The Secret Scripture

Roseanne writes in her testimony that John Kane is becoming more mysterious, hardly speaking, though he smiled at her that morning. On his way out of her room, he whacked the loose floorboard, under which she hides her testimony, with his shoe. It appeared he was indicating that he was aware of something being hidden there. Roseanne wanted to ask Kane about the progress of spring, if the snowdrops had evaporated and the daffodils have arrived. Suddenly, she became dizzy while looking out the window and tried to balance herself. Kane was still nearby; he reentered her room and helped her into bed.

Roseanne goes back to recalling the time shortly after Father Gaunt’s visit. She was wandering over the dunes on Strandhill beach one night. She didn’t want to see anyone but imagined that she saw people who weren’t actually there. She felt haunted by a figure wearing a black suit and a brown hat. She stood on the sand and watched the tide, which was far out. She then heard a “tiny growling,” which grew louder (233). She felt the ground tremble and saw lights approaching. Suddenly, there were dozens of airplanes coming toward her in unison. They flew close to the water, pulling it up “in torn sheets, that fell back to the surface” (235). Roseanne felt the planes pulling at her, as though trying to tear the brains out of her skull and her eyes out of their sockets. Then, just as quickly as they came, they were gone.

Some days thereafter, she was on her porch, tending to her roses—an activity that brought her some comfort during this period of distress. A man came along. At first, she didn’t recognize him then saw whom she believed to be Jack. She wondered what he was doing there, given that he was supposed to be in India. She called out to him. The man stopped. He looked frightened; he then spoke as though he had not spoken in days, as though words had become foreign to him. Roseanne realized that it wasn’t Jack. The man said that he was Jack’s brother, Eneas.

Roseanne asked Eneas what he was doing there. She remarked that he looked all black and grey, as though covered in ashes. Eneas said that he had been in Belfast, heading back to France, and that he was a soldier. He had been awaiting his ship and sleeping in a small hotel when sirens went off. Then, dozens of German bomber planes arrived, setting fire to Belfast. Roseanne invited him into her hut to rest. She identified with Eneas, feeling that he, too had been cast out of Sligo; that he, too, had become a black sheep within the McNulty clan, rarely discussed by his brothers and, when they did, with “heavy sighs and meaningful looks” (238). She ordered him to remove his uniform and brought him a cup of water. He drank it eagerly, “like he had a fire also in his insides that needed putting out” (239). She used her kettle to prepare a bath for him and handed him a bread and cheese sandwich, which he ate quickly.

It was getting dark. Roseanne heard the owl, her only companion in her exile, begin to hoot. She offered to take Eneas’ uniform outside to beat the ashes out of it; he refused, wanting to wear it as it was. He planned to go to Dublin and rejoin his unit. He told Roseanne that he came to Strandhill to see a girl he liked named Viv. He then told Roseanne that she and Viv were the most beautiful people he had ever seen. He asked for her forgiveness for speaking so, given that she wasn’t only married but also married to his brother. Roseanne corrected him, saying that she had been told that she was no longer married. She then went over to Eneas, took one of his calloused hands into hers, and led him to her feather bed. After making love, Jack asked about Joe Clear, saying that Jack told him that he was once in the Merchant Navy. Roseanne confirmed that he was. Eneas then asked if Joe Clear was in the “old police,” too, which Roseanne found a strange question. She asked if there was any more news about Tom. Eneas told her that he was doing well, but worried that he may have been upsetting her. Roseanne wasn’t upset at all. She liked having Eneas there with her.

Roseanne writes about how the medical doctor, Dr. Wynn, had just been in to see her. She told him that she had been feeling tired. Dr. Wynn noted her odd breathing and the rattle in her chest. While prescribing antibiotics, he told her that the main body of the hospital had recently been cleared of patients, and that the building would soon be demolished. She asked if Dr. Grene knew about this, and Dr. Wynn said that he was the one who had planned it. Roseanne worried about her testimony under the floorboard. She wondered how she would collect the papers and keep them secret. She asked Dr. Wynn what would happen to the apple tree in the courtyard and the daffodils. He didn’t know what Roseanne was talking about.

Dr. Grene writes in his diary that Dr. Wynn made a mess of things by telling Roseanne that the hospital would be demolished. Dr. Grene went in to see her and found her sweating in bed. John Kane was there, too, to his surprise. Dr. Grene remained suspicious of him but noted that Kane truly seemed concerned about Roseanne.

Roseanne’s face lit up when she saw Dr. Grene. She asked him to fetch her copy of Religio Medici. Dr. Grene recalls that she had mentioned it as Joe’s favorite book and that she may have shown him that Joe’s name was written inside. She told Dr. Grene that she wanted him to give the book to her son. Dr. Grene asked where the man was, but Roseanne only answered “Nazareth,” which Dr. Grene took to mean the city in Israel (246). Still, he insisted that he would obey her wish, though he knew that he could do no such thing. He wanted to ask her if she had killed her child but figures that he would also have to be crazy to have asked such a question. She had never answered any of his questions anyway.

The narrative shifts back to Roseanne’s testimony. She recognizes that she is unwell. She thinks back to a dark February when she was about seven months pregnant and unable to hide her condition under her old coat. Ireland was in the midst of the Second World War: The nation talked about “submarines out in the bay of Sligo, and the shortages, the scarcity of tea and the odd abundance of things like Beecham’s powders” (248). In those days, Roseanne had become known as “the woman in the corrugated-iron hut, the fallen woman, the witch, the creature ‘gone over the edge’” (248-49).

One day, an attractive woman wearing “an ermine-collared coat” passed by her hut and looked at Roseanne (249). The woman looked like someone with money. Her black boots were polished and her brown hair looked freshly-styled. The woman was heading to “an old house with a high wall across the road from [Roseanne’s] hut” (249). Roseanne approached the gates. Through them, she saw Jack. Roseanne wondered if this was “Mai, the grand girl of Galway that he had married” (249). The woman looked at Roseanne, whose appearance revealed the extent of her poverty. The woman remarked that Roseanne had gone off the deep end, then went through the gates. The couple went into the house together, not once looking back at Roseanne.

The weather worsened that month, and Roseanne felt ill. She was terrified about giving birth alone. She wished that she had said something to Jack or Mai, but surely, they had noticed that she was pregnant and didn’t care. Roseanne prayed to God instead. One day, that February, she combed her fingers through her hair, smudged her lips with the last bit of red lipstick in her possession, used some old plaster from the hut as facial powder, and tore a strip off of her bedsheet to make a scarf. She was going to go to Mrs. McNulty and ask for her, assuring herself that her former mother-in-law would understand. After all, she was a woman, and Roseanne had been married to her son.

The narrative shifts back to Dr. Grene who writes that the date of demolition has been set. He has received a letter from Percy Quinn, a former colleague in Sligo, inviting him to visit and look through records. Dr. Grene asked him if he knew where the Royal Irish Constabulary records were in Sligo and, if he did, if he could look for Joseph Clear’s name within them.

Dr. Grene then writes about how he went to Bet’s room the previous afternoon. He looked at her books on roses, picked up the collection, and took them to his room, where he read them in bed, “long into the night” (253). It made him happy and proud that Bet wanted to know so much about roses. He felt suddenly elated, as though her spirit were helping him in some way. Dr. Grene moved Roseanne’s copy of Religio Medici aside to concentrate on Bet’s books when a letter nearly felt out of it. The postmark on the envelope was May 1987, exactly 20 years earlier. Dr. Grene was tempted to open it.

The narrative shifts back to Roseanne’s recollection of entering Sligo to visit Mrs. McNulty. She reached the gates of her former mother-in-law’s bungalow and observed Old Tom’s beautiful garden. Roseanne felt frightened but pushed the doorbell. No one came right away. Then, Roseanne heard the noise of feet shuffling toward her. Mrs. McNulty opened the door just a little and peeked through the gap, asking Roseanne what she wanted. Roseanne was speechless for a moment then announced that she was in trouble. Mrs. McNulty quipped that she could see that. She then told Roseanne that there was nothing that she could do for her because she was no longer part of the family. Roseanne said that she knew, from Jack, that Mrs. McNulty had “had [her] own troubles in the past,” which Mrs. McNulty denied as “[f]ilthy gossip” (257). Moments later, Old Tom appeared and gently ushered Roseanne outside the gate, as though she were “a calf in the wrong part of the field” (257). He then told her that Tom was getting married and, therefore, couldn’t help her.

Roseanne went back out onto the road, feeling that there was nothing else to do. She felt angry and abandoned. She began her long walk home in the rain, thinking of the stew that awaited her and her feather bed. She took a detour to the beach at Strandhill and “[sloshed] through the shallow runs of water” (261). She used “a rusty metal arrow” on top of a bollard as her guide back home,” hoping that she could walk a straight line and get to Coney. She couldn’t go back toward the shore, where there might have been a rising flood, but she also had to move from where she was quickly, before high tide. There was a break in the storm, allowing her enough time to make it to boulders near shore. She collapsed within them, “panting, and half expired” (262).

She fell asleep and awoke in a confused state. The storm continued and dumped “enormous drenching drifts of rain” (263). Roseanne imagined that she saw someone watching her and called out to whoever it was. Hours passed. She looked down between her legs and saw blood. Then, she saw “the crown of a little head, and in another second a shoulder, all smeared in skin and blood” (263). When the baby was out, she lifted it up and bit the umbilical cord. The infant cried out. Roseanne fell asleep again. When she awoke, the storm had cleared and her baby was gone. There was no sign of it except for “the blood and the skin and cord and the placenta” (263). She looked around frantically then fell, hitting her hip against a rock. Blood still dripped from between her legs.

Roseanne walked out to the winding road and saw a white van that she recognized as an ambulance. She stood in the road and waved her arms. The men came to her with a stretcher. She asked them where her baby was, and wondered if the infant had been washed out to sea. She insisted that he wasn’t because she had kept him close to her breast. She shows them her open shirt. One of the medics noticed that she was still bleeding. They loaded her into the ambulance while she still wondered if they were abandoning her baby. After they started the engine, she fainted.

Roseanne recalls being taken to the hospital, where she bled for days and doctors didn’t expect her to live. They performed an operation to save her. Father Gaunt then arrived and assured her that she would be taken care of and told her that he knew of a place where she would be safe. Roseanne asked again about her child and each time she asked he answered with “Nazareth” (265-66).

Roseanne writes about “the two towers of the asylum looming above [her]” and crying out to see her mother only to be told that Cissy was “beyond seeing” (266). Roseanne remembers nothing past that, except for Eneas arriving one night in his army uniform and convincing the hospital staff to let him see Roseanne. He told her that he had borrowed Jack’s uniform, which had epaulettes. Eneas told her to get dressed, because the baby was outside and he was going to break Roseanne out of the hospital and take her away.

The couple crept through the hall and out of the hospital. The baby awaited in a pram across the gravel. Roseanne was barefoot but barely felt the sharp stones. Eneas took the baby into his arms and led Roseanne across the lawn and toward a small river at the bottom of the hill. Roseanne recalls that the moon was bright and reflected on the water. She heard her owl companion calling out to her. She stepped into the water which cleansed her of the dirt, lice, and blood that she was sure covered the raggedy clothes she had been found wearing when she was committed. She felt beautiful again, and Eneas handed her their son. Roseanne felt her breast fill with milk. She and Eneas stood together in the moonlight, “being stirred gently by a warm summer wind” (267). She recalls that they felt like “the first and last people on the earth” (267). Roseanne recalls this memory as a certainty and assures the reader that her “head is as clear as a glass” (267).