The Music Makers

by E. V. Thompson

  Nathan Brock gave Liam a lop-sided grin. ‘But you don’t want to stand here listening to me chatting about everything under the sun. Get on up to the big house and see Lady Caroline.’

  A troubled Liam set off toward Inch House but he had not gone many paces when he swung around and called to his friend.

  ‘Nathan, take care of Lady Caroline. Whatever happens in the future, take special care of her. She may need you.’

  Liam said no more, but as he trudged away Nathan Brock looked after him with an unhappy frown, wondering what he meant. Liam was a good friend, but Nathan had come to love Caroline. He, more than anyone, knew how hard she worked – and how much she cared for Liam. He hoped the fisherman was not about to do anything to make her unhappy.

  Caroline saw Liam approaching the house and ran down to open the door for him. He was shocked by her tired appearance, but when he mentioned it she shrugged off his words and as the door of her own sitting-room swung shut behind them she threw herself at him, almost knocking him off balance in her eagerness to hug him.

  ‘Oh Liam! … My love! … You don’t know how I have missed you. It seems a whole lifetime since I last saw you.’

  Liam held her slim body close, enjoying the clean smell of her and the excitement that always ran through him when she was close. The thought came to him that this might be the last time he would hold her like this, but he put it from him and held her even tighter.

  ‘You have been working much too hard,’ he chided gently as he looked at her taut drawn face and the dark smudges beneath her tired eyes. His concern brought a pleased smile from her.

  ‘We are both working too hard,’ she agreed. ‘But neither of us could do less.’

  Taking his hand, she led him to the settee. ‘When things have returned to normal we will be able to rest. Until then there is far too much to do to think of ourselves.’

  It would have been an ideal opening for Liam to tell her of Sir Richard’s ultimatum, but he remained silent. He knew it was a cowardly thing to do, yet it was more than cowardice. Liam was a stubborn man and he had not fully accepted that there was no other course of action to take.

  It was doubtful whether Caroline noticed his sudden silence. She was happy to have him with her again.

  Caroline was not a woman to pass her problems on to others, but in recent weeks she had witnessed much misery and grief and Liam’s arrival came as a great relief to her. To him she was able to pour out all her fears and anxieties.

  Not until they were lying tangled in each other’s arms in a darkened bedroom did the tension finally drain from Caroline’s body – and then she wept openly.

  Liam held her close and understood. He held her until she slept and then brushed the hair back from her tear-damp face and lay beside her.

  She was still sleeping when he rose from her bed and dressed quietly, kissing her gently on the forehead before making his way from the house in the grey damp dawn.

  He went away making excuses to himself for his lack of courage in not telling Caroline of her husband’s ultimatum.

  Liam rode to Castlemaine and there had to face a storm of anger about the latest government directive from London. Lord John Russell had implemented his decision to end the programme of public works in Ireland. There was to be no more road construction, ditch-digging, or wall-building at government expense.

  Ironically, this decision coincided with a sharp drop in the price of maize meal, and had the public works programme continued many people would have been able to buy enough food for themselves.

  Once again Liam wrote to Lord John Russell, complaining of the criminal folly of this latest move. At Liam’s suggestion, letters were also sent by the Castlemaine magistrate and many of the county’s land-owners.

  Lord John Russell’s reply was to rush through Parliament the Poor Law Extension Bill, ordering each impoverished parish to support its own paupers.

  Liam could have broken down and wept with anger and frustration. The rate returns for the vast majority of parishes in County Kerry were non-existent. The lesser landlords were in almost as dire straits as their starving tenants. With no potatoes for two seasons they had received no rents and could contribute little toward supporting the cottiers. The large estates were better off because many of them grew corn, but these were owned by landlords who were resident in England. Quick to call in the Army to help in the collection of rents and the eviction of non-paying tenants, they managed to resist all efforts to force them to contribute toward the local rates.

  Then, when it seemed that nothing more could be done, and contrary to all the English Prime Minister’s declarations, an under-powered paddle-steamer limped in through the entrance of Castlemaine harbour and unloaded fifty tons of meal for the Commissariat depot. The captain of the steamer informed Liam he would be delivering a similar amount to every depot along the whole of the west coast.

  As Liam had not been near Inch House for two months, he took the unexpected delivery to be an acknowledgement by Sir Richard Dudley of his own promise.

  Unfortunately, the paddle-steamer had been constructed for river work and was not equipped to cope with the Atlantic swell found off Ireland’s west coast. Twenty miles north of Castlemaine her uncertain engines faltered and died and the ship was swept on to the rocks of the Magharee Islands. The crew were taken off safely by the escorting naval frigate, but the ship and its cargo of meal were lost in the depths of the ocean.

  This was the last grain-ship seen on the west coast of Ireland during all the years of famine.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Early in June 1847, Liam was in Tralee, watching as the residents of this fever-hit town erected a makeshift hospital, when he saw a tired splay-legged horse enter the town from Castlemaine road. The rider was kicking the ribs of the horse in an attempt to make the poor beast move faster. As the hardworking duo approached, Liam saw that the horse carried no saddle and its bridle was more suited to a cart-horse.

  Then, as horse and rider came closer, Liam’s amusement quickly changed to alarm. It was Tommy Donaghue, mounted on the horse that usually pulled a cart between Kilmar and Gorey.

  Liam’s first thought was that something must have happened to his mother. She could not write, and so he had heard nothing from her since leaving Kilmar three months before.

  He shouted, but Tommy Donaghue would have ridden by without seeing him had Liam not run out and grabbed the horse’s bridle.

  ‘Tommy! It’s me … Liam. What’s the matter?’

  For a few seconds Tommy Donaghue’s legs continued to drum against the stationary horse’s flanks, as though he had no control over them. Then he sagged over the horse’s neck before sliding gratefully to the ground.

  ‘Is it my mother, Tommy? Is she ill?’

  ‘Your mother …? No, Liam, it’s not your mother. Just give me a minute to collect myself. I think the riding has bounced what little brain I own right out of me head.’

  Liam tried to hide his impatience as the other man put both hands to his head and shook it gently from side to side.

  ‘It’s Lady Caroline,’ he said eventually. ‘She’s got the fever. She must have caught it from the cottiers. It is a miracle she hasn’t gone down with it long before now, as I told your mother. I was with Lady Caroline when she was taken ill. I carried her back to Inch House in the cart. By the time we got there she was in such a bad way she didn’t know where she was.’

  Tears suddenly sprang to Tommy Donaghue’s eyes. ‘She was calling for you, Liam. She was so ill that she couldn’t have given anyone her own name, but she was calling for you. It broke my heart to see her, Liam. I went to your mother and she said I should come for you right away.’

  With tears streaming down his face, the old fiddler said, ‘Go to her as quickly as you can, Liam, and I pray to heaven you won’t be too late. She’s a wonderful woman.’

  Liam found lodgings for Tommy Donaghue in Tralee and was on his way to Inch House within the hour.

  It was a
hard two days’ ride with no change of horse, and for long stretches of mountain road Liam walked beside the animal to give it the only rest it could expect during the daylight hours.

  The journey was long enough to make Liam feel guilty for not giving Caroline a reason why he had not visited her for so long. He had taken the easy way out of his predicament, keeping to the letter of Sir Richard Dudley’s ultimatum, without being forced to discuss it with her. True, Liam had not actually told Sir Richard Dudley he would not see Caroline again, but the baronet obviously thought he had Liam’s tacit agreement.

  Alone, on this ride, Liam was able to view the situation much more clearly than before. He doubted whether Sir Richard Dudley could really change the policy of the English Government to any great extent. There had been the delivery of meal by the paddle-steamer, but Liam believed it would probably have arrived without any effort on the part of the Commissariat Inspector.

  As it happened, Liam was correct. The meal on the paddle-steamer had been loaded before he and the baronet had held their talk. Far from arranging the delivery, Sir Richard Dudley had kept it back, hoping to convince Liam when the time was right that he had the power to supply meal for the cottiers at will.

  Liam thought long about his relationship with Caroline. Looked at logically, in the light of day, he had to accept that it held out no chance of ending happily. They came from different backgrounds. She had a great deal of money, he had very little – and she already had a husband. The situation was entirely without hope for the future.

  But at night, lying on his back in the heather and listening to the lonely call of a solitary curlew, he looked up at a million stars and all the hopelessness fell away. He was left with only the clear and unwavering fact of his love for Caroline, and suddenly everything became possible once more.

  Liam rode into the courtyard of Inch House soon after darkness had fallen. He was reeling in the saddle from fatigue, having pushed himself and the horse to the limit to arrive at the house that night.

  The door was standing open, and Liam went inside and made his way upstairs before he met anyone. He had almost reached the top stair when the door of Caroline’s room opened and a woman came out. It was his mother. Seeing liam she ran to him and hugged him with great relief.

  ‘Thank heaven you’re here, Liam. I was beginning to think you would never arrive in time.’

  ‘In time …? Is she so ill?’

  Norah McCabe nodded unhappily. ‘Yes. I am afraid she is.’

  ‘Can I see her now?’

  ‘Not yet. She is in a coma. If – when she comes out of it Shelagh Brock will tell us. She is staying with her for now.’

  It was apparent that Norah McCabe did not believe Caroline would recover, and Liam knew she must be very ill indeed, but it did not explain why his mother was here in Inch House.

  ‘I came here after I had sent Tommy off to find you,’ Norah McCabe said, in answer to Liam’s question. ‘As she was asking for my son I thought it was the least I could do, but it doesn’t mean I approve of what is going on between you two. No, Liam, don’t try to deny anything; I’m not a fool. I have known you for too many years not to know what you are up to now. It is wrong and nothing will ever make it right. She already has a husband. All right, so he is not a good man – I have heard all about that from Nathan and from Shelagh – but Lady Caroline took him for better or for worse and I don’t like to think of a son of mine coming between a husband and his wife.’

  Norah McCabe sniffed noisily. She had voiced her disapproval; now she showed her generosity.

  ‘Be that as it may, I told Tommy where he might find you because I thought you could help to bring Lady Caroline back to good health again. A lady she may be, but she’s a mere slip of a girl who has broken herself for the sake of others. Without her, relief work for the cottiers would have collapsed ages ago. It will for sure now. Nathan is out somewhere doing the best he can, but it won’t be enough. That girl in there can bully, cajole, plead or demand – and if it is called for she can charm the skin off a toad, sure enough. There is no man alive who can do all that – not even Nathan Brock.’

  They walked slowly together down the stairs and Norah McCabe said seriously, ‘I think you ought to know that Sir Richard Dudley has been sent for. It was not my idea,’ she hastened to explain. ‘That cold fish of a butler told me he had sent for him before my arrival. He considered it “his duty”. He would have sent for the Earl, too, but it seems he is abroad.’

  Liam nodded wearily. It no longer mattered to him that there might be any angry confrontation with Caroline’s husband. If she was going to die, then nothing mattered any more. She had caught a fever from the cottiers, and in his present tired state he blamed them for everything.

  Caroline came out of her coma soon after midnight, when Norah McCabe was once more sitting with her. Liam was hurriedly summoned and he arrived bleary-eyed from sleep. His mother had told him that Caroline usually came out of her fever in the cool of the night, and he had been sitting in a chair in the big hall, waiting, when sleep overtook him.

  Caroline was very ill and extremely weak, but there was no mistaking her joy when she recognised Liam in the dimly lit bedroom. Telling Liam to feed Caroline with some of the soup she had prepared, Norah McCabe tactfully left the room.

  ‘It is … so good to see you again, my Liam. It has been so long … so very long.’

  Liam leaned over her swollen face, and she recoiled in alarm. ‘No, Liam … don’t touch me…. The fever….’

  Ignoring her protests, Liam kissed her moist brow and brushed back the long fair hair from her face.

  ‘I am sorry to be such a nuisance….’ Her fingers plucked at the bedclothes in her distress.

  ‘You are not a nuisance, and I should have come to you before now. I wanted to….’

  She looked up into his face. ‘Is that the truth, Liam? Did you really want to see me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Her eyes closed, and he had to lean closer to her lips to hear her next words.

  ‘I saw Richard when I was last in Dublin. He … told me … told me you had agreed not to see me. In return … he would not cause a scandal and have you … lose your seat in Parliament.’

  ‘He lied,’ said Liam angrily. ‘I saw him, yes. But—’ He stopped talking as he looked down at Caroline. Talking had exhausted her. She lay back on her pillow with eyes closed and lips parted, and her breathing was a shallow whisper against her lips.

  ‘This isn’t the time to tire you with talk. I am here, and here I will stay. Now you must try to take some of my mother’s soup.’

  Liam propped her up so that she lay back in his arm as he fed her with soup from the bowl. She took no more than half a dozen spoonfuls before her head dropped against his shoulder.

  He laid her carefully down upon the pillow, smoothing the bedclothes about her, willing her to get well again.

  He found his mother waiting outside the bedroom and told her that Caroline had held a conversation with him and taken a few spoonfuls of soup.

  ‘She is very weak, but perhaps the fever has broken,’ he said hopefully.

  Norah McCabe shook her head. ‘The fever has left her every night I have been here – but each time she is weaker than before.’

  ‘There must be something else we can do,’ said Liam. He knew there was not a doctor within forty miles, but…. ‘Why don’t you send for Bridie O’Keefe to come here? She would be able to do something.’

  Norah McCabe looked away from her son’s tortured face. ‘Bridie O’Keefe was with me when I first came here to be with Lady Caroline.’

  ‘Then why isn’t she here now? What did she do?’

  ‘She turned around and went straight back to Kilmar. She said that her business was with the living. She said there was no place for her here’

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Sir Richard Dudley arrived at Inch House soon after noon the following day. He was hot and dusty and not in the best of humour. When
he met Liam in the hallway of the great house his bad temper exploded in anger,

  ‘What are you doing in this house? We had an agreement. I should have known better than to trust the word of a man who is so clearly not a gentleman.’

  ‘You assumed we had an agreement,’ corrected Liam. ‘And, as I remember it, your part was to provide aid for the cottiers.’

  ‘I said I would try,’ retorted the angry baronet. ‘I did my best. A grain-ship was sent to the west coast. It was not my fault that it sank.’

  ‘Fifty tons were landed. Fifty tons to save the whole of the west coast from starvation. Is that how a gentleman keeps his word, Sir Richard? But now is not the time for such arguments. Caroline is lying upstairs very ill. She needs the attention of a doctor, urgently.’

  ‘Then I will take her back to Dublin with me today.’

  ‘She is not fit to be moved. The fever has not yet broken. A doctor will need to come here to treat her.’

  ‘Fever?’ Sir Richard Dudley’s face suddenly drained of blood. ‘I knew nothing of any fever. I was told only that Caroline was seriously ill.’

  ‘She caught the famine fever from the cottiers. She lies in a coma for most of the day and it is becoming increasingly difficult to get her to take food.’

  The mention of famine fever – typhus – put a cold and unreasonable terror in Sir Richard Dudley. His fear of the loathsome disease bordered upon hysteria. He had witnessed its effects during his travels abroad and now he cursed the man who had come to Dublin for not telling him the nature of her ‘illness’. He had managed to keep clear of the disease in Dublin and he had no intention of being put at risk here, so far from medical care.

  ‘I must return to Dublin,’ he said abruptly. ‘I will send an army surgeon to call upon Lady Caroline. No other doctor will undertake such a journey.’

  ‘But you have not even visited her.’

  ‘It would serve no useful purpose. If she is in a coma, she will not know me.’