The Thorn Birds

by Colleen McCullough

  Without a word she turned to her horse, mounted and waited for him; usually it was he who waited for her.

  Father Ralph had been right. At this time of year Drogheda was awash with roses, so the house was smothered in them. By eight that morning hardly one bloom was left in the garden. The first of the mourners began to arrive not long after the final rose was plundered from its bush; a light breakfast of coffee and freshly baked, buttered rolls was laid out in the small dining room. After Mary Carson was deposited in the vault a more substantial repast would be served in the big dining room, to fortify the departing mourners on their long ways home. The word had got around; no need to doubt the efficiency of the Gilly grapevine, which was the party line. While lips shaped conventional phrases, eyes and the minds behind them speculated, deduced, smiled slyly.

  “I hear we’re going to lose you, Father,” said Miss Carmichael nastily.

  He had never looked so remote, so devoid of human feeling as he did that morning in his laceless alb and dull black chasuble with silver cross. It was as if he attended only in body, while his spirit moved far away. But he looked down at Miss Carmichael absently, seemed to recollect himself, and smiled with genuine mirth.

  “God moves in strange ways, Miss Carmichael,” he said, and went to speak to someone else.

  What was on his mind no one could have guessed; it was the coming confrontation with Paddy over the will, and his dread of seeing Paddy’s rage, his need of Paddy’s rage and contempt.

  Before he began the Requiem Mass he turned to face his congregation; the room was jammed, and reeked so of roses that open windows could not dissipate their heavy perfume.

  “I do not intend to make a long eulogy,” he said in his clear, almost Oxford diction with its faint Irish underlay. “Mary Carson was known to you all. A pillar of the community, a pillar of the Church she loved more than any living being.”

  At that point there were those who swore his eyes mocked, but others who maintained just as stoutly that they were dulled with a real and abiding grief.

  “A pillar of the Church she loved more than any living being,” he repeated more clearly still; he was not one to turn away, either. “In her last hour she was alone, yet she was not alone. For in the hour of our death Our Lord Jesus Christ is with us, within us, bearing the burden of our agony. Not the greatest nor the humblest living being dies alone, and death is sweet. We are gathered here to pray for her immortal soul, that she whom we loved in life shall enjoy her just and eternal reward. Let us pray.”

  The makeshift coffin was so covered in roses it could not be seen, and it rested upon a small wheeled cart the boys had cannibalized from various pieces of farm equipment. Even so, with the windows gaping open and the overpowering scent of roses, they could smell her. The doctor had been talking, too.

  “When I reached Drogheda she was so rotten that I just couldn’t hold my stomach,” he said on the party line to Martin King. “I’ve never felt so sorry for anyone in all my life as I did then for Paddy Cleary, not only because he’s been done out of Drogheda but because he had to shove that awful seething heap in a coffin.”

  “Then I’m not volunteering for the office of pallbearer,” Martin said, so faintly because of all the receivers down that the doctor had to make him repeat the statement three times before he understood it.

  Hence the cart; no one was willing to shoulder the remains of Mary Carson across the lawn to the vault. And no one was sorry when the vault doors were closed on her and breathing could become normal at last.

  While the mourners clustered in the big dining room eating, or trying to look as if they were eating, Harry Gough conducted Paddy, his family, Father Ralph, Mrs. Smith and the two maids to the drawing room. None of the mourners had any intention of going home yet, hence the pretense at eating; they wanted to be on hand to see what Paddy looked like when he came out after the reading of the will. To do him and his family justice, they hadn’t comported themselves during the funeral as if conscious of their elevated status. As good-hearted as ever, Paddy had wept for his sister, and Fee looked exactly as she always did, as if she didn’t care what happened to her.

  “Paddy, I want you to contest,” Harry Gough said after he had read the amazing document through in a hard, indignant voice.

  “The wicked old bitch!” said Mrs. Smith; though she liked the priest, she was fonder by far of the Clearys. They had brought babies and children into her life.

  But Paddy shook his head. “No, Harry! I couldn’t do that. The property was hers, wasn’t it? She was quite entitled to do what she liked with it. If she wanted the Church to have it, she wanted the Church to have it. I don’t deny it’s a bit of a disappointment, but I’m just an ordinary sort of chap, so perhaps it’s for the best. I don’t think I’d like the responsibility of owning a property the size of Drogheda.”

  “You don’t understand, Paddy!” the lawyer said in a slow, distinct voice, as if he were explaining to a child. “It isn’t just Drogheda I’m talking about. Drogheda was the least part of what your sister had to leave, believe me. She’s a major shareholder in a hundred gilt-edged companies, she owns steel factories and gold mines, she’s Michar Limited, with a ten-story office building all to herself in Sydney. She was worth more than anyone in the whole of Australia! Funny, she made me contact the Sydney directors of Michar Limited not four weeks ago, to find out the exact extent of her assets. When she died she was worth something over thirteen million pounds.”

  “Thirteen million pounds!” Paddy said it as one says the distance from the earth to the sun, something totally incomprehensible. “That settles it, Harry. I don’t want the responsibility of that kind of money.”

  “It’s no responsibility, Paddy! Don’t you understand yet? Money like that looks after itself! You’d have nothing to do with cultivating or harvesting it; there are hundreds of people employed simply to take care of it for you. Contest the will, Paddy, please! I’ll get you the best KCs in the country and I’ll fight it for you all the way to the Privy Council if necessary.”

  Suddenly realizing that his family were as concerned as himself, Paddy turned to Bob and Jack, sitting together bewildered on a Florentine marble bench. “Boys, what do you say? Do you want to go after Auntie Mary’s thirteen million quid? If you do I’ll contest, not otherwise.”

  “But we can live on Drogheda anyway, isn’t that what the will says?” Bob asked.

  Harry answered. “No one can turn you off Drogheda so long as even one of your father’s grandchildren lives.”

  “We’re going to live here in the big house, have Mrs. Smith and the girls to look after us, and earn a decent wage,” said Paddy as if he could hardly believe his good fortune rather than his bad.

  “Then what more do we want, Jack?” Bob asked his brother. “Don’t you agree?”

  “It suits me,” said Jack.

  Father Ralph moved restlessly. He had not stopped to shed his Requiem vestments, nor had he taken a chair; like a dark and beautiful sorcerer he stood half in the shadows at the back of the room, isolated, his hands hidden beneath the black chasuble, his face still, and at the back of the distant blue eyes a horrified, stunned resentment. There was not even going to be the longed-for chastisement of rage or contempt; Paddy was going to hand it all to him on a golden plate of goodwill, and thank him for relieving the Clearys of a burden.

  “What about Fee and Meggie?” the priest asked Paddy harshly. “Do you not think enough of your women to consult them, too?”

  “Fee?” asked Paddy anxiously.

  “Whatever you decide, Paddy. I don’t care.”

  “Meggie?”

  “I don’t want her thirteen million pieces of silver,” Meggie said, her eyes fixed on Father Ralph.

  Paddy turned to the lawyer. “Then that’s it, Harry. We don’t want to contest the will. Let the Church have Mary’s money, and welcome.”

  Harry struck his hands together. “God damn it, I hate to see you cheated!”

  “I
thank my stars for Mary,” said Paddy gently. “If it wasn’t for her I’d still be trying to scrape a living in New Zealand.”

  As they came out of the drawing room Paddy stopped Father Ralph and held out his hand, in full view of the fascinated mourners clustering in the dining room doorway.

  “Father, please don’t think there are any hard feelings on our side. Mary was never swayed by another human being in all her life, priest or brother or husband. You take it from me, she did what she wanted to do. You were mighty good to her, and you’ve been mighty good to us. We’ll never forget it.”

  The guilt. The burden. Almost Father Ralph did not move to take that gnarled stained hand, but the cardinal’s brain won; he gripped it feverishly and smiled, agonized.

  “Thank you, Paddy. You may rest assured I’ll see you never want for a thing.”

  Within the week he was gone, not having appeared on Drogheda again. He spent the few days packing his scant belongings, and touring every station in the district where there were Catholic families; save Drogheda.

  Father Watkin Thomas, late of Wales, arrived to assume the duties of parish priest to the Gillanbone district, while Father Ralph de Bricassart became private secretary to Archbishop Cluny Dark. But his work load was light; he had two undersecretaries. For the most part he was occupied in discovering just what and how much Mary Carson had owned, and in gathering the reins of government together on behalf of the Church.

  Three

  1929–1932 Paddy

  8

  The new year came in with Angus MacQueen’s annual Hogmanay party on Rudna Hunish, and still the move to the big house had not been accomplished. It wasn’t something done overnight, between packing over seven years’ accumulation of everyday artifacts, and Fee’s declaration that the big house drawing room at least be finished first. No one was in the slightest hurry, though everyone was looking forward to it. In some respects the big house would prove no different: it lacked electricity and the flies populated it just as thickly. But in summer it was about twenty degrees cooler than outside, from the thickness of its stone walls and the ghost gums shading its roof. Also, the bathhouse was a true luxury, having hot water all winter from pipes which ran up the back of the vast fuel stove in the cookhouse next door, and every drop in its pipes was rain water. Though baths and showers had to be taken in this large structure with its ten separate cubicles, the big house and all the smaller houses were liberally endowed with indoor water-closet toilets, an unheard-of degree of opulence envious Gilly residents had been caught calling sybaritism. Aside from the Hotel Imperial, two pubs, the Catholic presbytery and the convent, the Gillanbone district survived on out-houses. Except Drogheda homestead, thanks to its enormous number of tanks and roofs to catch rain water. The rules were strict: no undue flushing, and plenty of sheep-dip disinfectant. But after holes in the ground, it was heaven.

  Father Ralph had sent Paddy a check for five thousand pounds at the beginning of the preceding December, to be going on with, his letter said; Paddy handed it to Fee with a dazed exclamation.

  “I doubt I’ve managed to earn this much in all my working days,” he said.

  “What shall I do with it?” Fee asked, staring at it and then looking up t him, eyes blazing. “Money, Paddy! Money at last, do you realize it? Oh, I don’t care about Auntie Mary’s thirteen million pounds—there’s nothing real about so much. But this is real! What shall I do with it?”

  “Spend it,” said Paddy simply. “A few new clothes for the children and yourself? And maybe there are things you’d like to buy for the big house? I can’t think of anything else we need.”

  “Nor can I, isn’t it silly?” Up got Fee from the breakfast table, beckoning Meggie imperiously. “Come on, girl, we’re walking up to the big house to look at it.”

  Though at that time three weeks had elapsed, since the frantic week following Mary Carson’s death, none of the Clearys had been near the big house. But now Fee’s visit more than made up for their previous reluctance. From one room to another she marched with Meggie, Mrs. Smith, Minnie and Cat in attendance, more animated than a bewildered Meggie had ever known her. She muttered to herself continually; this was dreadful, that was an absolute horror, was Mary color-blind, did she have no taste at all?

  In the drawing room Fee paused longest, eyeing it expertly. Only the reception room exceeded it in size, for it was forty feet long and thirty wide, and had a fifteen-foot ceiling. It was a curious mixture of the best and the worst in its decoration, painted a uniform cream which had yellowed and did nothing to emphasize the magnificent moldings on the ceiling or the carved paneling on the walls. The enormous floor-to-ceiling windows that marched uninterruptedly for forty feet along the veranda side were heavily curtained in brown velvet, casting a deep gloom over the dingy brown chairs, two stunning malachite benches and two equally beautiful benches in Florentine marble, and a massive fireplace of cream marble veined in deep pink. On the polished teak floor three Aubusson carpets had been squared with geometrical precision, and a Waterford chandelier six feet long touched the ceiling, its chain bunched round it.

  “You are to be commended, Mrs. Smith,” Fee pronounced. “It’s positively awful, but spotlessly clean. I shall give you something worth caring for. Those priceless benches without anything to set them off—it’s a shame! Since the day I saw this room, I’ve longed to make it into something every person who walks into it will admire, and yet comfortable enough to make every person who walks into it want to remain.”

  Mary Carson’ desk was a Victorian hideousness; Fee walked to it and the phone which stood upon it, flicking its gloomy wood contemptuously. “My escritoire will do beautifully here,” she said. “I’m going to start with this room, and when it’s finished I’ll move up from the creek, not before. Then at least we’ll have one place where we can congregate without being depressed.” She sat down and plucked the receiver off its hook.

  While her daughter and her servants stood in a small bewildered huddle, she proceeded to set Harry Gough in motion. Mark Foys would send fabric samples on the night mail; Nock & Kirbys would send paint samples; Grace Brothers would send wallpaper samples; these and other Sydney stores would send catalogues specially compiled for her, describing their lines of furnishings. Laughter in his voice, Harry guaranteed to produce a competent upholsterer and a team of painters capable of doing the meticulous work Fee demanded. Good for Mrs. Cleary! She was going to sweep Mary Carson right out of the house.

  The phoning finished, everyone was directed to rip down the brown velvet curtains at once. Out they went onto the rubbish heap in an orgy of wastefulness Fee supervised personally, even putting the torch to them herself.

  “We don’t need them,” she said, “and I’m not going to inflict them on the Gillanbone poor.”

  “Yes, Mum,” said Meggie, paralyzed.

  “We’re not going to have any curtains,” said Fee, not at all disturbed over a flagrant breach of the decorating customs of the time. “The veranda’s far too deep to let the sun come in directly, so why do we need curtains? I want this room to be seen.”

  The materials arrived, so did the painters and the upholsterer; Meggie and Cat were sent up ladders to wash and polish the top windows while Mrs. Smith and Minnie coped with the bottom ones and Fee strode around watching everything with an eagle eye.

  By the second week in January it was all done, and somehow of course the news leaked out on the party lines. Mrs. Cleary had made the Drogheda drawing room into a palace, and wouldn’t it be only the civil thing for Mrs. Hopeton to accompany Mrs. King and Mrs. O’Rourke on a welcome-to-the-big-house visit?

  No one argued that the result of Fee’s efforts was absolute beauty. The cream Aubusson carpets with their faded bunches of pink and red roses and green leaves had been strewn rather haphazardly around the mirror-finished floor. Fresh cream paint covered the walls and the ceiling, every molding and carving pains-takingly picked out in gilt, but the huge oval-shaped flat spaces in the paneli
ng had been papered with faded black silk bearing the same bunches of roses as the three carpets, like stilted Japanese paintings in cream and gilt surrounds. The Waterford chandelier had been lowered until its bottom pendant chimed a bare six and a half feet from the floor, every prism of its thousands polished to a flashing rainbow, and its great brass chain tethered to the wall instead of being bunched up. On spindly cream-and-gilt tables Waterford lamps stood next to Waterford ashtrays and Waterford vases stuffed with cream and pink roses; all the big comfortable chairs had been re-covered in cream watered silk and placed in small cozy groupings with large ottomans drawn up to each one invitingly; in one sunny corner stood the exquisite old spinet with an enormous vase of cream and pink roses on it. Above the fireplace hung the portrait of Fee’s grandmother in her pale pink crinoline, and facing her at the other end of the room was an even larger portrait of a youngish, red-haired Mary Carson, face like the youngish Queen Victoria, in a stiff black gown fashionably bustled.

  “All right,” said Fee, “now we can move up from the creek. I’ll do the other rooms at my leisure. Oh, isn’t it lovely to have money and a decent home to spend it on?”

  About three days before they moved, so early in the morning the sun had not yet risen, the roosters in the fowl yard were cock-a-doodling joyously.

  “Miserable wretches,” said Fee, wrapping old newspapers around her china. “I don’t know what they think they’ve done to crow about. Not an egg in the place for breakfast, and all the men at home until we finish moving. Meggie, you’ll have to go down to the chook yard for me; I’m busy.” She scanned a yellowed sheet of the Sydney Morning Herald, snorting over an advertisement for wasp-waisted stays. “I don’t know why Paddy insists we get all the newspapers; no one ever has time to read them. They just pile up too fast to burn in the stove. Look at this! It’s older than our tenancy of the house. Well, at least they’re handy for packing.”