‘It has the same ring as it had when she took a fancy to the FitzGerald boy, remember? When the family were here for the summer. Two years ago, wasn’t it? Yes – well – that’s precisely how she sounds now.’
Lady Oughterard thought for a moment, picking up her book of verses and opening it, then closing it and putting it back down on her knee.
‘If you’re right, George, and this is so, then who do you suppose it may be?’
Lord Oughterard turned round from the fire and faced his wife.
‘You know as well as I do who it may be,’ he returned. ‘And now I must make it my place to see that the young man never sets his foot in Glendarven again.’
Finishing his whisky, he put his glass carefully down on the table beside him and then made his way up the stairs, whistling tunelessly to himself as he went.
Just as Emily had thought and hoped, the unmarked envelope contained a note from Rory O’Connor. It said:
I have now a word which describes exactly the colour of your hair. It is rufous, and that is the very word. I also know the colour those eyes of yours go when you are angry for I saw them so that first day, the day I sillied you, the day you yassoped me. When you are sillied those eyes of yours go the colour of thunder.
He had not signed his name, but then he had no need.
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS
It was not long after that they came for her, even as the March winds blew cold. They came for her in numbers, ten of them there were, arriving along the rocky road that led to Glendarven, driven in the smartest equipage the people in those far-flung parts had ever seen. Every town and every village through which the entourage thundered its way westward was thronged with people who poured out of the shops, houses, cottages and even the taverns to watch wide-eyed and with mouths agape as coachmen in purple and gold livery and with top hats as shiny as any in the hunting field drove their teams of nut brown horses through the streets, the blinkers on the animals as polished as the toe-caps on the coachmen’s boots. There were three coaches, all painted deep purple and gold like their attendants’ livery and each one drawn by four horses, while behind followed two luggage wagons whose more menial attendants were rigged not in purple and gold but in plain dark brown and bowler hats, the trunks and cases of goods belonging to their masters piled up behind them and protected from the elements by thick canvas sheets well lashed with rope. Last of all in the caravan and led by their young grooms from the broad backs of Irish cobs were a dozen or more magnificent hunters, strong big-boned animals well up to the weight of the men and a selection of fine edgy near-thoroughbreds for the enjoyment of the ladies.
The occupants of these fantastic coaches were never seen, for whenever they passed through a town or village the side blinds were always drawn. Perhaps they feared their finery might draw the wrong sort of attention to themselves or perhaps they preferred to keep themselves private but for whatever reason only once did any of the population thereabouts get a full view of one of the travellers and that was when the carriages were brought briefly to a halt in the small town of Blahane by a mule which had dropped dead in harness right in the middle of the main street. While a body of men dragged the corpse of the old and exhausted animal away a small crowd of pinch-faced, dirty-nosed and barefoot gossoons collected in the road to stare at the fine coaches and the liveried coachmen who in return paid them not an iota of attention. Then suddenly and without provocation of any sort the window of the leading carriage was lowered and a woman looked out at the children gathered a few feet away on the street.
‘Boy? Tell us what town vis is, please,’ she demanded in a clear voice. ‘And how far we are from Galway town.’
The whey-faced lad stared up at this beautiful apparition above him but could say nothing. Instead his nose grew even dirtier and he began to tremble all over from fear, a fear that if he told this beautiful creature wrong she would spirit him away and he would never see his mother again.
‘Boy,’ the elfin-faced woman repeated, as if to remind him she had spoken. ‘I asked you a question. Be good enough to reply and if your reply pleases me, why – I might give you a penny.’
Still the little boy was unable to speak, but stood stock still on the road, twisting and burying the toes of one bare foot in the drying mud.
Sensing the boy’s fear a tall man with skin dyed a yellow brown by the peat and leathered by a lifetime of winter winds stepped forward and taking his old hat off put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
‘He doesn’t have the English, ma’am,’ the man said politely, but without a smile. ‘But will you repeat your question to me, then won’t I do the best I can to have it answered for your satisfaction.’
‘Very well. Please tell me exactly where we are in relation to Galway town.’ The woman looked at the tall man with eyes of a startling azure blue, eyes which seemed to the man to be almost too big for her tiny face, eyes which glittered like spun ice.
‘Isn’t it Blahane yer passin’ through, ma’am, which is only an hour’s fast run now from Galway,’ the man said, crossing himself involuntarily. ‘So may God speed you on your journey, for hasn’t yer way now been cleared for ye?’
The woman looked a little further out of the carriage and saw that the corpse of the mule had been hauled to one side.
‘Will you eat it, I wonder?’ she asked.
‘We will so, ma’am,’ the tall man replied. ‘We’ll eat him right down to his feet, so we will.’
‘Vare you are ven,’ the beautiful woman replied. ‘Good day to you!’
She put her head back inside the carriage as the coachman prepared to move on, but then as the carriage began slowly to move off one gloved hand appeared through the still open window to drop a handful of halfpennies and farthings at the feet of the half-starved children who fell as one body with many arms on the coins as if they were gold ducats.
And while the children scrabbled at his feet, the tall man watching the stream of carriages leaving the little town wondered whatever it would be like to be people such as he had just seen.
* * *
Everyone in the Glendarven household had been ordered to assemble in order to greet the arrival of the Earl and Countess of KilMicheal and the guests they were bringing with them to Galway for the last week’s hunting. So that the servants would not have to wait in the biting wind that was gusting up the long drive, Lord Oughterard had ordered old Mikey to send out a lad to watch for signs of his guests’ arrival, and one and a half hours after he had been despatched the boy was seen galloping bareback on his pony up to the house to announce breathlessly to Mr Garbutt that he had sighted the line of carriages coming through the pass.
By the time the entourage pulled up in front of the handsome grey-stoned Georgian house, as was the custom at Glendarven the entire household and stable staff were lined up in welcome either side of the magnificent flight of steps which led down from the main doors. As the distinguished visitors made their way up the staircase, the men waved their hats and caps in the air while the women bobbed a curtsey. In return for their cheers and their greetings one of the senior visiting servants handed each member of the Glendarven staff a silver sixpence before following the rest of the party into the house.
The formal introductions were effected in the drawing room, which despite the mighty efforts of the housekeeper and the maids to spring clean and re-order still looked less like a salon of a Society hostess than the haunt of an Irish bohemian, its walls hung with a huge collection of paintings and drawings executed by a mixture of famous artists and rank amateurs belonging to Lady Oughterard’s group of Celtic revivalists, and the room itself furnished in a similarly diverse manner, with many fine early Georgian pieces sharing the cluttered room with just as many contemporary Irish items, such as large throne-like chairs overthrown with brightly coloured locally woven drapes and elaborately carved heavily set chests and cupboards made of dark oak, as well as Lady Oughterard’s two fine harps and the most recent addition of all to the
furnishings – an ornate and lavishly decorated choir organ with a full set of pipes, rescued for Lady Oughterard by an admirer from a deserted church in Sligo. The organ now stood in one corner of the drawing room where out of sight in its range of pipes lay several of the more broody Glendarven cats.
Naturally due to his failing eyesight Lord Oughterard had little idea of the decorative state of the main room in his house, nor did he care. Thanks to the careful ministrations of his staff the room was always welcoming and comfortable, well warmed by a huge log fire and for formal evening occasions lit by a magnificent cut-glass fifty-candle chandelier. It was only Elisabeth and Cecilia who constantly complained to their mother about the eccentricity of the décor, criticisms to which Lady Oughterard would listen with intense interest and then utterly ignore. As for Emily, she adored the room in every detail because it spoke so readily of the family and of their life together.
As the family’s guests were announced, however, Emily could see the not quite concealed astonishment on most of their visitors’ faces as they surveyed their new surroundings, everybody that was except a small beautiful woman with azure eyes who was the third person in line and introduced as the Countess of Evesham. She paid no heed to the eccentricity of the room whatsoever, not even betraying her feelings with the smallest of glances, while one or two of those behind her, most notably the women, conversed to each other with looks which said it all.
Once she had been introduced to her host and hostess the countess was then presented to their daughters, beginning with Emily.
Daisy Evesham was a good half a foot smaller than the young woman whose gloved hand she held lightly in her own, but whereas Emily thought herself handsome at most, Daisy Evesham knew that she herself was beautiful. This was not her own conceit for she needed no deluding. Everyone had told her she was beautiful from the first moment she could recall, and everyone still did. Both men and women. But most of all she knew how beautiful she was because she had heard it from the highest in the land. Her lover had whispered it to her every time they were together. The Prince of Wales had assured not only Daisy Evesham but all his mother’s subjects that Daisy Lanford (as she then was) was the most beautiful woman he had yet known.
Now alas someone else had taken her lover’s fancy, but while the end of their affaire had all but broken Daisy’s heart she had done her very best to prepare herself for the eventuality, since even without everyone’s telling her (which of course they had) that the prince would inevitably be done with her, she knew it would be so. So with a careful eye on the future, and hardly before her official period of mourning for her late husband George Lanford was over and even though her affair with the prince was still raging, Daisy had examined the marriage market and earmarked the widowed Earl of Evesham as her most likely choice. As far as Daisy was concerned there were no ifs or buts about such matters. Once she laid siege to someone that someone soon fell, however exalted they might be or indeed however married. Not that Daisy would ever involve herself enough to endanger someone’s marriage. Divorce was not only unmentionable, it was unthinkable. As was the custom of the time she would much rather be a mistress than a wife, most of all when she herself was married.
Chacun à sa chacune was the motto. Hostesses were told and indeed often asked their guests well in advance of their visit whose room they wished to sleep next to, so that the necessary arrangements could be made and the guests’ cards posted in the cardholders on the appropriate bedroom doors. And mostly such minor infidelities passed off without comment. Indeed there was a school of thought which considered it questionable if neither the husband nor the wife had lovers. Men kept their mistresses openly and women had lovers a little less so but they had them just the same.
Such it was hoped was Daisy Evesham’s understanding to be with her new husband. After all the Earl was at the very least a good twenty-five years her senior, being in his late sixties as compared to Daisy in her indeterminate thirties, although her unkinder friends let it be rumoured she was already past forty. None the less, with such a great difference in their ages and the fact that the Earl was well known to have been rendered impotent as the result of a shooting accident, Daisy divined a perfect future for herself. The Earl was rich, extremely well connected, and most of all he was besotted with her. All she had to do to earn her keep was flatter him, show him an inordinate amount of affection (an act she had no difficulty in imagining knowing that she would never have to consummate her affected passion), and be seen with him whenever and wherever he should ordain. In return ready access to such wealth should more than guarantee Daisy the lovers she craved, particularly, as she sometimes let her mirrored image be known in the privacy of her boudoir mirror, since she was not quite so young as some said she was.
But as she had once heard Oscar Wilde remark and as she soon found out after her new marriage, the path of true lust seldom runs straight. For there was one eccentricity her new husband possessed which no-one had told Daisy while she was carrying out her pre-nuptial investigations, and that was that the Earl of Evesham had never allowed his first wife and nor apparently did he intend to allow his second to have anything other than married lovers. There was good reason for this, his lawyer explained to Daisy when drawing up the settlement, and that was because his impotency made him more rather than less insanely jealous, so while he understood that a woman’s physical needs required attention, as he put it, he so loved both his first wife and now his even more beautiful second one that he could not bear the thought of losing them to another man. Therefore, the lawyer instructed her, Daisy could play the game as long as she abided by the rules. She may take married men as her lovers and as long as she did she would have as much money as she needed. But if she ever took a single man to her bed her husband would see that she was penniless, and if she ever tried to leave him he would see that she was ruined. Daisy took both threats as seriously as they were meant, because she understood that her new husband had it well in his power to do precisely as he said.
Yet even so and only a few steps away behind Daisy as she made the acquaintances of Emily’s sisters in the cluttered and eccentric drawing room at Glendarven in County Galway stood a tall, fair-haired captain of the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons, a bachelor by the name of the Honourable Peter Pilkington with whom Daisy Evesham had found herself only recently to be passionately in love. The young officer knew nothing of the Countess of Evesham’s infatuation which was exactly as Daisy wished things to be. Indeed although he himself was almost beside himself with love for the divine Daisy, he thought she was completely indifferent to him, so little interest did she show in anything he might say or do. He was a brilliant and fearless horseman, yet after a day out in the field if the countess, herself a famous huntswoman, ever deigned to address a remark to him it was only ever a critical one.
‘Captain Pilkington?’ she once called one evening as they’d turned for home. ‘We were following hounds today, not going into battle! Every time we moved off we half expected you to produce your sabre and shout Charge!’
Even when they met socially the countess would either choose politely to ignore him or should he manage to engage her in conversation she would remain totally nonplussed by any attempt he made at either wit or erudition, forever asking him with a frown whatever he meant by what he had just said, as if he was a foreigner having trouble with his translation. Once when he found himself seated next to her at dinner and he turned to talk to her as soon as she had sat down he found himself looking at the back of her beautifully coiffured blond hair, a view which remained his for the rest of the meal despite all his attempts to attract her attention. When finally the gentlemen arose to allow the ladies to leave, the countess had turned to him, smiled politely, and apologized for not having been able to talk with him but offering no excuse as to the reason why and also calling him by quite the wrong name.
Naturally, the longer this exquisite woman ignored and outmanoeuvred him the more hopeless became the Honourable Peter Pilkington’
s passion until he was in danger of acting recklessly. Fortunately Daisy Evesham was so skilled at playing her men that she read the danger signs in plenty of time, and just as Captain Pilkington was all but ready to fall on his sword she allowed him to enjoy her company over dinner at a ball in Windsor Castle but politely refused to allow him to dance with her afterwards.
Therefore imagine the captain’s astonishment and then his unbridled delight when on accepting an invitation from his cousin the Earl of KilMicheal to stay for the month of March in order, as his relation put it, to hunt west across Ireland he discovered that among his fellow guests were to be the Earl and Countess of Evesham. Even though the poor heartsick captain considered he had no chance of becoming the countess’s lover, just the chance to be in her company was enough. Perhaps, he thought, having worked so hard on his hunting technique since first having been scolded and teased by his beloved, she might suddenly be impressed by his brio and her attitude might soften. Whatever the outcome, the chance to travel across Ireland hunting as they went with the most beautiful and desired woman in England if not by his side at least within sight was a chance for which Captain Pilkington would readily have laid down his life.
So good was the sport and so convivial the company that by the time the party reached Glendarven they were all in high spirits and excited by the prospect of topping their joint adventure off with a week’s hunting with the Blazers. Lord Oughterard’s reputation went well before him, and even though neither Daisy nor the good captain had hunted in Galway previously they had both heard of his legendary prowess in the field.
‘I have heard all about your farver, Lady Emily,’ Daisy Evesham said, having returned to re-engage in conversation the tall, good-looking daughter of the Oughterards who had caught her eye the moment Daisy had entered the room. ‘I hear ve order of ve day is long points wiff no let or hindrance and vat his famous pack is bofe dashing and bright.’
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