Debutantes

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘That is simply not true and you know it, Mr O’Connor!’ Emily swung round again and it was only then she realized how close his face was to her and that it was almost impossible not to do as she was being bid and fall into his arms and simply run away for ever across the great ocean that pounded the shore only a matter of a few miles away. Instead of doing what she was about to do, dutifully taking the packet to England and doing her best to make a marriage which would ensure not her happiness but that of her parents.

  Rory O’Connor had no idea how close his dream was to coming true. Perhaps if he had been so bold as to take Emily in his arms at that very moment and embrace her, to hold her, then who can say? Perhaps even to have kissed her. Then she may well have jumped up behind him on his wondrous grey horse and galloped off with him, hiding out in secret places known only to him as they rode through the wild lands of Clare and Limerick and down into the spring green of County Cork. But instead he pursued the topic of her family, and how people such as he were but playthings of people such as they.

  And by doing so, he lost her.

  ‘Find out for yourself!’ he cried. ‘Go home to your mother and ask her! Ask her in the abstract if you will, just what her reaction would be were you to suggest that you might even be considering marrying someone like me! Or if you dare then ask her in the particular! There’d be no dinner for me then! There’d be no more reading the latest poetry to her guests and no more leading them in song! Most certainly there would not! But I shall tell you what there would be in its place, Lady Emily, were I then to venture in myself to ask for your hand! They would have me horsewhipped for such impudence!’

  ‘Nonsense, Mr O’Connor!’ Emily cried in return. ‘That’s another thing with you people! You have this fixation about being Irish!’

  ‘That is because we are Irish, Lady Emily! And while we are proud of it, it is something of which the English would rather we were ashamed! I am descended from kings, Emily Persse! I bear the very same name as the last High King of Ireland! But do I ask myself whether or not you are good enough for me? Of course I do not! I would not dream such a thing – not even on the wildest of nights! But the same thing does not apply vice versa and you know it, and wouldn’t you be lying if you were to try to deny it!’

  There was nothing Emily could say at this moment because this was not how she herself felt, because she felt herself to be Irish, having been born and having spent most of her life so far in the country she adored and considered her own. But she knew from conversations on the subject she had overheard her mother and her father having, together and separately, and from talking with old Mikey about what it was to be truly Irish, that the man staring fast in her eyes was telling the truth. There was no way her parents would ever allow her to marry a native Irishman, no matter how well bred he was, no matter how many high kings were in his line.

  Out of the silence, someone called from below. Emily turned and saw Mikey with his hands cupped to his mouth.

  ‘Horsemen!’ she heard carried on the wind, and then she saw the old groom point north along the long road. Far away, breasting a rise, came some riders.

  ‘I must go, Mr O’Connor,’ Emily said, without turning away.

  ‘Then go, Lady Emily,’ Rory replied, ‘if you must.’

  ‘I have to.’

  ‘Then go,’ he repeated. ‘Go to England and marry your rich man. Or your soldier. Who knows? Perhaps he might be both – and if he is, then what, Emily Persse? Think on that and imagine. For you may wake one day to find your soldier man to a new war has gone. Gone to fight perhaps even against the likes of myself. A war the English might be forced to wage in order to keep a country they see as their playground, but which those of us who live here see as our own.’

  Again old Mikey called from below, this time more urgently. Not knowing at that moment quite which way to go Emily hesitated, looking first behind her at the approaching horsemen then back into the dark brown eyes of the man still standing before her.

  ‘I can’t,’ she whispered at last. ‘I can’t, Rory O’Connor – I can’t!’

  ‘Then farewell, Emily Persse, farewell!’

  Without another look or another touch he was gone from her, running fast up the hill to where his horse stood waiting. He did not turn once, not even when he reached the animal. Instead he swung himself up easily into the saddle, urged the horse on and in a moment was gone from her sight down the far side of the hill.

  ‘Whoever it is, they will have seen ye,’ old Mikey told Emily after she’d climbed back into the dogcart. ‘They’re that close now, and may the heavens above help us for isn’t it Mr Kilgannon I’m seeing?’

  Emily looked round at the party of riders who were now closing on the cart from behind. Sure enough, leading the party was the red-faced and portly Mr Kilgannon, mounted on an equally overweight cob.

  ‘Just leave this to me, Lady Emmie!’ Mikey called over his shoulder as the trap moved off. ‘Don’t ye say a word now!’

  Moments later the four horsemen ranged up alongside the trap and doffing their top hats called their greetings.

  ‘Ah ’tis only yerself, sir,’ old Mikey observed, reining the pony back. ‘I wasn’t sure who it was but thank God ’tis only yerself. With the way things are these days ’tis best to make quite certain.’

  ‘Come now, man! We look like brigands, do we?’ Kilgannon mocked. ‘Or if not brigands, what did you take us for? Fenians?’

  ‘Ah God no sir, with the greatest possible respect not at all, sir,’ Mikey answered with the hint of a patient sigh. ‘But haven’t I his lordship’s instructions not to dally at all if I’m to see strangers on the road.’

  ‘Then your sight must be failing you, man, because you know me well enough,’ Kilgannon replied impatiently. ‘Let alone what I am riding since it was you who purchased the beast for me. But no matter, the point is I myself was concerned for your well-being. Is everything all right with your party, because was not that you I saw up on the hill there, Lady Emily?’

  Kilgannon turned his attention to Emily, who for some unknown reason had begun to shiver quite violently, even though she was now well wrapped up under her warm carriage rug.

  ‘Lady Emily was taken a mite sickly, sir—’ old Mikey began, only for Kilgannon to silence him with a dismissive wave of one hand.

  ‘I am addressing Lady Emily, Paddy, so mind your manners,’ he said.

  ‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir,’ Fanny began, ‘but isn’t what Mr Michael was saying then the truth. Didn’t the young mistress here come over all faint and didn’t we have to take her to sit down up on those rocks there, so as she might catch herself some air.’

  Kilgannon looked idly to where the maid was pointing and then leaned out of his saddle towards Emily, with an expression of concern.

  ‘I must say you look a little wan, Lady Emily. I hope you have not caught a chill or somesuch. These March winds can be the very devil, you know.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Kilgannon,’ Emily said, doing her best to stop her teeth from chattering. ‘Perhaps I did put clothes on today that were not quite warm enough. But then it seemed so mild when we left Glendarven.’

  ‘Then if I were you, Lady Emily, I should have your man here drive you home with all speed and then have this maid of yours soak your feet in a good mustard bath. A chill taken at this time of year can be the very devil of a thing, and speaking for oneself, Lady Emily, one could not bear the thought of anything untimely happening to you.’ Kilgannon smiled down at Emily, revealing a mouth full of pointed and badly stained teeth. The thought of. a kiss from such a mouth added a further shudder to Emily’s set of shivers. ‘Good day to you anyhow, Lady Emily,’ Kilgannon said, tapping his hat back on his head. ‘And a safe journey home.’

  As the party of horsemen wheeled away to canter off in the opposite direction, old Mikey gave his pony a slap with the reins and the trap moved off once more. The three of them were silent for the first mile or so, until Mikey pulled the cart up before turning
sharp right on to the road which led back to Glendarven.

  ‘Now there’s a thing,’ he said, ‘and I’ll wager we’re all of the same mind. For wouldn’t ye think it odd Mr Kilgannon made no mention of Mr O’Connor up on the hill, but only of seeing Lady Emmie here?’

  ‘I know,’ Emily agreed, still with the carriage rug wrapped well round her even though she was no longer cold. ‘You must have read my thoughts.’

  ‘Didn’t he read mine too, Lady Emmie,’ Fanny said. ‘Wasn’t I just thinkin’ the self-same thing these last five minutes? Mr Kilgannon must have had Mr O’Connor seen, to be sure.’

  ‘He must have, Fanny, for we had them seen well enough,’ Mikey replied. ‘But then wouldn’t we all be agreed that Mr O’Connor has a way sometimes of making himself, shall we say, not entirely visible.’

  Old Mikey kept the pony reined back at the road junction while he tapped the ashes from his clay pipe.

  Emily said nothing. She knew it was impossible for Mr Kilgannon not to have seen that there was someone with her on the hillside, just as he must have been able clearly to see Rory O’Connor’s horse. And if he had done so, then Mr Kilgannon was not the sort of person to leave such a thing go by unremarked, most particularly since he boasted of knowing everyone in the county by their horse.

  Yet he had said nothing, not one word.

  So Emily too said nothing, except her reason was in case she should break the spell, because that was what she thought might be the explanation. Very possibly Rory O’Connor was some sort of magical person, some kind of Sidhe, or perhaps one of those others he had told them all about, the Tuatha de Danaan. What else could explain his properties of enchantment and the supernatural? Hadn’t he once told Emily and her sisters that he knew where the entrance to faeryland was, in the southern side of Ben Bulben, the mighty great bare mountainous mass that lies to the north of Sligo, a place Emily had once seen as a child and never to this day forgotten? He had told them for sure that there was a door in the side of the mountain and next time they were there to make certain they looked for it, a small white square in the limestone.

  That was the very entrance to faeryland, that white limestone square was a door which flies open in the middle of the night to release a rushing horde of unearthly people who sometimes return before dawn with a newly wed bride or a fresh-born baby whom they carry back with them inside their mountain there, so the story goes, to live in the faeries’ bloodless land in perfect happiness until Judgement Day when all those captured by the Sidhe would melt like snow on a griddle, for it is said that without sorrow, he told them, the soul cannot live.

  As she sat wrapped in her rug in the trap Emily looked behind her again, back to hills dappled dark by scudding windblown clouds one moment and patched with bright spring sunshine the next, then on to the blue-green mountains beyond whose distant slopes ran down to the sea. If there was the door to faeryland in the side of Ben Bulben then what else might these fantastically ancient mountains contain? What other properties might they possess? They might have ways of making people vanish, or ways to make it seem they were there when they weren’t, or ways to make certain people visible only to certain other people. Rory O’Connor had vanished from their sight once before, so what was there to say the mountains had not played their mischief once again, only this time instead of spiriting someone away they had hidden him in a veil of faery mist so that only Emily, Fanny and old Mikey knew he was there? Emily reasoned that it had to be so, otherwise for sure as chickens lay eggs Mr Kilgannon would have remarked on it, and done so in great and inquisitive detail.

  ‘I have heard all manner of things about these parts since the time I was a boy,’ old Mikey suddenly announced gravely, again as if he was reading thoughts. ‘On the very road where we were stopped wasn’t a young woman once waiting for her young man late at night, and as she did so didn’t this something come flapping and fluttering and rolling along the road until it stopped at her feet. So she bent down in the dark to see what it might be and didn’t the thing suddenly blow up to catch her full in her face, and she grabbed at it. And she pulled it away from her face and when she did so she saw it was a newspaper. An ordinary old newspaper. And she thought there was no harm in that, though it had given her a great start. But as she went to discard it, didn’t the paper all of a sudden change into the person of a young man who asked the girl to go with him. And when she would not, didn’t he vanish altogether.’

  And only recently didn’t a certain poet, Emily reminded herself, apparently manage somehow to have himself transported five miles in the time it took to wink an eye, and didn’t the selfsame poet send his cousin from one house to another in just the same span of time?

  Again she stared at the magical highlands behind them as if some trick of theirs might suddenly bring him back into her sight. But Rory O’Connor was gone now, gone from her, a man enraged by love. Already well out of her sight he was riding even further from it, away from the girl he had loved since he was a boy, since the first moment he had seen her, he sitting hidden well up the old oak tree down by the carp lake and she galloping innocently by below him, a young tall streak of a gorgeous thing with her long rufous hair billowing out behind her and her laughter carried to him on the warm summer breeze, up through the thickly leaved branches of the mighty oak, up to the broad bough where he lay on his front watching her, his heart already hers. One day, he promised, imagining himself like his forebears about to inherit a kingdom, one day she would be his queen and together they would sit side by side on a throne made of gold and studded with rare green and ruby jewels, the very same throne his mother had told him about so often, the throne of Rory O’Connor, High King of Ireland. For by right he could claim anyone as his bride. As the high king of the land he could claim any girl as his own. So as the ten-year-old Emily Persse rode by below the twelve-year-old Rory O’Connor for the last time on that fine summer day, the boy pointed down through the oak leaves and whispered in Gaelic that she was to be his.

  ‘Is och, ochon – is breoite mise,

  ‘Gan chuid, gan choir, gan choip, gan chisde—’

  * * *

  Fanny was singing softly to herself as the trap rattled up the track towards the back gates of the house. Emily wanted to know what she was singing, missing as she asked the quick stern look Mikey threw her maid over his shoulder.

  ‘Ah ’tis nothing, Lady Emmie,’ Fanny replied, folding the rug on her knees now their destination was near. ‘’Tis only an old song me dadda once sang.’

  ‘It’s pretty,’ Emily told her. ‘Sing us some more.’

  ‘She’ll do nothing of the sort,’ Mikey called from up front.

  ‘Yes she will, Mikey,’ Emily argued. ‘I want to hear it. It’s a very pretty song.’

  Fanny’s cheeks pinkened slightly, and she looked to old Mikey’s back as if to read it for signs, but she was given no time because Emily chided her once again to sing to them.

  ‘Slan tar aon—’ Fanny began, only to be stopped by Emily.

  ‘In English, Fanny. I want it sung in English.’

  ‘Doesn’t she only know it in Erse, so she does!’ Mikey called again.

  ‘So I don’t indeed!’ Fanny quickly contradicted. ‘Didn’t me dadda teach it me in both.’

  ‘So please sing it for me in English then, Fanny. Come on, we’ve time enough still for a song.’

  Mikey slapped the pony although there was no need. He slapped it in the hope that by going faster it would put Fanny off her stroke, but all Fanny did was hold on tight to the side rail before continuing with her song.

  Farewell to her to whom ’tis due –

  The fair-skinned, gentle, mild-lipped, true,

  For whom exiled o’er the hills I go,

  My heart’s dear love, whate’er my woe.

  And och – ochon – dark fortune’s rigour,

  Wealth, title, tribe of glorious figure,

  Feast, gift – all gone, and gone my vigour

  Since thus I wander
lonely.

  ‘Isn’t it better in the Gaelic,’ Mikey muttered as he steered the pony into the yard behind the stables.

  ‘Lady Emmie would not have had it understood in the Gaelic, Mikey,’ Fanny replied tartly.

  ‘She would not,’ Mikey said, swinging open the back door of the trap. ‘Which is why it would have been the better.’

  Old Mikey gave one nod in Emily’s direction before sticking his freshly lit pipe back in his mouth and standing back with his big hands clasped tight behind him. Fanny looked where he was looking and saw her young mistress sitting gazing away behind her with her hands folded in her lap.

  ‘Emily,’ Fanny began, but was stopped by a shake of Mikey’s head.

  ‘I’ll be makin’ tea in the tack room now, Lady Emmie!’ he interrupted. ‘Soon as ye’re ready. Soon as the boy has old George here put away.’

  After a moment Emily put a hand out for Fanny to help her down.

  ‘Mikey was right as usual, Fanny,’ she smiled as she climbed out of the trap. ‘It would have been better in Irish.’

  Two days later Emily set sail for England, journeying by train to Dublin accompanied by Fanny which on the instructions of the Countess of Evesham was as far as her maid was allowed to travel. From the moment Emily had joined the countess in the Irish capital Daisy Evesham insisted on providing her protégée with a lady’s maid from her own personal staff.

  The following evening the party boarded a boat bound for Liverpool, and after a storm-lashed crossing during which it seemed everyone on board except Emily was murderously seasick, the cross-channel ferry tied up on the busy quayside nearly two hours late.

  Shortly afterwards, as soon as the gangways had been made safe against the side of the ship, the English hunting party disembarked. Ahead of them a huge white door in the side of a building slid open and into its dark depths the hunters disappeared, taking with them what they hoped was a beautiful young bride for one of their clan.

  ENTR’ACTE