Hazel turned, startled. ‘Oh Laurel, you’re back.’
‘Yes I am. It was such fun to be out riding again. I feel rejuvenated.’ She looked at her sister and realized that she wasn’t the only one to feel rejuvenated. Hazel’s cheeks were pink and her eyes sparkled.
‘At least you didn’t fall off,’ she said in a blasé tone, as if she wasn’t very interested one way or the other. Hazel didn’t ask her about Ethelred and Laurel was relieved; she didn’t want to betray his kiss with a schoolgirl blush.
‘What have you been up to?’ She perched on the arm of the sofa and placed her hat on her knee.
‘This and that,’ Hazel replied vaguely. ‘Bridge was entertaining as usual. This afternoon, well . . .’ She sighed dismissively. ‘I haven’t done anything this afternoon except watch the birds. Aren’t they perky?’
‘Who was at bridge?’
‘Just the usual crowd. Bertie and Kitty and I partnered Ethelred.’ She went and rang the bell for the maid. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea and finish off that porter cake.’ She didn’t catch Laurel’s eye as she passed her. ‘Tell me, what is it like to be in the saddle again? Were you afraid?’
Laurel shrugged off her sister’s shifty behaviour and went to sit closer to the fire. ‘Not afraid, no,’ she said, smiling at the memory. ‘It was the most exciting thing I’ve done in years.’ And for once neither tried to outdo the other with florid tales of Ethelred Hunt. In fact, his name was not mentioned again and the cordiality with which they had always treated each other returned in eager chatter and cheerful laughter. But every now and then both women ran their fingers over their lips and smiled secretively into their hands.
As much as Celia tried to distract herself from the cold reality of her father’s death and the terrible debts Archie had left her with, she was unable to ignore the fact that she had to find money somewhere, and soon. Her father was no longer around to help her and, if he had been, she now realized that he wouldn’t have had the resources. She put on smiles for her children, for the friends who came calling and for the members of her family who were always popping in to check on her, but her anxiety lay in the pit of her stomach like cement. There were moments when she stood at her bedroom window, gazing up at the stars and remembering the Deverill Castle Summer Balls of her childhood when she, Kitty and Bridie had watched the carriages arriving, bearing Co. Cork’s finest, and wished that she could wake up as a little girl again, with no fears or worries. The skies had always been clear on those magical nights, darkening gradually as twilight receded into night with the faint glimmer of the first star.
She dreaded having to sell the castle. This was her home now. She had placed her heart in the heart of Ballinakelly and there it would stay.
It was a particularly windy morning when her butler walked into the drawing room to find her alone at her desk, writing letters. He knocked on the door. ‘There is a man here to see you, Mrs Mayberry,’ he said. Celia knew who it was. She had been expecting him. The cement grew heavier in the bottom of her belly and she pressed a hand to her heart. She couldn’t avoid him any longer.
‘Show him in please, O’Sullivan, and ask Mrs Connell to brew us some tea.’ She positioned herself in the middle of the room, straightened her skirt and cardigan and took a deep breath. A moment later the man Celia had seen at the funeral and at her father’s memorial service was shown into the room.
‘Mrs Mayberry,’ he said and he did not smile.
‘Mr Dupree,’ she replied, lifting her chin. ‘I’ve been expecting you for some time. Tea?’
Chapter 26
‘I don’t want tea,’ he said in a thin, reedy voice. ‘Whiskey.’ When O’Sullivan brought it, Mr Dupree downed it in a single gulp before replacing it on the silver salver with a quivering hand. Celia noticed his nails were cracked and ingrained with dirt. He looked at her with rheumy, bloodshot eyes. ‘I’ll have that tea now,’ he said and Celia nodded at the butler, who reluctantly left the room. He was uneasy about leaving his mistress alone with this menacing vagabond.
Mr Dupree could have been a hundred years old. His white hair was so thin that his scalp could be seen pink and scabby beneath it. His skin was sheer and mottled with age spots, scars and deep, angry lines which could have been the work of a knife. Bitterness had ravaged his lips and anger blazed behind cataracts that blurred his vision and made his eyes water. A nervous twitch had taken possession of one side of his face, snatching the muscles every few minutes and pulling his mouth into an ugly grimace, and he smelled of compacted alcohol and sweat found in men who have slept rough and lived low. The energy he emitted was as sharp and prickly as his gaze and Celia found herself struggling to conceal her utter aversion to this man who had forced himself into her life like vermin sneaking into the castle by way of the gutter. Yet, there was something evasive about the manner in which he held himself, something in the slight stoop of the shoulders and the curve of the spine, which robbed him of his menace and even aroused her pity. Beneath his anger he looked desperate.
‘Please take a seat,’ she said and her voice was cool and assured, she barely recognized it as her own. She watched him perch uneasily on the edge of the armchair then took the club fender for herself, in front of the fire. ‘I want you to know that I have read the letters you sent my father and I don’t believe a word that’s in them. The letters you sent to me I burned without reading them. I find it outrageous that you have the audacity to prey on a grieving family in this way.’
Mr Dupree pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the inside pocket of his jacket and tapped it against his hand. ‘How well did you know your father, Mrs Mayberry?’ he asked in a wretched voice, popping a cigarette between his dry lips. Celia thought his accent had traces of a brogue but couldn’t place it.
‘I was very close to him,’ she replied frostily.
Mr Dupree shook his head. ‘I think you’ll find you didn’t know him at all,’ he said before bursting into a fit of coughing. ‘Do you believe in justice?’ he asked her when the coughing had passed.
‘Just tell me what you want, Mr Dupree.’ Celia was infuriated that this total stranger should assume to know anything about her relationship with her father. She watched him flick his thumb against a cheap lighter and puff on the flame with his cigarette. He put away the lighter and sat back in the armchair, crossing one scrawny leg over the other, revealing threadbare socks, dusty shoes and painfully thin ankles. ‘Your claims are very far-fetched,’ she said, wishing he would get up and leave, but he didn’t look as if he was planning on going anywhere for some time. Mr O’Sullivan returned with a tray of tea. He poured Mr Dupree a cup and handed it to him. The fine bone china looked incongruous in his rough and calloused hands.
‘Let me start at the beginning, Mrs Mayberry. Let me tell you about the Digby Deverill I knew.’
Celia sighed with impatience. ‘All right. Go on.’ She had no interest in hearing his story, but as he was intent on blackmailing her, she had no choice but to listen. Mr O’Sullivan poured her a cup of tea then left them alone, closing the door softly behind him.
Aurelius Dupree exhaled a thick cloud of smoke and narrowed his eyes. In spite of the defiance in his steady gaze the hand that held the cigarette was trembling. ‘When Digby Deverill arrived in Cape Town in 1885 and came out to Kimberley my elder brother Tiberius had already been prospecting for eight years,’ he began. ‘He knew everything there was to know about diamonds. Everything. They called him “the Brill” because he had a nose for brilliants – he could literally smell ’em – and everyone wanted him on their team. He worked for Rhodes and Barnato – all of ’em giants and they paid him well for it. Very well. He called me out to join him and I came on the boat from England, travelled five hundred miles up to Kimberley and learned fast.’ He tapped his temple with a gnarled finger. ‘If you had your wits about you there was always money to be made in the mines.’ He grinned and Celia recoiled at the black holes where teeth had once been. ‘When Digby arrived Kimberley was a
great piece of cheese being eaten by ten thousand mice. Rhodes and Barnato were looking to amalgamate the mines. The place was all used up. There was nothing there for Deverill. He was just a keen boy from a good family but that counted for nothing, only money and diamonds meant a thing then and he had neither. Rhodes and Barnato were as rich as Midas. They were as rich as kings. Yet Digby arrived with his ambition and his optimism and he was a man who believed in himself. I’ve never met a man before or since who had the self-belief that Deverill had. He put up a tent on the edge of the mines, in the dust and the midsummer heat, with the flies – and deprivations that you can’t imagine and I wouldn’t want to tell you, not a refined lady like you, Mrs Mayberry. You’d never ’ave known that he was a posh boy, thrown out of Eton at seventeen for running a gambling ring and sleeping with the matron or some other boy’s mother, at least that’s what he told me.’ He chuckled joylessly, then ejected a round of coughing from lungs full of phlegm. ‘They say that Lord Salisbury’s son lost a hundred pounds at Deverill’s table. But it wasn’t with the finer class that Digby mixed in Kimberley, but with the roughest of rough diamonds you ever met. Jimmy “Mad” McManus, who’d fought in the Crimean War and disembowelled a man with his own hands, apparently. Frank “Stone Heart” Flint and Joshua Stein, better known as “Spleen” – and you don’t want to know how he got that name. He was their equal. He didn’t fear them. If anything, for all his manners and his Eton tricks, these cut-throats feared him. He had the Devil on his side. Ruffians they were but Deverill had one thing none of ’em had: luck. He was lucky at the gambling table, so lucky that he got the name “Lucky Deverill” soon enough, and it stuck – as did his luck.’
Celia thought of her father’s Derby winner – the last of his luck, before it ran out for good. ‘Go on, Mr Dupree. What happened then?’
Aurelius Dupree dragged on his cigarette and Celia noticed with disgust the patches on his skin where his fingers had yellowed; he looked as if he was getting jaundice. He blew out a puff of smoke, leant forward and flicked ash into the glass tray Celia had bought at Asprey on New Bond Street. Then he cleared his fluid-logged chest in another round of coughing which made Celia feel quite nauseous. ‘So, one day, Lucky Deverill is winning at the card table,’ he continued. ‘And Stone Heart Flint has reached the seams of his pockets. All he has left is a plot of useless farmland north of Kimberley. Deverill’s luck is bound to run out at some stage, right? At some stage, certainly, but not then. Not for years! Deverill reveals his winning cards and scoops up the money. And of course, he wins the land – this supposedly useless plot of dust. Now, Tiberius and Deverill had become unlikely friends. Deverill knew nothing of diamonds, but my brother knew everything. The three of us made a pact, a gentlemen’s agreement, if there were diamonds up there we were going to split it two ways. Two ways, equally, you understand, and Deverill agreed. Fifty per cent for him, twenty-five each for me and my brother. It was his land but he needed us, you see. He couldn’t do it without us.
‘At first we found nothing. The place had been left to ruin, the mine abandoned, it didn’t look like it had anything besides barren land, dust and flies and an old shack where the farmhouse had once stood. Even the well was empty and full of stones. It was a dead old pile of worthless land. But we began to dig in the places that hadn’t been mined. Nothing. Deverill grew despondent and talked of quitting the place altogether, but like I said, Tiberius could smell diamonds and he smelt diamonds in the earth, right there on that supposedly barren plot of land. Deverill went and lay in the shade of the only tree for miles around, put his hat over his face and went to sleep. He wasn’t interested in the land any more. He was thinking about the next game and his next hussy. But Tiberius and me, we were hard at it. Raking the ground with our bare hands and I was following Tiberius, because he smelt those brilliants like a hound sniffing for a fox. Then he found one, just sitting by the fence, or what was left of the fence. It was sitting on the earth there, like it had just dropped out of the sky. Like I said, Tiberius knew a lot about soil and this was alluvial soil, loose particles of silt and clay, and he came to the conclusion that there had once been water of some sort there and the diamond had been washed downstream and deposited right at the edge of the farm. We shouted to Deverill and he came running. Now he was interested, all right. We climbed to the top of the koppie and dug up there, and, hallelujah, we soon found the rich yellow stuff which told us one thing: diamonds. Our blood was up and even Deverill wasn’t thinking about cards and girls. We were all digging like dogs, the three of us. That ground was ripe with diamonds. Lots of ’em. We couldn’t believe our luck. We set about marking our claim. Deverill went off to register in the name of Deverill Dupree.’ At this point Aurelius’s face darkened with a deep and burning regret. He grimaced. ‘We were so busy digging we barely looked up from the ground as we put our signatures to those papers. We trusted Deverill, you see. Biggest mistake of my life, trusting Lucky Deverill.’ He shook his head ruefully and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘He had the luck of the Devil, though, there’s no disputing that.’ There was a long pause as he knocked back his tea and chewed on the terrible injustice he believed Celia’s father had committed. Celia remained on the fender, immobile, a sick feeling growing in her stomach. Yet she couldn’t stop listening, fascinated and appalled in equal measure. A new world, a new vision of her father was opening up before her like a terrible chasm. ‘Now Deverill wasn’t just a gambler,’ he went on. ‘He was a womanizer too. No one’s wife was safe when Lucky Deverill was about. Blond and blue-eyed, you’d have thought he’d been conceived by the angels. But the Devil comes in many disguises. While Tiberius and I did all the work Deverill was . . .’ He hesitated and flicked his black eyes at Celia. ‘Well, let’s just say he kept himself busy elsewhere. The only thing he did, while we sweated, was put up a sign that said A Deverill’s castle is his kingdom. He’d written on a wooden plank in black paint and I never did understand what it meant until I saw this castle right here. We laughed at him then but we should have known,’ he lamented. ‘We really should have known. We brought our workers, hundreds of Zulus and Xhosas, and Deverill hired his old ruffians as foremen: Stoneheart, Spleen and Mad McManus. They once caught a boy stealing a diamond and beat him to death.
‘Well, we needed investment to mine the diamonds so Deverill went to Sir Sydney Shapiro. Now Shapiro was the agent of the Rothschild family – who owned the Rothschild Bank which funded Cecil Rhodes in the development of the British South Africa Company – and Deverill was sleeping with his wife. She was a looker: fair and innocent, like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But those ones are often the worst sluts of the lot, if you’ll forgive me, Mrs Mayberry. As for Shapiro, he had a hand in everything, like a great big fat octopus, he was, but he didn’t know his quiet little wife was sneaking into Deverill’s bed. With Shapiro’s money Deverill formed his own company, Deverill & Co, which was owned by Deverill Dupree, but Deverill had tricked us when he registered the company, and given himself fifty-one per cent of the share to our forty-nine. So Deverill came to us with an offer to buy us out. At the time five grand each seemed good enough, with the promise of shares. But he formed the World Amalgamated Mining Company, known as WAM, and sold it to De Beers for several millions. There was nothing in the agreement about our shares. Nothing. Deverill moved down to Cape Town and bought himself a mansion, setting himself up as one of the great diamond magnates, and Tiberius saw red. We decided to sue. We wanted our share and we believed we had a very strong case.’
Aurelius Dupree pulled the cigarette packet out of his jacket pocket again and his hand trembled more violently. He flicked his lighter and inhaled sharply, drawing the smoke into his wheezing lungs. When he looked at Celia his eyes were no longer black but cloudy with layers of grief. ‘But you lost, Mr Dupree?’ Celia asked. She knew that if he had won he wouldn’t be sitting here as a human wreck. She was relieved that this was all it was, a row between diamond prospectors from years ago, one man’s word agai
nst that of her beloved father.
‘We would have won, I’m sure of it,’ Mr Dupree continued. ‘We would have won something. Maybe not seven million, but everyone in Kimberley knew we was owed our share.’
‘So, what happened? Why didn’t you win?’
‘That’s where the Devil came in, Mrs Mayberry,’ he said in a voice so quiet and ominous it made Celia shiver. ‘Digby—’
‘If you’re going to talk about my father,’ Celia interrupted irritably, ‘call him Sir Digby.’
‘Oh no, Mrs Mayberry, he’ll never be Sir Digby to me. A devil in the Devil’s pay, maybe, as you will see. Back then, we used to hunt. Every day almost – gazelle, antelope, zebra, elephants and even lions. Yes, even the king of the jungle. While Deverill was in Cape Town in his new palace hobnobbing with Rhodes, Beit and Barnato, we was struggling to make ends meet. But one day, we was in the Cape, outside the city. We heard of a man-eating lion from a man called Captain Kleist, a German from German South West Africa. This white hunter invited us to join the posse. It was bad manners to refuse and besides, we needed the diversion. When we arrived with our guns on the edge of the veldt, who did we find but Mad McManus, Spleen and Stone Heart with this German captain, Kleist. I doubt he was ever a real captain, but I won’t digress. Anyway, there was an awkward moment, but they greeted us like old times and we didn’t blame them for Deverill. So we set off into the veldt. It was dawn. Still dark and cool. But soon it grew hot. That heat like tar you can hardly move in. On and on we went. First on horse, then on foot. We saw lions, me and Tiberius, but we never saw that man-eater, if he ever existed. Captain Kleist was in command. He split us into pairs. He chose Tiberius and put me with McManus. The hours passed. Nothing. Mad McManus told me stories of Deverill and his immoral ways, like they say, there’s no honour among thieves. Then just as we were about to give up, it was nearly midday and too hot to continue, there came shots ringing into the air near by. We ran across the veldt. We called out. Finally we heard Kleist’s voice, shouting for help. We followed it. There we came upon a terrible scene. Tiberius was lying on the earth, but he wasn’t Tiberius no more. He was beyond dead, Mrs Mayberry. Torn apart, to pieces he was. My brother looked like an impala with his insides ripped out. Looked like the man-eating lion had got ’im, Mrs Mayberry. Nothing else could have done that and Captain Kleist and Spleen and Stone Heart were already there just looking and saying nothing. There were no words. Nothing to say. I asked Kleist what had happened. He was with him, after all. But Kleist told me they had split up and he had left my brother alone. He claimed to have fired at the lion but it was too late.’ Mr Dupree’s voice trailed off and he dabbed his damp forehead with his hanky.
Daughters of Castle Deverill Page 34