Tipperary: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  Three years, the Paglalonis told me—three years to repair these damaged plasterworks and put them back in place. I was jubilant; I had watched their careful perusals of everything that they must approach, and I had expected a span of ten years. With so much damage, we had all despaired of ever achieving the originals—and then I watched the brothers at work. No one else that I can envisage could work so precisely, with such comprehensive energy, and so fast.

  We gave them, as they requested, vacated sites in which to work (with the exception of the Ballroom wall with the mural). They began by spreading black fishermen's tarpaulins on the floors, on which they laid every piece of plaster, large and small, beneath the place on the wall or ceiling whence it had fallen. (We had preserved everything in numbered and listed boxes.) As they did this, they talked to each other all the time, in unusually slow speech—indeed, every syllable that they spoke seemed at odds with the speed of their movements.

  As for their delicacy! No man handled a pearl from the sea as tenderly as a Paglaloni caressed a piece of stucco, be it the head of a great bird or an as yet unidentified crumb of plaster that turned out to be a grape or a flower bud or a bead.

  I watched them closely as they assembled the pieces on the ground, and then surveyed the prospects of elevating the existing pieces to their sites above. Each brother took command of a sector of the stucco for that wall, or that ceiling in that room or corridor; and when they had worked through the assessments of the linear pieces, they investigated each cornice. The simplest pieces had been placed on the flat wall; the corners of each room held wonderfully elaborate displays—of cornucopia or fruit trees or great blossoms or creatures; and in the middle of the ceilings spread the great medallions with dramatic stucco creations in relief. In the Ballroom we had a Neptune with ocean billows and tridents.

  It seemed to me as if they must make all new material; that was not so. For example, inside the heads of birds, inside the bunch of flowers, the Paglalonis found the baskets of wire supports built and placed there by the original plasterers, as the little cages over which they draped their beautiful designs. When first I saw these structures, I felt that it was like looking into the broken hearts of the birds and the other creatures. Now these fortunate little beings would have their hearts restored, and they could again parade their beauty before the world.

  For long times before, I had been enjoying almost daily conversations on my own pet matter, the mural in the Ballroom. Our French contractors, the Lemms, had advanced to a most interesting phase of the renewal, and had also expressed some surprise at what they had uncovered. The limestone of which the castle walls had been constructed had, they declared, proven a friend to the mural. They had found considerably less damp than they had expected, and the coat of congealed powder (as I had described it) had actually given the mural some protection. Much of their early labor, they said, had been the careful removal of this concealing white cake.

  “All such work,” Claudette Lemm said, “where you want to uncover beauty—it has mistakes, it must have. We made a mistake by not removing all of the white mask in the beginning, really. But we feared that it would expose the painting too soon. Then we changed our decisions, and we have been able to move ahead, really.”

  On the morning that the Paglalonis arrived, Madame Lemm showed me the point of revelation that the mural had reached—Odysseus's torso, and much of the mural's upper half. I cheered so loudly that the Italian brothers peered in; when we beckoned them to come and see, their delight exceeded mine. I did not grasp what they said, but I heard “Fragonard,” and “Watteau,” and “Delacroix.” The Lemms stood by, smiling, and when the Paglalonis left, Claudette beamed me in conspiracy.

  “That was why we showed them, really,” she said. “To set them the standard of the house.”

  “Were they discussing who painted it?” I said.

  “Yes. They are wrong. It is not Fragonard; it is stronger. And we do not think that Watteau came to Ireland. It cannot be Delacroix, we think; he is not born when this was painted, really.”

  I said, “Do you know?”

  The Lemms looked at each other. Claudette said, “We think it was Vien.”

  “Vien?”

  “Yes. Joseph-Marie Vien.”

  I said, “A moment—I want to find Mrs. Somerville.”

  April came to the Ballroom shortly afterward and viewed the mural with much pleasure.

  “Do you know of Vien?” I asked. “A French painter.”

  April directed her answer to Claudette.

  “Father or son?”

  “The Elder.”

  They nodded, so pleased that she knew.

  Serge Lemm said, “We know that he painted some murals outside of France and Rome, but we do not know where they are.”

  April said, “Do his dates fit?”

  I said to the Lemms, “We think this part of the castle was built between seventeen-sixty and seventeen-seventy.”

  Claudette Lemm said, “Then his dates fit. He was born in seventeen-sixteen and famous by the age of thirty.”

  “But this is so exciting!” April exclaimed, and then walked from the Ballroom, passing me without a word. I saw the look from Claudette to her husband. Amid all that beauty and discovery my heart sank, because I knew that they pitied me.

  From the Harney oral depositions:

  We all had a fair idea of what was going on. I often overheard the workmen talking about it—workmen gossip like old women. Besides, after a while the “lovebirds”—as the workmen called them—didn't bother to hide it.

  You can imagine the bind I was in. Dermot was my friend and comrade-in-arms, and Charles was my deeper friend and comrade in life.

  I thought about interfering—my own mother told me that I should put a stop to it, that I should tell off Dermot, and what was he doing anyway with an Englishwoman, if he was such a little patriot? But, as I said to her, each of them wanted the other, the pair of them's free as the air, and Charles had made no move toward April.

  That was the point where I had the most difficulty. I knew what was in Charles's heart—and it was unfortunate that I was the only one who knew. Charles had told me that for as long as he didn't see April or hear her voice—all those years when he never heard from her—he could handle it all. Ever since he came to work alongside her, though, his heart had been bursting every day.

  So he had made a plan—which was very like Charles. He figured it like this: In 1920, when we had hit the last heights of the castle works, he was sixty years old. Her father, he told me, would have been sixty-six had he lived, so April—who talked about her father every day—had been in the habit of loving an older man.

  Somerville had been seven years older than she was, and there was thirteen years between herself and Dermot Noonan. Charles was twenty-two years older than she was. Mind you, Charles was a very youthful man; most people took him for forty-five or -six, that quick walk he had, and all the energy.

  He also reckoned that the main work on the castle would finish around 1921 or '22. If all went well, he said to me, he intended to take April on a long tour of what had been restored. He was then going to tell her that he had seen it all as a labor of love—from him to her. And he was then going to ask her to marry him.

  You see, they actually got on very well. I was at most of their meetings; in fact, I saw them together more than any person on earth. And I have to vouch for the fact that they were a natural pair. They never argued. One never deferred to the other, one never overruled the other. They worked it out from the point of view of common sense.

  I always said to Charles that he and April would make a great couple. He knew it, and I think that she did too. But when he showed no enterprise toward the capture of her heart, as they say in books—she turned away. And the only reason he didn't approach her earlier was because she had turned him down so hard in the past.

  Talk about a tragic time! There we were, rebuilding this beautiful house, this magnificent palace. And runnin
g a lot of Tipperary's war from the castle at the same time. And there I was, watching my friend Dermot, and I already knowing that in this case—and not for the first time—he was being more opportunist than sincere.

  The everyday conduct of that love affair was very severe on Charles. He'd meet April and me in the morning for breakfast—if she came down that morning—and he'd know by the dreamy and tired look of her that she'd been up half the night with Dermot. Maybe they'd gone out in the car somewhere, nearly daring the soldiers to arrest them.

  Dermot had, in a way, turned her into a kind of Irish freedom fighter—or that's what she thought. She was in love with the whole romantic notion of it. I mean—I saw them one day down in the Narrow Wood and Dermot showing her how to fire a Colt revolver, a gun with a kick to it that nearly knocked her down to the ground.

  She loved Tipperary Castle, she loved the countryside. And now she was in love with this romantic, handsome, clever guerrilla leader, who was going to be an important man when the freedom was won. Perfect for her. Out of a novel or a storybook. And for Dermot—well, there's no need to spell out what was in it for him. By then, he and Charles no longer spoke to each other.

  I said to Dermot one day, Listen, said I, shouldn't you be civil to him? Dermot just laughed. Naw, said he, he has no guts.

  When I sat back and reflected, that trip to Trinity College would not let go of me. Twice I had gone back over the text, to try to make sense of April Burke's character. I knew that I must dissect her and her life, piece by piece. Difficult to do—she was long dead and her pathways had closed in. And when I asked questions locally—nobody seemed to know.

  The footprints left by her and Charles were few and far between. Her traces had faded. Yet luck had been on my side many times since I began this exercise. So, I told myself that I might have some more luck—it usually runs in streaks.

  My first step, as I've described, took me to the portrait. I think I went to view it as a kind of test, as a kind of question to myself: Is this worth doing? When the question had been answered—and in a dramatic way, with Henry Lisney's intervention—I had to find the next thing to do.

  I began by dividing her life, or what I could divine of it, into sections: Ancestry, Birth and Childhood, Paris, London, Ireland and the Somervilles, and the other Anglo-Irish who knew her. My objective: to get as close to her as I possibly could. My method: to meet any and all of the people who knew her, and to track down every piece of paper that would tell me more.

  Again, as when I began reading Charles's text, I didn't quite know why I was being so ignited. I put it down to instinct—and I was still amused that a stranger who'd looked at the painting with me had told me that I was her son. Before that, he'd said that she was my aunt.

  There were, of course, other reasons. I had initially become fascinated with Charles, and although he irritated me from time to time, I found his story inspiring in some odd way. He had met my mother, and had even been helped by her to find accommodations in Dublin's most tumultuous week.

  And it brought me back into a period of history in our own county when events took place that would have been powerfully interesting even on a world stage, let alone our locality. The contrasts caught my imagination—as a great building was being restored, it was housing the revolutionaries who were tearing down what the place represented.

  And there was the intellectual reason: I liked teaching history because the past contains so many mysteries. Not as many as the future, perhaps, but more than enough to keep a retired teacher active in his mind and spirit. In short, I was enjoying this immensely.

  The Ancestry gave me no problems. I accepted that April's father, Terence Theobald Burke, was born to the man who died of a stroke on the stage of the theater in Tipperary Castle, Terence Hector Burke. I then traced his lineage, and was able to draw a time line of the family in the estates at Tipperary.

  The father of the apoplectic Terence Hector Burke was Luke, and his father, Henry Burke, had commenced the “building” of the castle in 1760—in other words, April was the fifth generation of these “modern” Burkes. I put the word “building” in quotation marks because there had already been a fortified house on the land.

  Henry Burke comes across as the most powerful of the family—and the shrewdest. He was born in 1710, and I found a document (in the Bolton Library at Cashel) telling that “Henry Burke of Tipperary Hill, the same, did raise one thousands [sic] militia for His Majesty's use toward Scotland 1745 and became rewarded.”

  Meaning that he sent soldiers to King George to hurl against Bonnie Prince Charlie, was rewarded with (I assume) a parcel of land, and then expanded on his fortified house. Well, that was one question answered; I had always been puzzled as to how a family with such a Catholic name and background came to own a huge farm. No trace could I find as to whether an earlier Burke had switched to Protestantism.

  Next, Birth and Childhood—and so to London, and Somerset House, repository of England's cradle-to-grave records. On 1 June 1880, Terence Theobald Burke of Orme Terrace in Mayfair, London, married Sophia Holmes of Alexander Street, Westminster, and Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire.

  Now the stew began to bubble. When April's father married April's mother, he moved into her home. According to Charles's text, April told Oscar Wilde that her mother had died when she, April, was “very young.”

  True; Somerset House lists the death of a Sophia Burke, née Holmes, of Alexander Street, Westminster, by drowning in March 1885—three years after April's birth. Well, well!

  Next I went to the British Library's newspaper archive in Colindale, North London, and endured hours of waiting—which proved worth it. From The News of the World for Sunday, 22 March 1885:

  “Tragic scenes were observed at Westminster Embankment on Friday afternoon as the body of a young mother was retrieved from the river. Passers-by comforted the small daughter. The woman was seen by witnesses to have jumped from the bridge into the river, even as her child entreated her. The deceased, aged twenty-five, it was said, was later identified as the wife of Mr. Terence Burke, who lives in nearby Alexander Street and is a deputy brewer for Mr. Whitbread.”

  In other words: as a small child, but entirely aware at the age of three, April saw her mother walk away from her, climb the parapet of Westminster Bridge, and drop into the Thames. That could explain some difficult matters of personality, I expect.

  Now came the blank spaces. In my lowest times I took comfort from Thoreau's remark that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Given the almost total absence of record, I can only assume that April lived in the care of her father through most of her childhood.

  The parish registers at Westminster record the death of a Mrs. Elizabeth Holmes, of Alexander Street, in 1886, at the age of fifty-one. We can tell that she was a widow (the use of her given first name, “Elizabeth”), and we can assume that she was April's grandmother, who lived with them.

  Next, a school record places April in “Miss Campbell's for Young Ladies of all Ages” from 1887 to 1899—twelve years, after which she shows up with Dr. Tucker in Paris. And after that she becomes more visible as she begins to enter Charles O'Brien's text, marries Stephen Somerville, and wins the court case.

  Now I had at least a pathway of her life, and amid all the Tipperary sources—Charles, Harney, Amelia, Mrs. Moore—I had assembled an idea of who she was and what she was like. But at that stage I had come no closer to finding any connection to me. I was beginning to wish that I had never seen that portrait, and to wonder what fantasy had taken hold of me. Once again, I turned to that most reliable of witnesses: Joe Harney's memory.

  Talk about getting caught in the middle. Charles talked to me every day—every day—about April and Dermot Noonan. He looked as haggard as a ghost. His jaw was sagging, he was gray in the face. I kept saying to him, “Listen, do your job,” I'd say.

  “But, Harney, I can't,” he'd say to me. “I'm not doing it for him. Why should I? I did that before, I did it for that drunk, Somer
ville—and look what happened to me.”

  And I'd say back to him, “That's dishonest of you, Charles.”

  We were able to speak to each other as frankly as that. I mean—I'd have done anything for him. And I'd say, “You always told me that you were doing it for her.”

  And he'd say to me, “Yes. You're right. I'll try and remember that.” And he would. Then after a few days he'd collapse again into the terrible pain he was feeling.

  Mind you, the two of them were very blatant. Dermot, for all his good points—he was always inclined to strut a bit. He'd walk into the Gallery or the Ballroom looking for April, and you'd think he owned the place. Charles would be there, talking to the plaster men—we had these four crazy Italians, they were brilliant but mad as hatters, and Charles was always calming them down.

  And Dermot would ask Charles, “Where's milady?”

  He'd pronounce it in the old-fashioned way, “mill-adie,” and Charles, cut to the quick, would give a polite answer—because that's what Charles was like. If he knew that Dermot was gaming him, he never said so. I tried to talk to Dermot too. Might as well have been talking to the wall.

  I never tried to talk to her. It would have felt intrusive, and I liked her too much for that. And she never said a word to me about it. Anyway, she wouldn't have listened to me—she was too far gone for that; she was on clouds higher than I could reach up to.

  What worried me, though, was the fact that we were building a tinderbox here—and I think that I was the only one who knew that. We had all these delicate works going on, with temperamental contractors, big decisions being taken every day, a red-hot love affair roaring like a fire in front of our eyes, and a cellarful of men with guns. I suppose it was what you might call an interesting time.

  In the last weeks of 1920 and the first weeks of 1921, Harney and I made a thorough inspection and a deep, thoughtful assessment of all that had been completed at the castle, and all that had yet to be accomplished. We began with the house exterior, moved to examine the interior, agreed that it was too soon to assess all the furnishings and hangings repairs (we had established a great workshop in the stables), and then moved out again to inspect the gardens and the land. This inspection, we calculated, would require five days. Each of us, at my instigation, had distilled the castle works into a large notebook, and the final compilation amounted to the sum of all we had added, as one task uncovered another requirement.