68 pages • 2-hour read
The Secret Scripture
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Part 1, Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary
When Dr. Grene enters Roseanne’s room, she notices that he’s shaved his beard. He notices Joe Clear’s volume of Religio Medici. Roseanne tells him that she likes to think that her grandfather had given her father the book, thereby bestowing the volume with a history of the hands of her people. Joe’s name is written in the book. He figures that Joe Clear was “an educated man” (98). Roseanne tells him that Joe Clear was “a minister’s son” from Collooney, a place that suffered during the Troubles in the Twenties (99).
Dr. Grene asks Roseanne again about the circumstances that brought her to the Sligo asylum. She recalls “terrible dark things” from there, as well as “loss, and noise” (100). While wanting to tell Dr. Grene something about herself, Roseanne detects that something is wrong with him. He confesses that his wife, Bet, died by suffocation and that it’s his birthday.
Roseanne lapses back into her testimony and recalls the gloomy December afternoon when she slipped into the Catholic cemetery where her father worked, out of nostalgia for her past visits there. She was 16. Nothing there had changed. Joe Clear’s kettle and enamel cup were still there. She even saw his footprints.
Suddenly, Roseanne felt a shove from behind. She turned and saw Joe Brady standing there, glaring at her. Roseanne felt so much terror that she urinated on herself. Joe Brady laughed then stepped toward her. Roseanne roared in fright. Another man stepped in behind Joe Brady, who had put his hands around Roseanne’s neck and drew her to him, fumbling with his flies. Roseanne worried that Joe Brady would draw out a gun or a knife. The man behind Joe Brady, however, had a gun and butt him over the head with it twice. Joe Brady sank to his knees. Roseanne saw his erect penis and shielded her eyes. When she opened them again, she saw that her rescuer “was a skinny youngish fella with black hair” (105). He then asked if Joe Clear was her father. Hysterically, Roseanne told him that her father was dead.
The young man asked if Roseanne remembered him; she didn’t. He announced himself as John Lavelle. He returned to the cemetery to see his brother Willie’s grave before going to America. In a sudden irrational fit, Roseanne accused John of killing her father by causing him to lose the job that he loved the most. She also insisted that she never told the Free Staters where they were. She figured that the Free Staters must have followed the boys to the cemetery while they carried Willie there. While saying all of this, Roseanne noticed that John’s eyes were “the tainted strange colour [sic] of seaweed” (107).
John asked Roseanne if she would show him Willie’s grave. She looked through the book of names and found “Willie Lavelle,” written in her father’s beautiful script. She walked past Joe Brady’s unconscious body and took John to the grave to say goodbye to his brother. John then went to America, and Roseanne went to the nearby Café Cairo.
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary
Roseanne writes about how John Kane, a normally inattentive man, noticed the snowdrops and a blooming crocus. Meanwhile, Dr. Grene goes to visit Roseanne for an hour. He talks about his wife Bet’s funeral, which had 44 mourners. He then reveals something surprising: Joe Clear was in the Royal Irish Constabulary and may have been murdered. Dr. Grene tells her about Father Gaunt’s deposition, written many years ago which claimed that Joe Clear “was an [sic] RIC man in Sligo during the height of the troubles in the twenties” (110). The document then claims that the Irish Republican Army killed Joe. Dr. Grene offers to bring her the document, but she refuses it, citing poor eyesight as an excuse. She refuses Dr. Grene’s offer of reading glasses.
After Dr. Grene leaves, John Kane enters Roseanne’s room to clean. While sweeping under her bed, he catches a spoon, smeared with soup, in the bristles of his broom. Roseanne figures that it must have fallen off a tray. John gives Roseanne “a very brief dark look, [slaps her] face lightly, and [leaves]” (113).
The narrative shifts back to “Dr. Grene’s Commonplace Book.” He notes that it’s been two weeks since Bet’s burial. Occasionally, while alone at home, Dr. Grene hears banging in his house caused by the wind, but he wonders if it’s his wife. For the last 10 years of Bet’s life, she lived in “the old maid’s room at the top of the house,” leaving the bedroom she shared with Dr. Grene (114). They met when he was “a penniless student” studying psychiatry in England (115). Bet’s father, “one of the subcontractors on the great Shannon hydroelectric scheme,” disliked Dr. Grene (115). During the wedding, Bet’s family filled one side of the church, while only Dr. Grene’s adoptive father was on the other side.
Dr. Grene looked at himself for the first time after his wife died and noticed that, at 65, he was old. In a few years, he figures that he’ll retire; though, he doesn’t know what he’ll do with his free time. He thinks again of Roseanne, whom he suspects “suffered in some way, at the hands of her ‘nurses’” in the asylum (116). Dr. Grene wants to be careful not to “drive her into silence” (116). He imagines that she must have been a great beauty in her youth, though there are no photos of her. In Grene’s own youth, he was transferred to Ireland from England after being offered “a junior post” (118). When he arrived at Roscommon, Roseanne had already been at the hospital for 20 years. At that time, she was called “Roseanne Clear.”
In Roseanne’s company, Dr. Grene feels less grief about the loss of his wife, but he did break down after announcing to her that Bet had died. Roseanne comforted him which, to the doctor, felt “like being touched by a sort of benign lightning, something primitive, strange, and oddly clear” (120). During that session, Roseanne answered few questions about herself. Dr. Grene thinks, while writing, that Roseanne’s caginess is because of fear. He claims that he can see her past suffering in her eyes. He insists on discovering “the heart and the thread of [Roseanne’s] story” (122). He also wants to do it before the 100-year-old woman dies.
Part 1, Chapters 10-11 Analysis
Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne was published in 1643. It is a Protestant spiritual text and psychological portrait, focused on the themes of faith, hope, and charity. Arguably, these are some of the more generic themes of this novel, practiced particularly by Joe Clear, who never abandoned his Presbyterian faith, gave selflessly in his work, and always believed that things could improve in his country. Roseanne, too, wants to maintain this image of her father as a devoted man, which is why she claims poor eyesight to avoid reading Father Gaunt’s deposition about her father. She envisions Father Gaunt as a destructive force, not unlike the rat who set the orphanage on fire. The clergyman destroyed her family and, long after his death, is trying to destroy her image of her father.
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