Ruby said goodbye and then flew down the corridor after Jane.
‘Don’t run,’ Mrs McKinnon shouted after them, but no one heard her.
Ruby turned the corner towards the nursery and Jane was waiting for her on the other side.
‘God, you made me jump so you did,’ said Ruby. ‘And before you ask me, no, I didn’t ask or tell her anything.’
‘You are getting mighty cosy with Mrs McKinnon, though. The two of you together in there, writing out the fancy letters. Are ye after her place, Ruby? Do you think you want to be the next Mrs McKinnon?’ Jane hissed.
‘No, Jane, I am not, I was just doing what I was told, now stand out of my way while I see to the fire.’
‘Well, just remember this, ’twas you what found it, you what read the note, not me. I wasn’t there, I know nothing about it, I never wanted you to get that box down. Do you understand, Ruby?’
Ruby gave Jane a long, exasperated look.
‘Jane I will never get you into trouble. Let’s just forget I ever pulled the box down, shall we and I promise, I shan’t ever ask anyone about it.’
Jane looked as if she would faint with relief. ‘Thank God, Ruby, because Amy, she would kill me so she would and me mammy, she would take what was left and kill me again and I haven’t even dared to think what me da would do to me, if I lost this job.’
‘Well, think yerself lucky ye have a mammy and a da to worry about,’ said Ruby, her voice softening slightly, as she brushed the ashes up from the fire.
*
Across on the other side of the landing, Lady Isobel sat on the edge of her bed. She took the letter Ruby had collected for her out of her bedside drawer and read it again, then she extracted a handwritten note from the back of the drawer, carefully concealed. The letter was from a private detective agency in Scotland Road, Liverpool, and it confirmed all of her worst fears. She had driven him away with her anger and her grief and she knew in her heart that was exactly what she had wanted to do. It had been her intention all along. She read the name and address. Stella Manning, hairdresser, County Road, Liverpool. She felt a slight pang of guilt. She had pushed him to live another life so far away from the one he had loved at Ballyford.
She wished he had told her himself. But why the unsigned note left on her bedside table? She knew who had put it there. The words written in poison had stood guard as she slept. It had been the first thing she saw when she woke, propped up against her water glass. Mrs McKinnon didn’t know, of that she was sure. Had he put her up to it? Was she as evil as the curse of Ballyford? Unable to help herself. Going about her business thinking nobody knew?
She slipped the letter and the note back into the drawer and then laid her head on the pillow and stared at the picture of them both in front of the fire, holding their firstborn. If the staff were conspiring against her, there was no one left to trust. ‘It is over,’ she whispered. ‘It is all over and done.’
She had no tears left. They had all long since been spent.
17
It was Sunday and Mrs McKinnon had given Ruby the day off as a reward for writing out the invitations.
‘You won’t get another now, until after we have cleared up from the ball, so make the most of it,’ she said.
Ruby felt the eyes of the other staff members fix on her and felt the resentment rolling towards her in rising waves.
Ruby waited to see if Mrs McKinnon mentioned the bike, but it seemed that Lord FitzDeane had reneged on his promise. If he had ever remembered it at all. Mr or Mrs McKinnon would have mentioned it to her if he had and there had been nothing said. Even with the bike, Ruby had no idea how to reach Doohoma from the castle. She had memorized the road from the convent to the castle, so she knew enough to know that the convent was in entirely the wrong direction.
The previous evening, she had studied Amy and the McKinnons closely as they ate their supper around the large, scrubbed kitchen table. She was hoping that one of the stable boys would ask if she needed a horse, or that Amy might mention that Jack was stopping by and would offer her a lift on the cart to Belmullet, but no one spoke about her surprise day off and that was odd in itself. Mrs McKinnon had done Ruby no favours amongst her peers as Ruby, for the first time, felt their unspoken resentment.
‘Don’t mind them,’ said Betsy as they undressed for bed. ‘You are different from us, Ruby. You can read and write, you have had an education and none of us have. Oh sure, Amy and the McKinnons can read and write, but they aren’t one of us, so it doesn’t count. They are all just jealous.’
Ruby knew Betsy was trying her best, but none of what she had said made her feel any better. ‘I almost wish I hadn’t been given the day off, they were all so quiet and no one spoke a word to me.
‘Come here while I tell ye,’ said Betsy, pulling the blanket up to her neck and wriggling down under the cool covers. Despite the fire in the grate being lit before they went to supper, the damp penetrated any room in the castle that spent the day without a fire. ‘Jimmy said to me that he had a feeling about you and not only Jimmy, Amy’s mammy said you had something about your nature and that you wouldn’t be anyone’s servant for long.
Now Ruby was interested. She poked the fire and with one leap from the grate, jumped into her own bed. ‘Go on then, what else did she say.’
‘Well, she wouldn’t tell me anything else, but she did say you had a wicked temper and that there was a man who was in your head and we would all know about it soon enough.’ Ruby pushed her pillow into Betsy’s face and the girls giggled. ‘Did she have anything to say about Jimmy by any chance? Anyone would think you worked in the stables, not on the first floor, you spend so much time slipping out the back.’ Their laughter could be heard along the staff corridor, but gradually the giggles subsided and minutes later both were fast asleep.
Now, it was the morning of her day off and feeling strangely deflated, Ruby was the first up to eat breakfast. As soon as she had finished she stood on the step and looked out into the courtyard from the back door. The rain of the previous day had finally stopped and a bright morning greeted her. She blinked up towards the scudding clouds; their progression across the bright blue sky lifted her spirits and blew away her low mood. Today, Ruby was a cloud. She might not have the bike she was promised, but she could roam the fields. She could be wild and random. Today, she was free.
As Ruby stepped out of the porch and into the courtyard, Amy placed her hand on her shoulder.
‘Here you go,’ she said. ‘You won’t be here for lunch, so you’ll need food.’ No one, from a tradesman to a beggar, left Amy’s kitchen door without a drink and a bite.
The sun shone brightly and Ruby shaded her eyes with her hand in order to see Amy clearly. Her heart melted a little at her kindness. ‘Amy, that’s really kind.’ Despite herself, a lump formed in Ruby’s throat.
‘Lord FitzDeane came into the kitchen at six and told me to make sure you were well provided for.’
‘Did he?’ Ruby was taken aback.
‘Aye, shhh, keep your words in, make your way to the stables, Danny is waiting for ye. It was Lord FitzDeane who told Mrs McKinnon to give you the day off today, he said you needed to do something private.’
Amy grinned as Ruby gave her a hug. ‘Stop, ye’ll have me going soft. I’ll be wanting to know, mind, why all the secrecy. I want to know where it is ye are off to, but that can wait till your business is done and never mind about Jane and the others, they are all as thick as pig shite and will have forgotten what irked them by the time ye get back.’
Danny was rubbing down Lord FitzDeane’s horse with a fistful of straw as Ruby walked into the stables.
‘Do you have something for me?’ she said.
Danny grinned. ‘I do. Lord FitzDeane said you were to have my bike for the day. The rest have all taken theirs over to the cottages. I’d have fed it and given it a rub down, if I had known ye was riding it out.’ He grinned again, pleased with himself. ‘Don’t break it now, will ye, I’m away to see me mammy in Bangor E
rris tomorrow and I can only go if I have the bike. She loves it that I can get home once a week now instead of twice a year. The bike has made a world of difference it has. Where will ye be for mass, then? Will ye call in somewhere on the way? The church at Bangor Erris is just on the bridge, by the river. You will be there in time, I’m thinking.’
Ruby didn’t answer. She had no intention of spending any of her day in a church.
‘Well, will ye take mass in Bangor Erris?’ A look of alarm had crossed Danny’s face. To miss mass on Sunday was the worst of all crimes.
‘I won’t be going to mass. Are you mad?’ said Ruby, walking over to the stall to stroke the horse’s nose.
Danny looked shocked. As shocked as if she had stripped naked in front of him, as he had so often dreamed that she might.
Ruby placed the palm of her hand over the chestnut mare’s warm muzzle and planted a kiss on the velvet cushioned nose, breathing in the earthy smell of sweet hay and sleepy horse.
‘I shall ask for forgiveness when I attend next week and that, Danny, is the beauty of confession. The priest cannot say no,’ she said as she closed her eyes and inhaled the smell. ‘I will be forgiven and all will be well. Do you know where Doohoma is, Danny?’ she asked, changing the subject. Ruby felt slightly stupid and cross with herself for feeling impatient with Danny.
‘I do. Turn left out of the drive, head for Belmullet and then turn right. It’ll take ye two hours if ye pedal fast. It’s one road in Doohoma, all the way to the head. If ye go any further, ye will drown as the ocean is all there is, all the way to America and that’s where I’ll be heading, one day, when I’m finished here.’
‘America? How will you get there?’ Ruby was genuinely interested. She had no idea Danny had any ambition beyond mucking out Lord FitzDeane’s horses.
‘I don’t know yet, but me brother, he’s there in Chicago and he said when he gets settled he’ll send for me.’
‘Does he write often?’ She pulled strands of hay from the manger and fed them to the horse from her hand.
Danny hooted with laughter, but a troubled look also crossed his face and his cheeks flushed.
‘Write, none of us write, we don’t know how. But he said he would find someone to write a letter for him.’
‘When did you last hear from him, then?’
Danny had wheeled a shiny black bike out of the next loose box and now he looked embarrassed.
‘I haven’t heard from him yet. He’s only been gone a year, but I will, as soon as he is settled.’
Ruby had learned to ride a bike at the convent. They had one with a huge basket on the front, which the girls took in turns to use for errands in the village. Ruby remembered the painful cuts and scratches she collected whilst learning to ride a contraption twice her weight.
She smiled at Danny, sorry now for pressing him to talk about his brother. He needed to hold on to his dreams, his hopes for the future, just as she did herself. His brother was gone and there would be no letter. She knew that. In his heart, Danny knew it too. It would just take some time before acceptance found a place to slip in. Before he could move from speaking of the brother who was waiting for him, to the brother who once was.
‘Thanks Danny, that’s grand,’ she said kindly, as she took the handlebars. ‘I’ll bring you some pebbles back from the beach.’
Ruby tucked her skirt into her knickers, threw one leg over the saddle and was away down the drive as fast as her legs would take her.
Danny’s hands shielded the sun from his eyes and he lifted his cap and grinned as she pedalled furiously away.
Danny was not the only one who watched her as she went. On the first floor of the castle, Charles FitzDeane leaned against the stone mullions of his study window. He took his cigarette case out of his pocket, lit up and watched until Ruby rode out of sight around the corner of the drive.
Ruby whooped as she turned the corner and headed for the gates. She was as free as a bird, until sundown. If anyone had asked her at that moment she would have struggled to explain how she felt. Free was almost too short and inadequate a word to describe her emotion. Overjoyed came close. Overjoyed sat in the basket at the front of the bike and whooped with her as she rode along.
It was the first time, since the storm, that she had been entirely alone, with no one needing, instructing or wanting her. For the first time since she had been rescued from the storm, she had a whole day to herself and no one expected anything of her. She could do exactly as she pleased.
The sun rose in the east and she turned away from the glare, into the west. The smell of the wet pungent earth stung the inside of her nostrils, and she could hear every noise as though it were ten times louder than it actually was. The sound of the squeak on the front wheel as it went round and round, the crunch of the wheels as they met and churned the gravel in the rough road. The birds twittering, the river roaring and even the silence of the bog.
She shouted hello to every man and woman she passed on the roads and stopped whenever she was waved down to be handed a drink by women standing in front of their cottages who saw her ride by. Ruby knew it was the custom to make this gesture to all travellers on the road.
This was not Ruby’s usual life. Today she was someone else. She was simply a girl on a bike out for the day, visiting the place she thought of as home.
The first hour flew by in a haze of joy. There were many conversations with strangers at gates, as they dipped metal cups into a rain barrel and handed her an oat biscuit, each wanting her to stop and give them news of wherever she had come from. They were all desperate for gossip. But Ruby had no time to chat, for long.
She called into the store at Bangor Erris and was directed on her way by the shopkeeper.
‘My sister’s boy works at the inn at Doohoma,’ she shouted after Ruby, puzzled by her urgency. No one rushed anywhere in Mayo.
As she left Bangor Erris, her mood altered. Her feet pushed slower and her heart beat faster. Eventually, she drew up in front of a signpost which told her that she was entering Doohoma. She stared down the single-track road towards the place where she had lived and her family had died. The place she knew would call her back, forever.
A travellers’ wagon, pulled by two piebalds, startled her as they cantered past. Sitting up on the front board was a woman with long grey hair and black teeth. As she passed Ruby, she spat out a plug of chewed tobacco that landed on the floor at Ruby’s feet. Laughing as she cracked the reins and sped by. On the back board sat two boys. One of them threw something at Ruby. It was a stone.
‘Oi, you eejits,’ she shouted, as she felt a sharp pain and then saw the blood dribbling down her leg. She felt tears prickling at the back of her eyes. This was not how she had imagined returning to Doohoma to be.
Taking her handkerchief from her pocket, she spat on it and began dabbing to stem the flow from her shin. This gave her a chance to pull her thoughts together. She knew where the house was and how to get there.
This is it Ruby, she said to herself, you are back home girl.
The sun was shining on Doohoma. She could no longer feel the memory of the cold. It had left her, along with the smell and the distress she had once felt. The helpless, crying, lonely, empty uselessness at not being able to do anything to help or save anyone, not even her beloved dog, Max.
The silence was suddenly pierced by the pealing of church bells, signalling the end of mass. People slowly began to file out from the church onto the street.
‘Goodbye, Father.’ ‘Thank you, Father.’ ‘Stop by for a drink and a bite, would you, Father?’
Ruby watched from her secluded spot on the ground behind the post hidden by a long thick tuft of coarse grass and listened while people took their leave of the old priest. The front door of the inn swung back and forth as men left the confessional to worship at the altar of Guinness.
And then she saw a man and a woman with two young boys and she shrank further back into the long grass and the wild ladies’ tresses, growing alon
g the roadside. She recognized him instantly. She remembered the gratitude she’d felt as he carried her inside his coat. She could still feel the warmth of his body and recalled wanting to scream out in thankfulness, to sob with relief that someone was holding her, thawing her ice-cold bones. She could still smell the musty mixture of wet wool and tobacco on his scarf as he carried her down the cliff. The snow, blizzarding against the exposed nape of her neck and his gloved hand, as he pulled his coat up further over her head as though he knew. And she could still see the pity in his eyes, drowning her.
There he was with his wife, pregnant back then, but now clearly the mother of two young boys.
‘Daddy, please you take the ball and kick it for me,’ the little boy shouted, as the older one ran ahead and taunted him by shouting, ‘I’m going to get to the ball before you.’
‘Don’t tease him, CJ,’ shouted Susan. ‘If you kick the ball Con, he will make you play with him all the way back without stopping.’ She laughed and linked her arm through Con’s.
They turned up the hill and there, waiting for them at the end of the church wall, having guarded the ball throughout the mass, was a dog with a coat as grey as iron.
‘Max,’ shouted the elder boy, ‘you are a good dog guarding the ball, isn’t he, Daddy?’
‘Aye he is that. Come on Max, good boy,’ said Con as they progressed up the hill. ‘Let’s be home for dinner now.’
Ruby sat quite still on the verge. She was afraid to move in case her heart broke in two with the effort. The puppy who had slept on her bed when she was a girl, the only other living being who had shared her past. Knew the call of her family, the whistle of her da, the sound of her mother’s laugh and the shouts from her brother. He was feet away from her. Old, with arthritic bones he hobbled up the road and she wanted to run after him and throw her arms around his neck. He was hers. She had thought he might be dead. But Con and his wife had cared for him for the past six years and now she had found him, she couldn’t move. She sat stock still, as their voices faded along with the sound of the boys kicking the leather ball.
Ruby Flynn Page 17