Life was hard for common folk on the west coast of Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century. The men who went out to harvest the sea in small boats were no exception. The sea took her toll and tax. She was a cruel mistress at the best of time, and seldom went unpaid.
An Oak plaque hung on a wall in the local church, engraved on it were the names of the boats, their crew and the years they were lost. Each year that passed it could be counted on that one or more new names would be added to the memorial.
The wind tossed Suzanne's wavy auburn hair as she walked along the well-worn path. Her long, dark green skirt snapped and blew like an untrimmed sail. Her white blouse billowed out like a spinnaker as she held her dark, fringed shawl tight around her shoulders.
She stopped at the end of the path and looked down the vertical limestone walls from Widow's Weep. The angry grey waves crashed against the black, knife-edged rocks some thirty feet below. She emitted a soft sigh as her emerald green eyes scanned the horizon.
This was the place where the wives, mothers, and girlfriends of the fisherman came to watch for the return of their loved ones. No one could remember when it got its name or who named it. But, everyone knew that the legend said the sea was a few feet higher from all the tears that had been shed from this lonely and forlorn place.
As far as she could see, there was nothing, nothing but the sea and the clouds. The sea was looking particularly brutal this day. The whitecaps made the water look like it was boiling. Her mother had tried to dissuade her from coming up here.
"Trust in God, and his divine mercy." Those had been her words of advice to Suzanne.
Suzanne's own father had been lost to the sea when she was just a young girl, and she had few memories of the man.
A terrible storm had blown down from the north the previous night, battering the small fishing village. It did not subside until well after the dawn tried to break through the thick clouds. The wind had howled like a banshee throughout the night, had downed trees throughout the parish, and had even taken the roof off Michael O'Sullivan's horse shed. The old-timers, who had braved the weather, gathered at O'Shaughnessy's public house. They couldn't remember a storm that horrific in many a year.
Fear had been expressed for those at sea; the boats that they fished from were small craft carrying only four to six men, a modest main sail and occasionally a jib. There would be nowhere for the men to seek shelter from the wind and the rain; they would have only their oilskins for protection from the elements.
The grey clouds scudded quickly across the afternoon sky. Suzanne's grandfather had told her when she was a wee bit of a girl that those clouds were the ghosts of lost ships. He said if she listened hard, she would be able to hear the ship's captain barking orders and the sound of the bell signaling a change in watch. Even now, all these years later, when Suzanne saw these types of clouds, she would strain her ears and listen for the sounds of lost ships and their ghostly crews.
---
Sean Mulroney came to the village when Suzanne was seventeen. He had come to live with his maternal uncle in hopes of finding gainful employment in the fishing trade. Where he had come from, there was little work for young men, or any man for that matter. Families split apart as the husbands emigrated overseas to Canada and the United States in search of work and money, seeking a better life for their families.
Suzanne had met Sean in the village after church one Sunday. He had been standing outside of the church with several other young men when Suzanne had emerged from morning mass.
He had walked right up to Suzanne that day, looked her straight in the eye, and said, "Aye, the lads are right; you are the prettiest lass in the village. I will marry you one day. You can mark my words on that, Suzanne McDonough!"
She had blushed as her temper rose. "That's a bit of cheek you have there. I don't think I have met my future husband this day."
---
The screeching of the gulls circling overhead only caught Suzanne's attention for the briefest of moments. Her eyes went back to the horizon, scanning as far north and then as far south as she could see. There was nothing to be seen or heard but the waves, the clouds, and the biting wind that was still gusting out of the north. It was the kind of a wind that bit clear through a person no matter what they were wearing. The kind of wind that was born in the snow and ice of the frozen northern regions.
A special mass had been held this morning, and the parish priest had urged the congregation to pray for the lives of the fisherman and for their families. There had been a lot of weeping wives and teary-eyed men in attendance.
After the service was over, the men stood outside of the church discussing the storm. There was none of their customary jocularity during the gathering. All wore serious and worried looks on their faces. Almost to a man, they had gone to the sea at one time or another to harvest her bounty. Each had felt the fury and wrath of a winter's gale on a small fishing boat.
"Would you have run with the storm or pointed your bow into with the sails down?" one man asked another.
"Sweet Jaysus," was the reply. "Running with a storm like that could find a man near half-aways to the Azores by dawn."
"With some luck some of them could have made it to the safety of Finnegan's Cove." Paddy O'Brien remarked.
Even though Finnegan's Cove was nearly thirty miles to the south, it would have safely sheltered any vessel finding its way there. By that route, it would take a small craft better than a day's tacking against the wind to return to the village.
No wreckage had been spotted yet on the beaches, so this was taken to be a good possibility and a good omen.
"Getting past the Three Sister might be a wee bit tricky, depending on how the sea was running," warned Mad Mike Murphy.
Mad Mike had gotten his nickname in a storm when he had lashed himself to the broken mast of his boat. He held onto the bow despite the wind, and as the fishing boat would crest a wave, he would shake his fist and yell. He cursed the sea while the rest of the crew cowered in the bow of the boat.
The Three Sisters were trio of jagged, granite spires that rose from the sea just outside of Finnegan's Cove. A ship or a boat would have to sail well clear of the Three Sisters to avoid the jagged rocks just below the water that endangered all but the smallest of vessels. And still, once past the Three Sisters, the boat would have to make a hard turn and run for a quarter of a mile, with the wind trying to capsize the craft.
"Aye," several men nodded their heads as they piloted the course in their minds. One of them added, "It would take a good piece of seamanship to pull that off in a storm."
"I wouldn't turn her hard in. I'd set the bow for the far point, and once in the lee, try to cut back up and sit out the storm." Suzanne's grandfather offered his advice.
---
Every Sunday Suzanne would find Sean waiting outside the church to give her a smile and a wink. Suzanne did her best to ignore him as she walked with her mother and grandmother until she arrived at her employer's house where she would busy herself preparing afternoon tea.
Suzanne had turned eighteen that summer, and her new position in the household required that she return to the manor house after church to serve tea to the mistress and any guests that she may have.
Suzanne herself had found employment as a servant in the house of an English landowner. While she held no animosity towards the English who lived in her country, she had no love for them either. She also had no doubts as to how she got the position; it was for her looks and her figure.
While the mistress of the house seemed to take little interest in what went on around her, choosing to spend most of her time in her bed, the master of the house had made thinly veiled hints to her regarding how best to improve her position. They were hints that she had been able to avoid up to this time.
She was there because Elsie, the upstairs maid at the manor house, was suddenly absent one day. The whisperings in the servants' quarters were that she had gotten pregnant by the none other than the master of the house himself. Rumor had it that he had paid for her departure to have the child.
