Cloud Castle

by Sara Seale

  In a little while the crowd began to disperse, and she watched them leaving in the divers ways they had come, by ancient car and bicycle, by farm wagon and weedy hack, by the humble ass-drawn carts, all pressed into the work of salvage. Only the fire-engine remained, shining and magnificent, on the trampled grass, and Judy went slowly back to the house, her long skirt trailing in the dew.

  Men were still hacking away at bar and pantry, and water seeped into the hall in black, evil-smelling pools, but the fire was out. It had not, one of the men was cheerfully assuring Raff, done as much damage as might have been expected, and wouldn’t that old sinner, Timsy Sullivan, be havin’ a skelpin’ for leavin’ his pants to dry on the stove and he away in his bed, not mindful that the stuff would scorch?

  “Me cornet...” Timsy himself was still muttering unhappily, picking about amidst the blackened remains of his pantry, and two of the firemen were surveying the bar and scratching their heads sorrowfully.

  “Would you credit it, Murphy, all that good liquor wasted, and never a wan of us to save a bottle or two?” one said to the other.

  “Ah, sure, ‘tis the bad luck that’s been on us these days past,” Murphy agreed mournfully. “Would you think, now, the O’Rafferty would be havin’ a drap of the crayture stored away beyont?”

  “There’s some still left in the cellars,” Raff reassured them, with a grin. “Timsy will see to you. Mary Kate, take them all to the dining-room and do what you can for them. The kitchen, I think, is still too choked with smoke to prove a comfortable spot for entertaining. You might bring something to the study for the rest of us, Agnes, when your uncle has taken his pick from the cellar. Come along, Judy, and the rest of you. We can all do with a pick-me-up before spending what’s left of the rest of the night in our beds.”

  But it was only Judy and the Colonel who followed him to his study. Miss Botley, remembering her chin-strap too late, removed it hurriedly and, not liking to look in Colonel Frazer’s choleric eye, observed crushingly that since she did not drink, even in an emergency, she would retire again to her bed if she could be assured she would be safe for the night.

  “I shall leave in the morning, however, Mr. O’Rafferty,” she said. “I’m sorry for your misfortune, but really I cannot be expected to stop on here any longer with the house in this state of turmoil. Will you kindly have my bill made out in the morning, and I shall expect, of course, a small reduction in terms for this week’s inconvenience.”

  She swept upstairs, coughing as she inhaled the smoke which was still hanging about, and Judy wanted for a moment to run after her, offering apologies for the shortcomings of the house, but she was too tired. A burst of merriment came from the dining-room where the firemen were evidently well on the way to being entertained by the kitchen staff, and the Colonel closed the study door and cleared his throat.

  “Might have been worse!” he said. “Might have been a lot worse. I remember when I was in Simla—”

  She could not bear it, Judy thought, if the old soldier were to embark on one of his deadly reminiscences now, and she curled up on the hearth, surprised to see that the turves were still a glowing heap of white ash, and examined her burnt hands.

  “Gad! You’re hurt, Miss Judy, what?” the Colonel interrupted himself to exclaim, and Raff, who had been foraging for candles, looked down at her sharply.

  “Let me see,” he said, kneeling beside her, and taking her hands gently in his to examine the palms.

  “Yes, you are,” he said, frowning. “Quite nasty burns, in fact I’ll get the first-aid box—these must be painful.”

  “Plucky, though, by jove! Damn plucky little filly,” the Colonel observed admiringly, and Miss Doyle came in with a tray bearing glasses, a magnum of champagne, and a many-branched silver candelabrum which gently touched the room with light.

  The pop the cork made was a heartening sound and Judy watched the bubbles rising to the surface of each glass with sleepy interest. The Colonel raised his own glass with the appropriate vague noises to accompany a toast and observed optimistically:

  “Insurance—make quite a thing out of that, O’Rafferty—only those two rooms and the one above badly damaged. I should let ‘em go to ruin to match the other wing and concentrate on the rest of the house, what? Still room enough for P.G.s, and that damn bar’s no loss.”

  “Yes...” Raff said, absently sipping his champagne while his eyes brooded on Judy’s bent head, bright in the candlelight. Miss Doyle brought the first-aid box and put it on the desk with some stringent observation which received no answer, and went away again, and Colonel Frazer, finding that he too was receiving scant attention at the hands of his host, downed his champagne and did not wait to be offered a second glass.

  “Get those burns fixed up. Painful thing, burns. Girl’s probably in pain, what?” he remarked from the doorway, and was gone, congratulating himself on his tact.

  Raff put down his glass with an exclamation of remorse.

  “What am I thinking of! Here, come to the light and let me see to your hands,” he said, setting out such remedies as he needed with swift efficiency, but a great lassitude had fallen upon Judy. Her hands were throbbing, but no more noticeably than the uneven tempo of her heart, and the champagne was going a little to her head.

  “You come to me,” she said in the provocative tones she had sometimes heard Marcia use, and wondered a little lightheadedly if the trick would work for her.

  He gave her a quick glance, then, setting the candelabrum on the floor, knelt down again beside her and started dressing her hands. She watched him closely, observing all the small familiar details which she had come to know so well; the flecks of grey in his hair, the sharp, irregular outline of his bony features, and that endearing suggestion of a break in the high bridge of his nose. He was so close to her that she could trace each line and idiosyncrasy in his face with loving attention, and only looked away when he glanced up suddenly, and caught her at it

  “Isn’t it queer,” she said, beginning to talk very fast, “that I bought this housecoat in case the house caught fire? Do you remember—it was only yesterday?” He did not answer, but pushing the first-aid box aside, sat down on a low stool to regard her steadily. “Granny Malone saw ashes and ruin in my fortune ... she said I was bad luck to the house because of my hair ... Do you think I’m bad luck? Raff ... do answer me—”

  “Are you ready to sort out those riddles now, I wonder?” he asked, and his grey eyes were grave and questioning. Her answering gaze was as grave as his, but the first faint flicker of alarm changed to a look of untroubled acceptance, and she smiled at him.

  “Yes...” she said on a long sigh. “Yes, Raff—perhaps I had the answer all the time...”

  “I think you had. I think, perhaps, you just refused to let that part of your mind grow up.”

  “Oh, yes, I did. It was your fault if you didn’t understand what I felt about you. Everyone else did—even Timsy and the Colonel—but you were too busy being avuncular.”

  “You mustn’t grudge me my defence,” he said, and his smile was tender and a little rueful. “Lovers are humble creatures, I think, my dearest dear, and I, with only one love of long ago to show me the way, had forgotten, perhaps, that one must be bold in order to conquer.”

  “I wouldn’t like,” she said, suddenly sitting up very straight and stiff with her long skirt spread about her, and her bandaged hands folded primly in her lop, “to be confused with Kathy.”

  “Meaning just what?”

  “Meaning, I suppose, that I wouldn’t care to be part of a fixation—a sort of Kathy-symbol, or whatever the right jargon is.”

  He moved so abruptly that he nearly knocked the candelabrum over, and it was she who stretched out and moved it, holding it between them like a bright shield.

  “Jargon is right!” he exclaimed, and was on his feet. “Where did you learn such nonsense—from Marcia? Here, give me that thing!” He snatched the candelabrum from her and set it on the desk, seeing as he
did so the new challenge in her green eyes and the brief unsteadiness of her mouth. “Come here! The time for riddles between us is past, and I can be tough, my dear, if that’s an approach you’d understand better.”

  He pulled her up into his arms and kissed her, as she had once seen him kiss Marcia, with angry exasperation, and knew then that provocation, even though unwilling and freshly learnt, was a woman’s easy weapon. But as she offered herself willingly for whatever he should choose to bestow, no longer caring if she did not please him as Kathy had done, the quality of his passion changed and the warmth and gentleness that flowed from him took her without words, into his keeping and into his heart...

  “Don’t you understand that one love is an echo of another?” he said, his cheek against hers. “My love for Kathy was a young, untried thing; my love for you is a mature completion of what might have grown between us, because with her you share that quality of innocence and loving kindness which I must need for my own fulfilment. But I have never confused you, my darling. You are you, and love for you has grown into my very bones, just as my love for Slyne, and can have no uprooting. Will you share me with that and that alone?”

  “You and Timsy both speak with the poet’s tongue when you are moved,” she said wonderingly. “Is it an Trish trait?”

  “I don’t know. Eloquence is supposed to be attributed to our race, but mine, perhaps, has not been much tested until now. Do I have to plead further with you, Judy, or shall I summon Timsy from his revels to do it for me?”

  “Timsy would do it no better, and you’ve no need to plead, dear Raff, with someone whose nice clean heart you took long ago and squeezed dry.”

  “This time,” he told her with mock severity, “I refuse to give you the benefit of the doubt on the score of lightheadedness—unless the fire has been too much for you!” He caught sight of her bandaged hands and brought them to his lips. “Oh, Judy, my child, you’ll never know the fear you put on me when I saw you trying to force your way into that inferno—and all for the sake of that miserable old sinner who ought to be shot...”

  “He was my friend,” said Judy gently. “With Timsy I never had to pretend, and he could make me laugh, and sometimes he could make me cry, too. Can we go out, Raff?”

  “Out? Haven’t you had enough for one night, you astonishing child?”

  “Avuncular again—you must learn to stop it if you’re thinking of making me your wife,” she said sedately.

  “I beg your pardon! And I was certainly thinking of making you my wife, so don’t let there be any more misunderstandings between us on that score. We’ll go out.” They walked through the dark, silent hall, the light from the candles through the open doorway making a dim path for them. The acrid smell of charred wood still hung on the air, and Raff opened the great front door to the fresh stillness of the hours before dawn. She took his hand and led him down to the shore where she had stood and watched the castle burning, and, still hand in hand, they turned to look back.

  There it lay, the sleeping house, as it had lain for centuries, with the same moon keeping watch and the same stars looking down so impersonally on the slow passage of a decay that would never be absolute until the place like its two burnt-out wings should become, in some distant decade, a heap of stones too long forgotten to be mourned.

  “Satisfied?” Raff asked very softly. “You wanted to make sure it was still there, didn’t you?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Oh—because for me, as well as for you, perhaps, it’s had a kind of magic.”

  “But for you it was never a castle in the clouds—something out of reach and not quite real,” she said, and he looked down at her with tenderness.

  “Not out of reach any more, Judy. Sometimes one finds one’s cloud castle, like the leprechauns’ crock of gold at the end of the rainbow,” he said, and as he spoke she saw the first light of dawn begin to break in the sky behind Slieve Rury.

  A new day, she thought, a day different from all the others and one to be remembered for a lifetime, because it was the beginning... She lifted her face to his, closing her eyes for a moment in a silent vow, and the dawn breeze blew a strand of her hair across his lips.

  Somewhere a cock crowed, and down the boreen Paddy-the-Sheep s dog woke from its slumbers and began to bark Soon it would be answered by Mulligan or Holy Joe or Wheezy, and pails would clatter in the milking sheds, and sleepy voices would call a greeting or, more likely, a good-tempered curse, and the pattern of their lives would begin again.

  Judy’s bright head, heavy with long-denied sleep, began to drop against his shoulder.

  “Raff, who was Finn MacCoul?” she murmured.

  “A legendary hero, my bemused sweetheart, a myth—and no possible relative of any of us,” he said, and picked her up and carried her back to the house.

  the end