After that night, only a small burn-mark was found on Bridget's flannel night-dress but if - as Angela Bourke remarks - the object of the exercise had been to break the will of a woman who was not conforming to social expectations, then it certainly seemed to have worked, as she lay distraught, soaked in urine, streaked with soot, her eyes rolling in her head. But the men were relaxed. They were back in control. "They were satisfied that they had their own", according to William Simpson, meaning that they had banished the changeling.
Next day, she seemed to be gaining strength and was sensible enough to ask Johanna Burke if she had been paid the shilling owed for the new milk. Burke showed her the shilling and later claimed that Bridget took it under the bedclothes and rubbed it on her leg - implying some sort of piseogery to divert the "luck" that should accompany payment. This became a source of friction between Bridget and her husband that evening. "I used no piseogs", she insisted. The tension between them was palpable.
At one point, he had insisted in front of a neighbour that she drink a naggin of holy water before allowing her some milk. At another, he had refused to give her any milk at all, removing it from her reach. "I never asked for milk without buying it", she told a neighbour - a serious issue, clearly.
As the neighbours drifted off, leaving behind Michael and Bridget Cleary, Patrick Boland and Mary Kennedy with four of her grown children and a granddaughter, the tension between the couple deepened. The argument about piseogs and fairies continued until Bridget said the words that would seal her doom : "Your mother was going with the fairies. That's why you say I am going there now." Did she tell you she was, he asked. "She did; she said she gave two days with them," said his wife.
This would have been a devastating allegation for Cleary, writes Angela Bourke - it would have cast doubt on everything about him as a "blow-in", on his mother's virtue, on her sanity, on his own fertility. Furthermore, it destroyed any hopes he had of hauling Bridget back into line in the eyes of his neighbours.
When bread and jam were laid on the table, Michael got three pieces and asked her three times: "Are you Bridget Cleary, my wife, in the name of God?" She answered twice and ate two pieces. When she failed to eat the third, he knocked her to the ground, tore off all her clothes down to her chemise, got a burning stump from the fire and, with his knee on her chest and a hand on her throat, said he would shove it down her throat if she didn't eat the third piece.
"Give me a chance!" was all Johanna Burke heard Bridget say. Then Burke heard her head strike the floor and a scream. With Cleary above her waving the burning stick, it probably took only seconds for the calico chemise to catch fire. Cleary's response was to pick up the lamp from the table and douse her in paraffin oil.
"She's not my wife. She's an old deceiver sent in place of my wife." Cleary rounded on her relatives: "You are a dirty set. You would rather have her with the fairies in Kylenagranagh [where there was a fairy-fort or ring-fort] than have her here with me".
That night, Michael Cleary, with the assistance of Mary Kennedy's son, buried Bridget on adjacent land and swore the others to silence. As news spread of Bridget's disappearance, it was being plainly said that she had gone with the fairies. But the legend was that she would soon reappear at Kylegranagh Fort, racing along among the fairies on a white horse, and that if the men were quick, they could cut the cords tying her to the horse and that she would stay with them.
On the Sunday after he burnt his wife to death, Michael Cleary was heard to say that his wife was up at Kilnagranagh Fort and that they would go for her that night with black-handled knives. Three nights in a row, he gathered up a reluctant posse to keep vigil at the fort.
But meanwhile, the police had acquired sworn statements from both William Simpson and Johanna Burke, and on March 23rd, Simpson led RIC men to the shallow grave about a quarter-of-a-mile from Cleary's house. They found Bridget Cleary's grotesquely burned body, naked apart from a few scraps of rags stuck to her flesh and a pair of black stockings. Five days later, she was buried under cover of darkness, without a priest, her body placed in a common car, escorted by four police constables and not another human soul. The community had spoken.
As news of the burning spread and those involved were rounded up, many commentators (remarkably unhindered by such piffling considerations as a fair trial for the peasants) found that it fitted their requirements perfectly. The unionist Dublin Evening Mail had no trouble linking the death of Bridget Cleary to the Home Rule question, to agrarian reform and to anything that suited its agenda: "How to deal with Ganey (the herb or fairy-doctor) . . . is a question of exactly the same sort as how to deal with the Irish orators who egg on ignorant peasantry to murder or maltreat landlords, land-grabbers and their employees . . . It would be interesting to know how this revelation from the heart of Tipperary will affect Mr Morley's (the Chief Secretary) opinion of Ireland as fit for Home Rule."
The bluntly anti-Catholic Scotsman had a go at the peasants, their religion and their priests. The London correspondent of the New York Times summed it up: "As might be expected, the barbarous episode near Fethard . . . is being gravely cited by the anti-Irish papers here as evidence of the mental degradation and savagery of the Irish peasant population."
Meanwhile, articles on Irish fairy folklore by people like Lady Gregory were finding a ready outlet in publications such as the New York Times, the Spectator and the Illustrated London News. Lest anyone imagine that tabloid supplements and special supplements are new media toys, these were very much a feature of the Ballyvadlea sensation. Photographers advertised photographs of the murder scene, and William Simpson - Bridget's alleged lover - profited nicely from guided tours of the "fairy cottage".
As for those involved in the case, nine were sent for trial, charged variously with murder and wounding. Michael Cleary eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter, for which he got 20 years penal servitude. The rest got sentences ranging from five years down to none - the last for Mary Kennedy, whose little thatched cabin had been torched by neighbours to prevent the family's return.
It is the kind of human tragedy, writes Angela Bourke, in which nobody is entirely to blame, or entirely innocent, and there are no winners. When two worlds collide, the issue becomes power, and power is the key to why Bridget Cleary died: power that was flowing towards some and stranding others. Jack Dunne was being stranded, becoming a laughing-stock with his old stories. Michael Cleary found himself isolated and almost powerless among his wife's relatives and neighbours until Jack Dunne at last reacted, rallying them to an older way of thinking.
But Bridget Cleary was the one who ended up dead - the only adult victim among documented cases of changeling burnings in the 19th century. "She had accumulated power," writes Bourke, "both economic and sexual, it seems, far in excess of what was due to a woman of her age and class, and when the balance tipped, all the anger flowed towards her."
They paid a bitter price. Within a year, Johanna Burke would be living in a workhouse, deserted by her husband. Within 15 years, Michael Cleary would be an emigrant in Montreal. In a census taken six years after Bridget Cleary's death, only five of the nine houses in Ballyvadlea were inhabited and the tiny population had halved.
The Burning of Bridget Cleary by Angela Bourke, published by Pimlico