‘I do not agree with magic,’ Lady Oughterard said, feeding the hidden cat pieces of sole from her plate. ‘It is blasphemy, is it not, to try to make people – or the spirits themselves for that matter – obey one’s will. Magic reveres no other spiritual being than itself, and so is the self-appointed Lord of Nature.’
‘Yet mysticism, at least as I heard it explained by one of the Dublin Visionaries – apparently one of the tenets of mysticism is that by abstention and intense deliberation one can develop extraordinary powers and an exceptional insight into nature.’
Lady Oughterard was about to answer when out of sight on her knee another cat joined the first and a fight broke out over the latest scrap offered to the hidden creatures, and while her ladyship’s attention was diverted Emily seized the opportunity herself to ask a question.
‘What about ghosts then, Mr O’Connor? If you believe in the supernatural then you must know some très terrible spooky ghost stories.’
‘Mysticism is not concerned with daemons and spooks, Lady Emily,’ Rory O’Connor returned, his eyes holding hers. ‘But if you want an unusual story, then I do know of some concerning the poet Yeats,’ he went on, with a half glance at his hostess who had all but recovered her decorum. ‘He has long been well known for his interest in mesmerism, has he not? And in Sligo, where he often stays with his uncle, the country folk postulate that he is himself something of a magician. They say a young bank clerk from Tobercurry who used to partake occasionally in séances up there at Thornhill saw a vision of the Garden of Eden and never returned to the house again, for he said he would never be able to hold down his job at the bank if he were to continue to see such things.’
‘I should imagine not, Mr O’Connor,’ Lady Oughterard agreed, the battle of the cats having now been concluded. ‘One would hardly be capable of the chicanery necessary with banking if all one could hear were the brooks of Eden mazily murmuring.’
‘The very reason the young man gave for his subsequent absence, although I have little doubt that he couched his excuse less eloquently,’ Rory O’Connor replied. Then he leaned slightly forward in Emily’s direction before continuing, his deep-set dark eyes fixing on hers. ‘There are other tales told too, Lady Emily. Of the poet being carried five miles in the winking of an eye, and likewise of Yeats himself sending his cousin from her house at Rosses to Tory Island in the time it takes merely to blink.’
‘That certainly beats Banaghan,’ Emily readily admitted. ‘Really I never heard the like. But do you believe such things yourself, Mr O’Connor? Or do you not think in all honesty that they might all just be sheer gibber?’
‘Whatever the merits of that story, I believe such things are entirely possible,’ Rory O’Connnor assured her with a straight face. ‘As indeed must anyone who favours the soul rather than the intellect.’
‘Oh, of course,’ Lady Oughterard agreed enthusiastically. ‘There are a great many of us who believe that the Renaissance was responsible for making the human mind inorganic, and that one of the aims of the Celtic revival is to have Ireland lead a counter-movement against the bad effects of the so-called enlightenment of Europe.’
Although Emily was now well out of her depth, none the less the ensuing conversation thrilled her, not because of its content of which she understood less and less, but because she had resumed imagining herself and Roraigh O’Connor riding out from their Connemara castle not just to enjoy a good gallop or a canter through the summer sunshine, but to lead the fight to restore the human mind once again to its original organic state.
Afterwards, when the gentlemen had been summoned by Lady Oughterard to rejoin the ladies in the drawing room, for once the household fell into two camps, those who wished to discuss one of their neighbours’ failure to gain election to the Irish Parliament due to the opposition of the Nationalists and those who did not, for it seemed that the man in question’s heart had been broken by his tenants’ electing someone quite other than himself whom they hardly knew and who had taken no interest in them at all.
‘I find it increasingly difficult to know what precisely to do to please the people of this country and to improve their general condition,’ one of the guests complained loudly as he resumed his seat in one of the voluminously draped chairs in the drawing room. ‘As you know, I have been fundamental in helping set up the Irish Agricultural Organization Society for the benefit of the small farmer and even went so far as to introduce a new strain of goat, which was guaranteed to be a sound investment.’
‘And what was it instead, Davian?’ a small man with a bushy red beard and dark twinkling eyes teased. ‘As I recall it was the exact and very opposite. For didn’t the beasts jump up on your tenants’ rooves and eat all their thatch for them?’
Gradually those who had no desire to discuss the politics of the land they occupied gathered instead around their hostess and set about persuading Lady Oughterard to sing to them at her harp. She agreed she would play but said she preferred Emily and her younger sister Cecilia to do the singing, whereupon the three of them gathered around the harp and sang two songs in perfect harmony, ‘Sing, Sweet Harp’ and ‘The Snowy-breasted Pearl’.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ the small red-bearded man said after the applause. ‘I have an enormously soft spot for these Irish songs, so-I-do.’ He winked after the little phrase he had tried to gaelicize and then clapped his small scarlet-palmed hands once more. ‘Now how about an encore, dear ladies? Perhaps my favourite of them all? Perhaps “The Rose of Tralee”?’
‘You will not mind me saying, sir, but none of the songs to which you refer is an Irish song,’ Rory O’Connor informed him courteously. ‘Neither the adoption of an Irish place name in the title, such as “The Rose of Tralee”, nor any amount of acushlas, machrees, colleens, or even mavourneens can make these songs anything other than English drawing-room ballads. All they are is, if I may so call them, patois Irish.’
‘Ah ha!’ the red-bearded man cried gleefully. ‘So we have one of her ladyship’s Fenian friends in our midst, so-we-do!’
‘What I am is an Irishman, sir,’ O’Connor replied with great dignity. ‘That is all that I am.’
‘Certainly, sir,’ the bearded man agreed. ‘And if you believe such songs as we have heard to be English songs and not Irish, then you must also be a Fenian.’
‘I am a Fenian, sir, only inasmuch as I am descended from the fene,’ O’Connor corrected his antagonist, ‘the fene being the ancient Irish, often confused with the fiann who in turn defended Ireland under Finn and other legendary kings. However, to return to the matter of the songs, rather than find ourselves unintentionally embroiled in a political altercation, perhaps with the kind help of our hostess I might show you in music exactly what I mean.’
Something in O’Connor’s tone or perhaps the glint that was in his eye was enough to make his opponent smile and nod his assent after a moment. The bearded man then turned to see if his hostess would also bestow her approval, but Lady Oughterard was already giving her permission, before asking if her guest would prefer her to accompany him on the harp or the piano. In turn the tall, now solemn-faced O’Connor enquired if there might be any objection to his singing unaccompanied, since he doubted very much if Lady Oughterard knew the song he intended to sing.
‘It is what you would call a lullaby,’ he announced, ‘and what is called in Ireland suantrai, which translated means sleep-music, so it comes to the same thing in the end. This one concerns the fate of a woman abducted by the Sluagh Sidhe and it is called a Bhean ud Thios ar Bhruach an tSruthain. Or in English “O Woman Washing by the River”.’
‘A moment please, Mr O’Connor,’ Lady Oughterard said, as she settled herself nearby on a sofa upholstered in faded green velvet. ‘First tell everyone exactly who the Slooa Shee are. They are what the Irish call fairies, do you see,’ she announced to her guests. ‘Although they are not what you and I would call fairies, is that not so, Mr O’Connor? For whereas our concept of a fairy is that of a diminutive super
natural being, in this part of the country anyway they are seen to be the same size as mortals.’
‘The Sluagh Sidhe most certainly are, Lady Oughterard,’ O’Connor agreed, ‘while I am sure most of you will be familiar with their best known member, the bean sidhe, the woman fairy whose terrible wail as she combs her generally red hair presages death or disaster.’
‘Where would we find these creatures, Mr O’Connor?’ Emily asked from her place, seated now between her mother and Elisabeth. ‘Is it not so that they are meant to live in those prehistoric knolls we see all over the place?’
‘You are right of course, Lady Emily.’ O’Connor’s smile was sudden, brilliant, direct and devastating and obviously intended as a reward for Emily’s answer to her own question. ‘They live indeed in what you call knolls or tumuli, and what we call lios, whence they ride out on the whirlwinds to abduct mortals. They take children for any of their women who are without child, handsome young men as husbands for their daughters – and beautiful, healthy young women as wives. Often in place of the abducted they leave a changeling, a grizzled old man or woman for the adults or a sickly child for a baby.’
‘But do they not say there is meant to be some way of escape from their clutches, Mr O’Connor?’ Emily further enquired. ‘Old Mikey our groom told us there are indeed ways of getting your baby back. Like for an instance putting the changeling on the fire or somesuch.’
‘Perfectly true, Lady Emily,’ the red-bearded man now put in. ‘Why, not thirty years ago I myself tried such a case down in Tipperary for the murder of a supposed changeling. The parents had left it to roast on a red hot griddle iron. I had to see to it that they were hanged or there would have been a spate of such baby murders. As it was we know it still goes on undiscovered in the wilder parts of the country.’
‘This song recounts a way of escaping, Lady Emily, which I will explain since I am to sing the song in the native tongue,’ Rory O’Connor continued, politely ignoring the interruption. ‘A young married woman has been abducted by the Sluagh Sidhe and incarcerated in their fort where she is made to act as a foster mother. One year to the day of her abduction as she stands by the door of the fort with the baby she is nursing in her arms, she sees a woman close by on the banks of the stream. Pretending to sing the baby in her arms a lullaby she tells the woman what has happened to her and asks her to carry a message to her husband at once. He must come straight away, bearing a blessed wax candle and a black-shafted knife, the only weapon known to be capable of killing the Sluagh Sidhe, although it must be said you may only make one stab, for a second stab renders the first one harmless. She then sings that if the husband strikes the first of their horses as it flies out of the fort, then his wife will be freed, but as a safeguard against her recapture he is to pick the herb that grows by the entrance. Finally, he must come to her rescue no later than the following day, because any mortal who remains captured by the Sluagh Sidhe for one moment longer than a year and a day can never, ever be freed.’
So enthralled was Rory O’Connor’s audience that they remained completely silent after he had done with explaining his song and while he began to get himself ready to sing. Putting one hand to an ear softly he sang a note to make sure of his key, and then after taking one deep breath he began.
It was a beautiful melody, simple and haunting, which Rory O’Connor sang in a fine, strong tenor voice. And all the time that he sang the five verses and choruses of the suantrai his eyes were kept tightly closed, yet for all those haunting five verses and choruses Emily Persse was sure that Rory O’Connor was looking only at her.
THE FORT
‘I am enthralled,’ Emily whispered to Elisabeth as she helped unwind her sister’s long brown hair. ‘I know it. I am utterly and completely enthralled.’
‘You can’t be, Emmie,’ Elisabeth replied. ‘Someone like Mr O’Connor is never for the likes of us. He would never do, and you know it.’
‘Never do,’ Emily snorted in disdain. ‘Being enthralled has nothing whatsoever to do with things not doing.’
‘But of course it has! Never for one moment would Pappa approve of him. Not forgetting of course that your Mr O’Connor is the very man Pappa banned from hunting for the season!’
‘Oh, Pappa will have forgotten all about that, Lizzie. Pappa is forever sending young men home from the field.’
‘Not for jumping out in front of him and the entire pack, Emmie. If you’re considering Mr O’Connor then I have to say you must be mad.’
‘Of course I’m mad, Lizzie.’ Emily looked at her sister over her shoulder in the mirror. ‘What else is being enthralled other than being possessed? And what is being possessed other than totally mad? Well?’
‘Pappa would never hear of it, Emmie,’ Elisabeth insisted, ‘and come to that neither would Mamma. Mamma has you marked down for marrying someone like Fred de Montfort.’
‘Ugh,’ Emily grimaced. ‘Fred de Montfort about comes up to my knees. Besides, you are wrong about Mamma. She’s quite enthralled by Mr O’Connor herself. It’s obvious that she sees him as part of her great pash for Ireland, for heaven’s sake. Why should Mamma have any objection? Isn’t this place always full to brimming with Celts and Gaels and Picts and Finns?’
‘That has little to do with whom Mamma and Pappa wish you to marry, Emmie, and you know it,’ Elisabeth replied, picking up her hairbrush and starting to dress her long shiny tresses. ‘And I don’t know what on earth you mean by “pash”. That is a brand new word of yours, it really is.’
Emily sighed.
‘You know full well what pash means, Lizzie Persse,’ she said. ‘For I’ve told you many a time and oft. Pash is short for passion – sure what else could it possibly be? And it has everything to do with whom Mamma would like me to marry, for Mamma is enthralled by the whole of Ireland. So why do you imagine for one minute she should object to me being enthralled by just one of the people?’
‘You know perfectly well, Emmie, you’re just being stupid,’ Elisabeth retorted, getting up from her dressing table and ringing her bell. ‘If Pappa or Mamma thought for one moment that you were thinking seriously about Mr O’Connor, they would never again invite him back.’
‘Do you really think so, Lizzie?’ Emily frowned and sat down suddenly on the chair just vacated by her sister. ‘Ah sure you can’t really be serious?’
‘Of course I am, Emmie. And there really is no point at all affecting to speak the way you do, as if you’re Irish.’
‘I cannot help the way I speak, Lizzie! I have been brought up in this country!’
‘By an English governess who is forever reprimanding you for your manner of speech,’ Elisabeth interrupted. ‘And by a father who likewise is always scolding you for your use of the vernacular.’
‘And by a younger sister who’s forgotten her place!’ Emily grinned suddenly, getting up from her chair. ‘So you watch what you says, me girl, or I’ll harf you all over.’
‘Don’t you dare!’ Elisabeth squealed, backing away from Emily who was advancing towards her with hands held out in front of her ready to do the pinching. ‘Don’t you dare even try and pinch me – don’t you dare! Or I’ll – I’ll—’
‘Yes? What’ll you do, you little skite?’ Emily wondered with over-wide eyes as her sister backed away from her. ‘You say one word to Pappa or Mamma about what I’ve just said and I won’t only harf you all over – I’ll put bugs in your bed so I will!’
By the time Fanny finally made it upstairs from the kitchens and into the room to which she’d been summoned the two girls were hysterical with laughter, both of them rolling around the bed with Emily still threatening to pinch and tickle her sister half to death.
‘Heaven preserve us all,’ Fanny said. ‘From the sound of it out there I thought yes was being moithered.’
‘Just get my sister off me, Fanny, please!’ Elisabeth entreated, through gales of laughter. ‘Please get her off me before I die from laughing!’
‘Ye should hear yerselves,’
Fanny replied with a shake of her head, ignoring her young mistress’s entreaty and attempting to attend to the bedroom fire instead. ‘Isn’t it as if ye’ve both fallen into a giggles nest.’
‘And from the sound of you, Fanny McBride,’ Emily said, finally giving up the torture of her sister and sitting round on the edge of the bed, ‘it’s as if you’ve fallen into a jug of punch.’
‘Isn’t it Cook’s birthday, Lady Emmie,’ Fanny replied, helping herself stand upright by grabbing at the mantel. ‘And didn’t Mr Garbutt very kindly allow us a glass of port wine.’
‘I thought it was Cook’s birthday last month,’ Emily said with a wink at her sister. ‘The night you fell fast asleep in Miss Constance’s cupboard.’
‘Is that a fact?’ the red-cheeked Fanny wondered, doing her best to focus on Emily. ‘Ah well now if that really is the case then ’tis only understandable, Lady Emmie. For don’t all of us girls not tell the truth about our age? Now if ye’ll excuse me, someone up the stairs has rang.’
‘That was me, Fanny,’ Elisabeth sighed. ‘I want to go to bed.’
‘Yes, Fanny,’ Emily agreed. ‘And so too do I.’
After Fanny had unlaced their stays the two girls lay side by side on the bed gently massaging their unbuckled sides while their maid did her best to continue with the full undressing of her charges.
‘“First comes me coat—”’ Emily began to sing, nudging Elisabeth to join in which she refused to do.
‘Certainly not,’ she retorted. ‘That’s a vulgar song of yours.’
‘It’s never mine!’ Emily laughed. ‘Is it, Fanny Moran?’
‘Sure I’ll sing it with ye,’ Fanny agreed, removing Emily’s laced-up boots. ‘Sure I’ll sing it with ye seein’ no one else is.’
‘“First comes me coat,”’ they both sang. ‘“Then comes me petticoat. Then comes me pollydoodles – and then comes moi!”’
Debutantes Page 31