Emily fell back on her bed in fits of laughter, even though she must have sung the ditty countless times. Even Elisabeth had to laugh, although like her sister she was amused purely by the words of the song, the silly words as she called them such as pollydoodles and moi instead of me, with no understanding of any other meaning. To Emily and Elisabeth it was simply an undressing song, and to them both at this time in their lives young women simply undressed when it was time for their maid to help put them to bed.
When they had composed themselves after all the merriment, Emily lay back on the pillows and held up her long legs for Fanny to roll down her stockings.
‘But wouldn’t you say he’s really handsome?’ Emily sighed, returning to the topic the two of them had been discussing earlier. ‘Compared to most of the young men round here you would surely have to say, Lizzie, that Mr O’Connor is a veritable Apollo.’
‘Is it Mr O’Connor you’ll be talking of, Lady Emmie?’ Fanny asked, attending now to Elisabeth’s stockings.
‘Who else would it be, Fanny Dunderhead? Who else has the name Mr O’Connor other than Mr O’Connor, you great gomshaw?’ Emily threw a pillow at the maid, which hit Fanny on the top of her head and caused her to slide to the floor, helpless with laughter. ‘Will you listen to her, Lizzie?’ Emily asked. ‘Now who’s fallen in a nest of giggles?’
‘God save us all,’ Fanny sighed, pulling herself up over the end of the bed with her maid’s cap tipped over her eyes. ‘But won’t I have such a head on me shoulders in the morning? And for the life of me can I not remember was I putting on your stockings, Lady Emmie, or was I taking them off? Can I not.’
Taking pity on her maid’s hopeless state, Emily got up off the bed and sat Fanny down on it, leaving her holding on to one of the four posts while she undressed herself. Her sister followed suit and by the time both the girls were in their nightgowns their maid had fallen into a sleep of deep intoxication, still holding fast to the post.
‘Come on,’ Emily decided, stretching the unconscious servant out on the bed. ‘We’d best both sleep in your room, and leave Fanny to come to her senses here.’
‘Don’t you think she’ll be missed in the kitchens, Emmie?’ Elisabeth wondered as she followed her sister out. ‘We don’t want poor Fanny getting into any trouble.’
‘Do you think anyone will notice she’s gone?’ Emily laughed, closing the bedroom door. ‘If Mr Garbutt’s been at the port then I’ll wager you the whole lot of them down there will be as stotious as newts!’
While the night wind lamented outside the house and the owls hooted in the tall creaking trees, the two girls lay beside each other in Elisabeth’s bed and wondered of their futures.
‘Even if you don’t plan to end up marrying the Count of Dromore you’ll have no trouble finding someone equally notable, Lizzie,’ Emily said. ‘For you’ve always been considered by far and away the prettiest.’
‘That simply isn’t so,’ Elisabeth contended. ‘I’m not going to marry dull old Dromore, and I’m not near a mile as pretty as Cecilia nor as pretty as Connie is going to be and nowhere near as pretty as you.’
‘Tosh – I’m not pretty at all,’ Emily replied. ‘I have never been thought of as pretty, never for a moment. Mamma says I’m handsome, which really means I look like a boy, and that makes a lot of sense because isn’t that what I was intended to be? The son Pappa always wanted.’
‘That doesn’t stop you being pretty, Emmie. Just because you think Pappa hoped you’d be a boy.’
‘Pappa and Mamma,’ Emily corrected her sister. ‘But anyway you’re right, because what they wanted has nothing to do with the fact that as matters stand I am too tall, my nose is too long, my upper lip sticks over my lower lip and is also crooked, and my left leg seems a great deal shorter than my right one. My eyebrows are too straight as well, just to cap it all. So if I’m to be completely honest and taking into account what really is on offer in these parts, then I imagine I shall be considered to be lucky – although not by me, I hasten to add, dear sis – I will be counted lucky if as Pappa keeps predicting that gomshaw Mr Kilgannon does in fact offer to make me his wife.’
‘Lawks,’ Elisabeth whispered from under the edge of her bedsheet. ‘But you wouldn’t ever say yes to him surely, Emmie, would you? Not after all the jokes you’ve made about him?’
‘Of course I couldn’t,’ Emily replied. ‘I’d never be able to stop from laughing whenever I saw his feet. But then I might have no alternative, if no-one else will have me. And to be honest I’d rather be married to Mr Kilgannon than unmarried and a governess like Miss Hannington.’
‘So you weren’t really being serious about Mr O’Connor?’
‘That’s not really the point,’ Emily replied, turning away on her side so her sister couldn’t see the expression on her face by the candlelight. ‘I know you’re right and that Pappa would never allow it, so now shut your eyes and go to sleep. And pray that the Sluagh Sidhe kidnap Mr Kilgannon for his shoe leather and put someone more handsome back in his place.’
‘With smaller feet,’ Elisabeth whispered.
‘With infinitely smaller feet,’ Emily agreed, blowing out the candle, and closing her eyes once more to see in her mind’s eye Rory O’Connor and herself galloping out of their castle on the clifftop.
There was no sight of him for a week. It was as if he had been banished, although when Emily carefully enquired without giving her game away where her mother’s quite-mad-poet friend had gone, her mother mid-tying a new silver turban round her head just shrugged and said she had not the faintest.
‘Artists come and go, my child,’ she sighed in her best and most mysterious way. ‘They are marsh lights, all of them. You see them, you make for them, and then they are gone. Mr O’Connor is a poet and a writer of books so he has faded from sight the way such people must when the Muse calls.’
Not even old Mikey had had sight nor sound of Mr Roraigh O’Connor.
‘Didn’t some say he’d gone to Dublin?’ he mused as he stoked the stove in the tack room early one hunting morning while Emily stood tapping her boot with her crop. ‘And didn’t others say he was away to Sligo to see a famous poet in Thornhill? But isn’t it my belief he’s away in the mountains, dreaming up new stories for his boocks.’
‘Why ever should he go away to the mountains to do that, Mikey?’ Emily enquired impatiently as the tack room filled with peat smoke. ‘Whatever gave you such a notion?’
‘Isn’t that where the poets find their inspiration, Lady Emmie? In the magic mists that hang on the bens, where don’t they sit with their heads in the clouds till they may be filled with all manner of enchantments.’
The more time that passed, the more Emily became convinced that somehow, either asleep or awake, she must have given her parents some indication of her secret enthralment and that in return they had indeed banished her love from the house. For there was no word of him at all, nor, according to Mikey when he returned from Ballinasloe one evening, had he been seen in his house since the day after the last party he had attended at Glenarven.
‘Perhaps I dreamed him, Lizzie,’ she said to her sister one Sunday afternoon when they were out for a jaunt. ‘Perhaps all this has been a dream and when the cart gets home I’ll wake up and not one thing of this will have happened.’
‘So who’s that over there?’ Fanny asked from the other side of the cart. ‘Isn’t that Mr O’Connor standing up as ever was by the lios?’
Emily turned to look behind her as quick as could be, to where her maid was pointing, and sure enough in the middle distance was an old earthworks and mounted beside it was the figure of a tall man in a black cloak and hat, mounted on a sturdy dark grey horse.
‘That’s him for sure!’ Mikey called from the driving seat. ‘For that’s certainly his horse!’
‘Can we drive up there, Mikey?’ Emily asked.
‘We cannot,’ the old groom replied. ‘Wouldn’t we have to drive round the other side where the road all but run
s up to the lios. Then we could drive up.’
‘So drive round there, Mikey,’ Emily ordered, ‘and be quick! Because look – he’s riding off that way!’
Mikey slapped the reins down the pony’s quarters and they were off, down the hill and round the sweeping bend that would bring them practically to the old fort itself.
‘I do not like this at all!’ Fanny cried out, hanging on to her bonnet. ‘We were not put on this earth to go at this sort of speed!’
‘Why is he riding off, I wonder?’ Emily wondered to her sister, ignoring their maid’s protests to which they were well accustomed. ‘Sure he must have seen us, mustn’t he? We’re considerably more visible than he is.’
It was a fine but bitterly cold February day, so there was no mist into which anyone could disappear, and around the fort there was nothing but bog and a ribbon of winding open road. Yet when the dogcart had swung round the bend and come to a halt there was no sign of the horseman.
Mikey pushed his cap to the back of his head and scratched his forehead with his thick forefingers.
‘Now there’s a thing,’ he said, surveying the bleak but deserted landscape around them. ‘Is your man gone or isn’t he?’
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Fanny muttered, crossing herself with her right hand while her left hand still clasped her bonnet. ‘May God have mercy on us all for didn’t I just see him wit’ me own eyes? Didn’t I just see him?’
Fanny went as white as a sheet and closed her eyes, while Emily and her sister scoured the landscape just as old Mikey was doing for any sight of the horseman. But there was none.
‘Perhaps it wasn’t him at all,’ Mikey said, cocking his cap right. ‘Perhaps weren’t we all seeing things.’
‘All of us, Mikey?’ Emily asked. ‘How is it possible for us all to see the same things?’
‘That ’twasn’t what I was saying, was it, Lady Emmie.’ Mikey drew deep on his clay pipe but the tobacco had gone out. He shoved the burnt remains down with the stub of a thumb and then turned the pipe upside down in his mouth. ‘What I was meaning was that we was seeing things. Things that you see and then that you do not.’
‘But that was Mr O’Connor’s horse! You said so yourself! I saw it for myself too! Just as I saw Mr O’Connor!’
‘Isn’t that the way of the Sluagh Sidhe, Miss Emily. Aren’t they forever taking our own shapes and looks in order to have us bamboozled?’
‘I’m going to see if there are any hoof marks,’ Emily said, making to swing open the door of the dogcart.
‘Why don’t you?’ Mikey said, holding the pony still. ‘Ye’re bound to find plenty because didn’t we hunt this way only yesterday?’
Sure enough one look over the side of the cart was enough to show the old groom was right. The ground all around the fort and away in a broad ribbon as far as Emily could see was covered with the fresh hoof marks of dozens of horses.
‘Come on, Buttons now!’ Mikey cajoled the pony, giving it a gentle slap with the reins. ‘Isn’t it high time we was home?’
While Fanny kept her face buried in her hands, Emily and Elisabeth watched the fort until the dogcart dropped down the hill beyond it and the ancient earthwork was finally lost to their view. When the cart had picked up some speed, Emily swore she heard a faint whinny from somewhere behind them, but Elisabeth told her she could only have been imagining it.
But she had not. For half a mile behind them now and ten feet below the grass which for centuries had covered the prehistoric fort a tall dark-eyed man leaned forward in his saddle with a smile and stroking the pricked ears of his sturdy steel grey horse quietly told it to whisht.
THE NOTE
It was given to Mikey as he rode back home, leading his master’s first horse. On a road not far from the crossroads where the Blazers had met that morning a shawlie called to him from where she stood in the doorway of a burned-out cottage and when Mikey came back to see what the old woman wanted she told him in the Gaelic that she had a letter which needed the delivering. But it must only be put into the hand of the person to whom it was written otherwise bad things could come of it, the shawlie warned, adding before Mikey could enquire that he would know whom that person was even though there was no name written on the envelope.
Mikey placed the sealed letter in his coat pocket and asked the woman how she knew he would pass this way and why the letter was to be delivered so, with her as the bearer of the note, but all the crone would say in reply was that this was the way it was meant. Then smiling a toothless smile at him and bidding him all the luck he wanted she put her still smoking clay pipe back in her mouth and hobbled slowly away across the stony landscape.
Mikey gave the letter to Emily as soon as she had taken her usual place by the tack-room fire after hunting. Emily frowned when she saw the envelope and was about to ask her old groom how he had come by the letter, but seeing the look in his eyes she placed it in her own pocket, knowing that she must wait. Which she could scarcely bear to do, because although she did not in truth know from whom it came it was as if she could feel his name burning through her clothes and into her heart. She stayed by the fire as long as would seem proper, talking over with Mikey and her sisters how the day had gone before managing to slip away with little attention being paid when Elisabeth and young Cecilia, as red-haired as her eldest sister, began to argue hotly about the respective merits of their two best horses.
Had it not been pouring with rain as Emily hurried across the stable yard towards the house she would have torn open the letter there and then and read it on the move, such was her excitement. Instead, because of the sudden violent rainstorm, with her skirt hitched over one arm she ran for the shelter of the house, hurrying in through the main back door and nearly knocking Cook flying, then along the warren of half-dark barely lit passageways until she burst through the pass door which led into the hallway.
Her father was standing with the skirt of his doeskin hunting coat crooked up over his arms so that he could dry the back of his breeches by the roaring log fire Garbutt always had lit for his return from the field. A large cigar was stuck plumb in the middle of his mouth and his face was still well mud-spattered from the chase.
‘Over here!’ he called as the pass door swung shut behind Emily and before she could even attempt to cross the hall out of her father’s range of vision. ‘And fetch me my whisky off the table there on your way!’
Just in time Emily found that of all things in anticipation she had pulled the letter out from her coat pocket, so hurriedly stuffing it back once more out of sight she collected the heavy cut-glass tumbler off the table as directed and put it in her father’s outstretched hand.
‘That’s the ticket, Lizzabett,’ he said as he took hold of the glass. ‘Well done.’
‘It’s Emily actually, Pappa.’
‘That’s so. Can’t tell one of you from t’other beyond your huntin’ veils but there you are. That’s how it goes.’
‘Yes, Pappa,’ Emily agreed.
‘Not a bad day all round, eh, young lady?’ her father said through a thick cloud of cigar smoke. ‘Dull to begin with but picked up mid-morning. Yes it picked up mid-morning all right. Wouldn’t you say?’
‘That was a quick one we ran to Ballynoe right enough,’ Emily agreed, at the same time stealing a quick warm of her frozen hands by the fire. ‘I’d say we must have scored a seven mile point.’
‘Scored will do, young lady, but we’re not having any of your quick ones,’ Lord Oughterard said in his mellow voice. ‘It’s not as if you haven’t been told. A fast thing does, a quick one does not.’
Looking up from the fire Emily found herself staring very closely into her father’s face. He had leaned forward while she was straightening up and now his handsome, white-moustached face was only a matter of inches from her and his large grey eyes were firmly fixed on hers.
Not quite knowing what to say and caught by the look, Emily hesitated before straightening up to her full height, which was a good two inc
hes taller than her parent.
‘There we are then,’ Lord Oughterard suddenly concluded, having drained his whisky and handed the glass back to Emily. ‘Time to get changed for dinner.’
But instead of preceding her up the stairs as was his custom, Lord Oughterard turned and headed for the drawing room. For her part Emily turned and hurried up the stairs as fast as she could, realizing her father’s change of habit had given her the golden chance of soaking in a hot bath instead of shivering in a tepid one.
But more than that, Emily Persse was practically bursting with curiosity to discover the exact contents of the note.
Lady Oughterard was as surprised to see her husband coming into the drawing room still in his hunting clothes as Emily had been, the difference between mother and daughter being that Lady Oughterard knew there would be a very good reason and Emily could only guess that there must be.
‘I was about to go up and change,’ she said, putting down her new book of verses. ‘Is something the matter, George?’
‘Not entirely,’ Lord Oughterard replied. ‘Not entirely, but then one cannot of course be sure.’
This time he stood himself facing the fire, to dry out the front of his breeches.
‘Did something happen out in the field?’
‘No no. Nothing to report, that is. Nothing out of the usual.’
‘Then why are you not upstairs being helped out of those soaking wet clothes?’
Lord Oughterard drew deeply on his cigar, then tapped off the ash with a downward stroke of one finger, without removing the cigar from his mouth.
‘Because Emily has that look about her again, Constance, that is why,’ he replied.
‘What a nonsense!’ Lady Oughterard laughed. ‘How would you know what sort of look Emily has, you dear man? Most times you have to ask me if I’m laughing or crying, so how would you know Emily has that look?’
‘You know full well, Constance, without having to ask,’ her husband replied, still staring into the fire. ‘I heard it in her voice.’
‘Take care, George, you’re beginning to sound like a native,’ Lady Oughterard told him quietly after a moment. ‘What exactly did you hear in your eldest daughter’s voice?’
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