Ruby felt diminished. The furniture dwarfed her. But she knew that the following moments were important and she took a deep breath before she spoke. She had to get this right, or she would leave this room a fool. The FitzDeane ancestors looked contemptuously down at her from the walls. She thought she saw the mouth of a wigged and pretentious man curl at the corners. She began to wonder, was she mad? Before she could reply, as if sensing her fear he spoke again.
‘Is Lady FitzDeane well?’
Ruby almost sighed in relief. Her hands clasped together tightly in a little ball before her. He had handed her an opening. She wondered, was her hair in place, did she look presentable? Was her apron clean? She had been in such a state of blind anger she hadn’t checked and now, as she stood before him, it was the most important thing on her mind.
‘Yes, m’lord, she is very well indeed.’ Her voice croaked. She was angry with herself. This was not Ruby. Ruby did not cower in front of anyone. As she took another breath she felt her confidence return and she prepared to fire her onslaught.
She licked her lips. She looked him over and pinned him to the chair with her stare. He was her prisoner. She was ready.
‘I hear, Lord FitzDeane, that the clerk from Doohoma was here, making enquiries about myself and I demand to know why I wasn’t told. I demand, I do.’
Ruby’s legs wobbled slightly but she willed herself not to flinch.
Charles FitzDeane was speechless. He couldn’t help but be amused by her ferocity and the sparks in her eyes.
‘He didn’t call at the castle to see you, Ruby, he came to see me and on entirely private business. You must never believe castle gossip.’
‘But, but I know it was about me and that makes it my business too.’ Ruby was flustered. She had expected him to tell her that he had no time to be dealing with such lowly people as town clerks, that he had dismissed Con without even hearing what he had to say, but instead he made her feel as though he were laughing at her standing in his office interrogating him. She was amusing him. His expression altered in an instant.
‘What makes you think it was about you?’ His voice was now cooler and shot through with steel.
Ruby felt scared. This was not turning out as she had planned when she had stormed through the corridors in a fit of indignation. She had expected him to apologize, to pick up the phone right away and call the clerk so that he could speak to Ruby at once. But he did none of that and instead sat and held her in his gaze. The tables turned. She felt as though she might disintegrate before him.
‘It’s Doohoma,’ she whispered. ‘He’s from my home. I wanted to see him, because he’s from Doohoma and it was him who saved me.’
Charles rose from his chair and walked across the floor towards the window. He stood with his back to her and she found that so much easier. It was when he was facing her, his eyes piercing into her, that she found it difficult to speak.
‘Doohoma was where you lived?’ His voice had softened slightly.
She knew it was not really a question, she could tell he already knew the answer and the thought, How? fluttered across Ruby’s mind. The McKinnons would know, but surely they didn’t discuss the staff with Lord FitzDeane?
She didn’t reply. Instead, she stared at the red carpet and at the intricate black diamond pattern around the edge.
The atmosphere in the study was tense and she thought, There’s dust on the desk. Betsy, where are you?
She sometimes deployed this diversionary tactic when she thought about Doohoma. It was as if her mind played tricks on her. She distracted her thoughts away from a potential source of pain by concentrating on things of no substance. A bit of dust here, a raindrop winding its way down a window there. In the convent, she would fix her gaze on the second hand of the large wall clock and count the seconds until her thoughts had moved on.
Charles turned from the window and spoke again. His voice took on a very different tone and one that Ruby did not like.
‘Did you live in Doohoma? Did you live in a cottage facing side on to the sea, did your broken boat, with its nets, rest at the bottom of the cliff with the rope fixed to a rock? And did your donkey shelter at the side, under a sod shed?’
Ruby’s mouth opened and closed. She felt as though she had been punched in the stomach and as the blood rushed to her face she tried to remember to breathe. Memories crowded in and completed the landscape. A little boy saving the peat, her brother. A woman hanging out the washing, her mother. A dog running and barking around her, Max. But where was she, was she there? Could she see herself? Of course she could, she was there, handing the washing up to her mother and looking out to the ocean for her father, who waved his hand in greeting as his boat came in closer. As he did even now, every time he caught her unaware and sailed into her dreams.
The noise she made as she cried was inaudible. It had brewed inside her for years, gathering strength, pushing away at the edges in her sleep, and now, Charles had dismantled her defences and with just a few words had left her bare and raw and vulnerable. She had nowhere to hide. She was here, standing before Lord FitzDeane and she could not stop her heart from breaking.
‘I am so sorry,’ he said, moving quickly towards her and gathering her into his arms. He was unprepared for his own reaction as his muscles hardened in response to her yielding feminine softness. ‘I should have explained to you. I did discuss you with the town clerk. He thought he had traced your mother to Ballyford. I’m afraid I had to tell him he was quite wrong. He described the house to me, just in case it jogged my memory, but I am sorry to say he was mistaken. He had thought nothing of it, before, but when he heard you had been brought here, he thought it worth mentioning. I also told him that when you next have a day off, I would lend you one of the new bikes, which I have had delivered to the castle from England, to ride to Doohoma yourself and you could visit him then. He was keen to see you. Said he felt a responsibility, having rescued you from the storm.’
Ruby could not believe what she was hearing. She would see her home again and the clerk. There was a link to her past. Someone from Doohoma, who both knew her and cared about what had happened to her. It meant everything. The things she had wished for in the convent, they would be hers, at last.
‘Thank you so much, Lord FitzDeane,’ she said between sobs.
She knew that she now needed to leave the room. She was in danger of humiliating herself and embarrassing him further. She wouldn’t have to steal a bike, he was giving her one for a day and letting her go.
‘Oh, God, me and my stupid thoughts,’ she said out loud as she wiped her nose. ‘Does he know I will be coming?’
‘He doesn’t, Ruby, but he said you can knock on his door at any time and that you would be most welcome.’
She was now devoid of anger and filled only with elation. She felt ashamed for having lost her temper. Drying her eyes on her apron, she realized he had moved her gently away from the paintings and towards the weak sunlight streaming in through his window. She thought he was wonderful. He had more than redeemed himself. Lord FitzDeane had no idea that he had spoken words that from that moment on would support a lifetime of devotion.
Charles moved to the desk and picked up the Waterford carafe, which was washed and filled with fresh water each day by Betsy. He poured the clear water from Ballyford’s own mountain stream into the crystal cut-glass tumbler which sat, always ready, next to it.
‘Here, before you dash away, have a glass of water. I swear that the water from our streams has fabulous restorative properties. If I could, I would bottle it and sell it, except I know everyone would laugh at me, trying to sell something provided for free by the good Lord.’
Ruby smiled at him through watery eyes.
‘Thank you,’ she gasped gratefully gulping the water. She took the handkerchief from her apron pocket and unselfconsciously blew her nose loudly. She checked that her hair was in place under her hat, before she replaced the handkerchief in her pocket.
Charles found that
he didn’t want her to leave his office and his mind scrabbled for a reason to make her stay.
Ruby looked up and her eyes, still full of tears, met his. The moment seemed to stretch into forever, a hundred messages flashing between them as their eyes spoke. She saw the pulse throbbing in the side of his neck and the colour rise in his cheeks. She knew that it was there again, a deep familiarity between them. She was aware, without a shadow of a doubt that he would not have spoken to her, or looked at her in such a way, if they had been in the presence of other servants. There was a knowledge, an acceptance between them. It was there in the way he now said her name and smiled at her. It was as if he regarded her as an equal and not as a servant. But she had no idea why.
Charles dragged his gaze away as he absentmindedly placed the linen cloth back over the carafe. Ruby was filled with gratitude and something else she could not identify. Something which bound her to this man’s life, this castle. His world, past and present.
The phone on his desk rang and the shrill noise ripped apart the ambiance of familiarity which had settled between them. He looked at her apologetically.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered simply. The smile that followed held a deeper meaning, which neither understood.
And with that, Ruby turned and left.
*
Charles dealt with his business call quickly and, once he replaced the receiver, put both hands in his pockets, deep in thought. Through the window, he watched Danny and Jimmy and the rest of the garden boys lay down their raking tools, before they ran inside the castle for lunch.
He smiled to himself, feeling warmed by the things he had once loved to distraction about Ballyford, but from which he had derived no pleasure in recent years. The green of the grass, the laughter of the gardeners as they worked together like generations before them and the feeling of being responsible for the wellbeing of others, all this lifted his heart.
But the lies he had told Ruby lay like a weight in his gut and dragged down the smile from his face, as he thought of her tears.
He had ridden out to Doohoma only yesterday, to find where Iona had lived. Charles thought deeply about what he knew of the past. It wasn’t much. Iona’s arrival in the stable had put the fear of God into everyone. He had to prove to himself that she had really lived, to see what had become of her, and in Ruby he had touched her life. The only other people who knew who Ruby really was were the McKinnons and Charles realized that Mrs McKinnon knew even more than she had ever let on to him.
And now she was here. He was thirty-three years old to Ruby’s eighteen and in her presence he felt like a young man once again. She made his heart beat faster and his mind fill with foolish thoughts. Charles knew he would have to fight hard to conquer his natural responses to Ruby. When he handed her the glass of water, he had felt a burning need to hold her tightly in his arms again. A need that had almost got the better of him. But down the corridor sat his wife.
‘How can a place so beautiful be so cruel?’ he whispered out loud.
He heard his father’s voice. ‘I shall rid this castle of spirits and sin,’ he had shouted to Charles, who had begged and cried as Iona was carried away and handed to a faceless stranger, waiting on the other side of the door.
Tears filled Charles’s eyes. He turned to the marble effigy of his hated father. ‘But you never knew, did you, Father, you never knew that the darkest sin casts the longest shadows.’
16
The daylight was fading fast and the fall of the light from the brass lamp on the escritoire was contained by its dark burgundy shade. A soft, amber pool illuminated the writing blotter and guided the hand that held the pen. The rain and wind beat ferociously against the tall leaded windows and drowned out the sound of the careful scratch of the gold nib on card as fine as vellum, the hissing of the peat as it gently burnt in the fireplace and the occasional stomach rumble from hungry Rufus, lying next to Mrs McKinnon.
Ruby carefully wrote out each of the invitations to the ball at Lady FitzDeane’s writing desk, while Mrs McKinnon sat beside her in a straight-backed chair, with a list in one hand and her folded reading glasses in the other.
Lady Isobel had begun the task herself, but her concentration had waned and she had made many errors, so she handed the task to Ruby.
‘You have a lovely hand, Ruby, would you mind continuing for me? Mrs McKinnon knows who is who. She will help.’ Lady Isobel rose and offered Ruby her seat and as Ruby settled anxiously in the chair she added, ‘I will take myself to bed for a sleep. I should try and build up my strength ready for the ball.’
Ruby accepted the task willingly, although she was very nervous, having never written anything as formal as an invitation before. Now she lifted the blotting paper away from the last gold-edged card and placing it in the envelope, said, ‘There, done at last, my hand is about to drop off, so it is.’
‘Oh, at last, Ruby,’ Mrs McKinnon exclaimed, collapsing back into her seat with relief. ‘I cannot tell you how relieved I am to have got that job done and so well, too. You made not one mistake. I am near exhausted myself, just from watching you.’
Mrs McKinnon laid her glasses down on the blotter and picked up the tidy pile of embossed envelopes.
‘Right, let’s just go through this list and tick off the envelopes against it. Then no one can accuse us of missing anyone. You do have a beautiful wee hand, Ruby.’
‘It was the only thing the nuns taught me which I enjoyed,’ said Ruby in response.
‘The Lady Lydia Trevelyan, she’s a one, if ever there was.’ Mrs McKinnon sniffed and placed the envelope back on the top of the pile. ‘If I didn’t think it was the wrong thing to do, I would put that one straight on the fire, I would.’
‘Why would you do that?’ Ruby’s eyes opened wide in alarm.
‘Because she’s a trollop, that’s why. She would steal Lord FitzDeane and all he owned right out from under Lady FitzDeane’s nose, if he let her, mind, which he wouldn’t, as he has far more sense than that. But what tricks that woman hasn’t pulled aren’t worth talking about.’
‘Why, what has she done, then?’ Ruby leaned forward towards Mrs McKinnon and lowered her voice, encouraged by the semi-darkness and the glow from the fire.
Mrs McKinnon folded her own arms across her ample chest, then, with a quick glance at the door to check no one had opened it unawares, leaned forward.
‘Well, I can’t even begin to tell you how she dresses, because it would be most inappropriate, but let me just tell you this: what she has she flaunts and straight in Lady FitzDeane’s face, too. And that one you just wrote out there…’ Mrs McKinnon lifted the top invitation and jabbed her finger at the envelope underneath, addressed to another of their neighbours, ‘…he encourages her, so he does. If there was a name for a male equivalent of a trollop, he would wear it well.’
Ruby had no idea what a trollop was and she thought it best not to ask.
Mrs McKinnon continued. ‘I only hope the lady is up to this ball. Oh, I know I encouraged it, on the doctor’s advice, mind, but now I have seen this guest list, I don’t mind telling you, I’m concerned. There are people I would have thought better of inviting. I had hoped Lord FitzDeane would have kept the list to the nice local lords and landowners, the people he grew up with as a boy, but our Lord FitzDeane, he makes friends wherever he goes, so he does.’
Ruby watched the older woman carefully as they went through the list. She had other thoughts on her mind. She was burning to ask Mrs McKinnon about the baby clothes hidden in the box in the linen room, but she realized that once she had spoken she could never take those words back. Something also told Ruby that if she asked that particular question, nothing at the castle would ever be the same again. She sensed a danger in being aware of the note and the contents of the box.
A small tap rattled the door, and Mrs McKinnon said to Ruby, ‘Now, I’m trusting you, as a convent girl and a good Catholic, to understand that conversation you and I have just had, it’s between us two. Not to b
e repeated.’
She rose from the chair and pulled and fastened the shutters. She knew she really had no need to ask for assurances of discretion. Ruby wasn’t like the other servants and not only because she had been educated at the convent with the best reputation in Ireland. She carried a maturity like an invisible shawl wrapped around her and it made her appear so much older than her years.
Ruby smiled at Mrs McKinnon and the thought crossed Mrs McKinnon’s mind that even Ruby’s smiles appeared weary at times.
‘Of course, it’s our secret, although I have to say, I’m rather excited now about the trollop. It will be an education in itself to see how she behaves.’
Mrs McKinnon grinned. ‘Aye, well that’s as may be, just as long as she doesn’t upset Lady FitzDeane.’
Ruby inclined her head towards the door. ‘That’ll be Jane,’ she said.
‘Aye, jealous, no doubt, that she isn’t sat in here with us.’ Then Mrs McKinnon shouted, ‘Yes, come in,’ and Jane immediately popped her head around the door.
‘Come in, girl, what’s up with you, has the cat got your tongue, or what?’ Mrs McKinnon smiled kindly at Jane, she intended no rebuff knowing that Jane always appeared either cross or half scared to death.
Jane shot Ruby a look which only Ruby understood. It said, Have you told her? Have you? Because if you have, I will hate you forever, Ruby Flynn.
Jane had her story ready. She wasn’t there. Ruby was a liar. She cannot read.
‘Amy is calling for you, Mrs McKinnon and the nursery fire is nearly out, Ruby.’
‘Run along Jane and tell Amy I am coming.’
‘I am very grateful to you for this, Ruby,’ Mrs McKinnon said, placing an elastic band around the invitations. ‘We shall have to get these into the post tomorrow and then it’s all systems go. We have to turn the luck of the castle. That’s what it means to me and everyone here, Ruby – a night to turn our luck around and hope things will be sunnier from the morning after.’
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