speak of in the Bible.
The administration hut was close to the pier, a long shed with windows looking out over the bay. The administrator himself was a Scotsman from a place called Dumfries. He said he had been working here more than ten years. I asked him if he wasn’t afraid of catching the typhoid. He just smiled and said the fear never leaves you. But that if he’d been going to catch it he reckoned he’d have got it by now.
‘You speak the Gaelic, I’m told,’ he said, and I nodded. ‘We have translators for most languages here, but we recently lost our Gaelic speaker. Actually, he was Irish, but he seemed able to talk to the Scots well enough.’
The administrator turned to gaze out of the window at all of the boats anchored in the bay.
‘I wonder if you might be able to help us with a wee problem we have. An Irishman called Michaél O’Connor who arrived here on the fifth. He doesn’t appear to speak any English.’ He turned back to look at me. ‘The man’s demented. Even turned violent once or twice. He hitches a ride on the ambulance and comes here two or three times a day shouting and screaming. Maybe you could talk to him for us. Find out what the hell it is he wants.’
I found Michaél O’Connor in Lazaretto No. 3, and was surprised to discover that he was not much older than myself. He was sitting at a table on his own, staring into space. Most men, it seems, shave and get their hair cut after a day or two here, but Michaél had a thick black beard on him, and his hair was shoulder-length, matted and knotted. He looked at me with the palest of blue Celtic eyes, empty of any emotion.
Until I spoke the Gaelic to him, and his face lit up. ‘Man, I thought you were another of these bloody people come to jabber at me in English. There’s not one of them speaks God’s own language, and I can’t make myself understood at all.’ Then he glared at me suspiciously. ‘It’s a weird sort of Gaelic you speak, though.’
‘Not as weird as yours,’ I said.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Scotland.’
He roared and laughed then and slapped me on the back, and I think it is the first time I have heard human laughter in months. ‘Ach, you’re a Scotsman!’ he said. ‘Second-best to an Irishman, of course, but you’ll do. Did they send you?’
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘To find out what it is you want from them.’
His face clouded a little as his smile faded. ‘My brother Seamus left Cork on the Emily more than four months ago. He’d have been quarantined here, so there must be a record of him. They’re bloody meticulous about keeping their records. All I want is to confirm that he landed here safely and then passed on to Quebec City after his quarantine.’
‘Surely you could have found some way of asking them that?’ I said.
And then he shocked me by speaking English with a thick brogue and a foul mouth. ‘The fockers don’t speak the mother tongue, Scotsman. Just the fockin’ English.’
I was astonished. ‘But you speak it yourself.’ I raised my hands, at a loss to understand. ‘So where’s the problem?’
His eyes twinkled with mischief. ‘I’ve never given the English the pleasure of hearing me speak their bloody language yet. And I’m not about to start now.’
I laughed and shook my head. ‘But these people aren’t English, Michaél. They’re Canadian. And they only speak English or French.’
He guffawed again. A big, loud, infectious laugh. ‘In that case, it looks like I’m going to have to learn the fockin’ French, then.’
They gave me access to the arrival and departure records in the administration office this afternoon, and I sat at a table with a great big log that listed the arrival of every boat — where it was from, when it arrived, how many people were aboard, how many had died and were sick.
I looked for the Heather, sailing from Loch Glas in the Hebrides. But I couldn’t find any record of it. I asked the clerk if every boat that arrived stopped here at Grosse Île. He was a grey little man, with not much hair left, and sad green eyes. He said that every boat got stopped here, but because of pressure of numbers this year if the doctor found no disease aboard then the boat would be allowed to continue without quarantine.
And from that I took heart and hope that my mother and sisters had not faced disease aboard the Heather, and that they had passed on directly to Quebec City. I would find out when I got there.
I turned my attentions then to the passenger list for the Emily, whose arrival I found had been registered on July 2nd. The crossing had taken fifty-one days, with a hundred and fifty-seven passengers in steerage. Nine had died during the crossing and sixteen were sick on arrival. And there among the surviving passengers was one Seamus O’Connor. The grey clerk with the green eyes raised his head wearily when I troubled him for some further information. ‘Seamus O’Connor,’ I said. ‘Arrived on the Emily from Cork, Ireland, on July 2nd. Can you tell me when those passengers left for Quebec?’
He opened another huge ledger, and ran a bony finger with a dirty fingernail down columns of entries. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘The Emily was held in quarantine for just four days. Six of the sixteen that were put in hospital died.’ He ran his finger down another column, then looked up. ‘Seamus O’Connor was one of them. He’s buried in the mass graves.’
The mass graves are to be found in a flat, grassy area near the south-western tip of Grosse Île. The ground rises up on both sides, rocky and tree-covered. But through the trees beyond the graves, you can just see the sluggish swell of the river. Quebec City is somewhere there, not far upriver. So the dead were almost within sight of it.
Rows of crude white crosses pepper the grass that has grown freshly here over the recently disturbed earth. I found Michaél standing among the trees, sheltering from the drizzle and looking out over the crosses. He wore a blue woollen jacket and torn, baggy trousers held up by braces. The stitching in his boots was rotten and barely held them together. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets.
He nodded towards the graves. ‘That’s my countrymen buried out there,’ he said.
‘And mine.’
He looked at me. ‘Did you people have the famine, too?’
‘Yes.’
He turned away again. And I sensed anger in the way he clenched his jaw. ‘There’s not one of these poor bastards who would have chosen to leave. But if they’d stayed, they’d have starved to death.’ Anger flashed in his eyes now as he turned them on me. ‘With not a single landowner lifting a finger to help them.’ And then he blurted the question I knew he’d been afraid to ask. ‘So what did you learn about Seamus?’
I had been dreading the moment almost as much as he had. I was not at all sure how to tell someone that the person they love is dead. But I didn’t have to. He saw it in my face. And he turned away again quickly.