Merciless Reason

by Oisin McGann

  Two maids who, by position and posture, had remained invisible just outside the room, moved in to clear up the mess.

  “Out!” she snapped at them, pointing at the door as if she were about to send them flying back through it by the sheer force of her thoughts.

  In moments, they were gone, cowering outside and holding others back who came to investigate the commotion.

  Daisy’s fist came down on the keyboard, a clash of ruptured notes, followed by another thump and another. Standing up, she picked up the piano stool and stood foolishly looking at it, unsure of what she was doing. With a gasp of frustration, she put it down again and stared at it. Then, with an almighty shriek of long pent-up emotion, she seized it up again and hurled it through the large windowpane with a crash, watching with satisfaction as it bounced and broke on the paving stones outside.

  “Is this a new trend in musical performance?” Elvira asked in her deep nasal voice, rolling up the path in her engimal wheelchair and stopping in front of the unfortunate stool. The old battleaxe’s bulbous head turned on its accordion of chins and she aimed her listening horn in Daisy’s direction. “I must confess I am more partial to the old-fashioned mode of sitting on one’s stool.”

  “When one reaches your age and stature,” Daisy replied, making no attempt to regain her civilized composure, “I imagine that being forced to sit on one’s stool for long periods of time is a daily hazard.”

  “Perhaps,” Elvira droned on in her overloud voice, “but neither is it proper to eject one’s stool in public, and propel it across the garden.”

  “Better out than in, as they say,” Daisy retorted. “I am of a mind to reorganize the drawing room. I suggest you keep your wandering, oversized seat well clear of the window.”

  Elvira grunted and tapped her fingers against the arm of the chair. Daisy watched the obese old harpy roll away. That chair had been designed by Gerald for Berto, using a self-propelling wheelbarrow. Daisy had learned not long after that it was the very same engimal that had held her husband down, commanded by Gerald’s music, while Gerald carried out the murder. Gerald had since made a ‘gift’ of the chair to his mother. Daisy, like most of the family, suspected that the living wheelchair had more to do with impeding her poking nose and her caustic tongue than transporting her bloated backside. It was easier to keep her in her place if one could control the places to which she could go to.

  An image of a steel-framed window, looking out of a sealed room in the attic, flashed across Daisy’s mind. She was reminded again that there could be a heavy price to pay for any woman who defied the head of the Wildenstern family.

  Daisy turned round to find Leo standing right behind her.

  “Hello, Daisy!” he said cheerfully, a beam of sheltered innocence lighting up his face. “What happened to the window? Did you break it? How? Mummy and I were with Big Uncle in the mountains! We saw Mister Gordon’s new machines!”

  “Did you really?” Daisy asked. “Where was that?”

  “In the mountains, I said, silly!” Leo said impatiently, rolling his expressive blue eyes. “Mister Gordon says we’re going to—”

  “Now, Leopold, what did I say about our day trip?” His mother spoke up, standing at the door of the drawing room.

  “You said it was ‘our little secret’,” Leo sighed, as if he felt the time limit had already run out on that particular agreement. “Can’t I even tell Daisy?”

  “Not even Daisy, my love. Come away from that broken glass, we don’t want you to ruin your good shoes.” Elizabeth glided into the room, looking resplendent in a royal blue dress. She settled gracefully onto one of the sofas and laid her hands upon her lap.

  “It’s a secret,” Leo said, shrugging apologetically to Daisy and then walking over to the piano.

  He glanced shyly at Daisy, and with an exaggerated motion brought his right index finger down on one of the keys with a plink. Daisy smiled and came over, playing the first few notes of a tune that started with his choice of note. He tapped out another note, and she followed it with another snippet of a tune.

  “Mister Gordon has a piano in the mountains … but with pipes,” Leo said softly.

  “You mean like a church organ?” Daisy asked.

  “Remember what I said,” Elizabeth’s voice cut across them.

  There was a tone in it that sent a chill through Daisy. Leo’s face went pale and he swiveled on his heel, trudging away from the piano and sitting down beside his mother on the sofa.

  “You know boys and their imaginations,” Elizabeth breathed, her smile not quite reaching her eyes.

  Daisy held her gaze for a few seconds, but then another voice behind her made her look round.

  “Have you seen Cathal?” Tatty asked, standing on the paving stones outside the window.

  “No,” Daisy replied. “He wasn’t at breakfast either.”

  “I need him to help me look for Siren,” Tatty told her. “The little rotter’s gone missing again. I swear, it’ll go back on its chain for good if it keeps flying off like this. Here, what did you say to Elvira? I just saw her roll past and she … What’s that phrase Cathal uses? ‘She had a face on her like a slapped arse.’”

  The girl’s face broke into a wide grin as she said it—a common expression whenever she uttered some verbal bombshell designed to shock.

  “Dear God, Tatty, that’s no way to speak.”

  “But—”

  “And I don’t care if Cathal says it. He’s hardly a shining example of etiquette.”

  Tatty gave the shattered window an obvious glance and raised her eyebrows at her friend.

  “I’m reorganizing,” Daisy explained again. “Here, I’ll help you look for Siren.” A thought occurred to her, and she glanced back at Elizabeth. “We’d better look for Cathal too. I … I wanted to ask him a few questions of … of a scientific nature.”

  “Gracious, your life is full of questions!” Elizabeth observed. “Why, you must spend half your life in a state of befuddlement. How bewildering it must be, to be you! Perhaps Cathal suffers from the same malady and he simply wandered off in a fog of his own making, just as Nathaniel did. And speaking of states of confusion, have you begun compiling a briefing for your successor? Don’t forget, your new master will be arriving any day now. We wouldn’t want you to be unprepared.”

  Daisy wondered how many hours a day she spent trying to ignore Elizabeth. Too many, she decided.

  “We’ll start by looking in the gardens,” she said to Tatty. “Let me get my coat and hat, and I’ll join you.”

  “Excellent,” Tatty replied. She looked at the spread of shattered glass and broken wood around her and lifted her face up to Daisy again. “Will you be using the door, or shall I wait by one of the windows?”

  Daisy laughed, and was about to reply when one of the footmen came into the room. One look at his face told Daisy that their hunt for Siren—and Cathal—would have to be postponed.

  The dead body of a man lay somewhere amid the muddy ruins of the three tiny houses. The distraught family had been prevented from digging it out until Detective Inspector Urskin, of the Royal Irish Constabulary, had finished examining the scene. So the broken mess that was the ruined clachan of thatched turf cabins was almost unchanged when Daisy arrived. She spotted Urskin, standing in the shadow of the enormous engimal known as Trom. Opening the carriage door as soon as the vehicle came to a halt, she stepped out into the light spray of rain that was falling, and made straight for the inspector. Tatty was close on her heels, neither young woman bothering to mind her shoes in the marsh-like mud surrounding the site of the wreckage. A footman tried to follow them with an umbrella, intending to find a cleaner path for them to take, but Daisy waved him away impatiently.

  There was a hostile tension in the air, and the rain failed to dampen that aggression. Women stood in groups, upset and grieving and bitter. Dressed in ra
gged dresses and scarves, their feet bare of shoes, they cursed the soldiers and police and the hated Wildenstern family. But the men were quieter, standing with hats in hands, their faces stiff with frustration … and barely restrained violence. Some of these people would once have lived in the cottages that were now no more than a crushed area of turf, stone and wood. Others were here in support, trying to block the army and the policemen from getting to the cabins. Those soldiers and peelers had now created a cordon around the ruined buildings. But the troops had only been there as crowd control—rumor had it that some of the men had connections with the Fenian rebels and might cause trouble. The people being evicted would be prevented from taking refuge with their neighbors, and anyone who took them in would risk being evicted themselves. That was the policy—landlords could not tolerate any unwanted miscreants hanging around after they had been ejected from their homes.

  On most estates, the eviction of tenants who could not pay their rent was carried out by ‘crowbar brigades’ of bailiffs, forcing the inhabitants out of the house and burning the thatched roof of the building or destroying the cabin itself. The Wildensterns had a more thorough method, one Daisy had been trying for years to bring to an end.

  Trom was the type of engimal known as a bull-razer, a creature larger than most of the cottages the tenants lived in. It was a ponderous, dull-witted creature that moved along on rolling tracks, guided by its driver who stood on its back, reins in hand. Trom’s jaw jutted out before it like the blade of a giant plough, or the cow-catcher on the front of an American steam locomotive, but much, much bigger. This beast could reduce a peasant cabin to rubble with one unstoppable charge. Daisy had once seen Trom ram a steam train off its tracks. It was both cruel and ridiculous to use a monster such as this against ordinary people’s homes.

  But Oliver, Gideon’s son, was responsible for managing the estates, and he cared little for Daisy’s opinions. It was his view that control of the peasant workforce was made all the easier if one could ‘instill a bit of lively terror’ from time to time.

  Oliver now stood leaning against the edge of Trom’s jaw, looking wearily at the gold pocket-watch in his left hand and fingering the waxed tips of his black handlebar moustache with his right. A thug-faced bailiff looked desperately out of place, standing behind him holding an umbrella over his employer’s head. Inspector Urskin was writing with a pencil in his notebook, having made a careful examination of the scene in his slow methodical manner. He kept his head bent over the notebook to shield it from the rain. He was a thin-featured man dressed in a long grey coat, a plain blue suit and shoes that were normally well cared-for, but today were caked in mud. A well-used bowler hat sat on his head. The policeman had a crumpled face that made him look older than he was, and his thick lip-whisker—not nearly as well groomed as Oliver’s—was a shade lighter than his auburn hair. Daisy and Tatty knew him, and felt reassured by his presence. Urskin was a quietly intelligent man, and one who managed to balance a sound ethical sense with the unpleasant practicalities of his job.

  Detective inspectors did not normally attend evictions, so Daisy assumed he had come here for another reason and had now taken control of the scene of the incident. He looked up and raised his hat to her when he saw her approaching.

  “Good afternoon, your Grace,” he greeted her in his earthy Midlands accent. “Word travels fast hereabouts, it seems. The accident could only have ’appened half an hour ago. Though, if you don’t mind my sayin’ it, I am not surprised to see you takin’ a personal interest.”

  “Good afternoon, Inspector. And was it an accident?” Daisy responded.

  “Have you any reason to think otherwise?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, not having witnessed it. All I have heard so far is that a man has been killed under the feet of one of the family’s engimals, while under the direction of my dear cousin here.” She tried not to refer to Oliver with too much sarcasm. “Would you mind very much providing me with the full facts of the case?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, woman!” Oliver snapped at her, barely keeping his voice low enough to prevent the people around them from hearing. “The bloody fool ran back into the house after the bailiffs had dragged them all out. Trom was almost on top of the shack when the noodle dived inside. There was no helping it, that’s what I say. Everyone could see that, eh? And this is no concern of yours anyway. Why don’t you go back to your papers and leave the harsh realities of business to the men who can deal with them?”

  “And when you start dealing with them, will you let us know?” Tatty inquired, looking very pointedly at the waste ground around them. “We eagerly await the day when we will see your management skills come into full bloom.”

  “These are the facts as I see ’em so far, your Grace,” Urskin said to Daisy, choosing to ignore Oliver’s protests. “Mister Wildenstern here had requested a police presence to provide support for his bailiffs, as he suspected the tenants to be Fenian rebels, or rebel sympathizers. His suspicions were passed on to me in Dublin Castle, and they concurred with some reports I had received from informants in the area. I arrived accompanied by some of my own men, and a detachment of soldiers from the local barracks, whom you see here around us.

  “Mister Wildenstern brought a team of bailiffs and this engimal, with a view to removin’ the occupants of the houses and demolishin’ said houses. They ejected the families with some force.” He glanced over at Oliver. “A level of force, sir, that bordered on the excessive, in my opinion.”

  “I didn’t ask it,” Oliver retorted.

  “I’m givin’ it anyway,” Urskin said in a warning tone. Then he continued his narrative: ‘The occupants, havin’ been removed, were standing off to one side when the bailiff in control of the engimal set it to smashing down the houses. Whereupon Patrick Ahern—a man in his fifties, with a wife and two children—pulled free of the bailiffs and ran back into the house. It’s thought he had some money hidden away in there somewhere and was desperate to get it out before the bull-razer went in.

  “But the beast was already up to speed, and Patrick didn’t get out in time. He was crushed with the house. The use of engimals such as this in evictions has been questioned for some time, and some legislation may well be in order, but that’s not my role here. Patrick ran into the beast’s path of his own free will. There’ll be an inquest, and I’ll make my report. But for now, that’s all that can be done.”

  “Dear God in Heaven,” Daisy muttered, putting her face in her hands. “Dear God, that poor man. God help his poor family. We must do everything we can for them.”

  “Here now, steady on!” Oliver said. “Don’t go accepting any obligations, Daisy. Fate played a hand here, that’s all. We couldn’t have seen this coming.”

  “You drove that thing over their house!” Daisy snarled at him, looking up with a savagery that caused Oliver to take a step back. “A man is dead because his family couldn’t afford the rent we charge them. And because you deal with such things by swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. You disgust me!”

  “Actually, they did have their rent,” Urskin pointed out. “But your family wouldn’t take it, because of where it came from.”

  “What?” Tatty exclaimed.

  “What do you mean?” Daisy asked.

  “They had the money for the rent when the bailiffs arrived today,” Urskin said again. “But the tenants normally pay their rent with their labor, not with money, as you well know, your Grace. If they can’t make their quota with the crops they grow for their landlord, they get evicted. Most of these people hardly deal in money at all. So Mister Wildenstern here had reason to believe it had been given to them by the criminal known as the Highwayboy. Mister Wildenstern wouldn’t accept the money. In fact, he said their taking the money from the Highwayboy was reason enough to evict them.”

  “It’s not the first bloody time it’s happened, either,” Oliver snorted. “The last few times we�
��ve come to evict someone, they’ve handed over the back rent, happy as you please, after months of not bein’ able to pay it. How else would they get their hands on that kind of money, eh? Half of these snirps wouldn’t see a coin from one week to the next, let alone a lump of ready money like that. It’s obviously robber’s loot, that’s what I say.”

  “That’d be a very generous and considerate robber indeed,” Daisy observed.

  “A robber nonetheless,” Oliver sniffed. “One who is no doubt intent on sowing the seeds of rebellion by pretending to support the peasants. Throw a few coins their way today, lead a mob through the door of Wildenstern Hall tomorrow.” He glared at Urskin. “And what are you doing about it, eh? Nothing! That’s what!”

  “He’s a slippery customer,” the police inspector admitted. “I’m not on that case myself—at least, not yet—but the lads’ll catch up with him in time.”

  “In time? Is that your idea of a manhunt?” Oliver barked. “Well, while you’re dilly-dallying, this wretch is causing unrest, and I won’t have it, y’hear? I won’t have conspirators on our land, and that’s the end of it.”

  “We’ll have to send our whole family packing, so,” Tatty chirped. “Can I be the one to break the news?”

  Daisy was walking over to the Ahern family, with the intention of offering her condolences. The footman dithered between following her with the umbrella, or staying to protect Tatty. One sharp look from Daisy fixed him in his place, and she continued through the rain alone. She was reaching her hand out to the grieving wife when the woman beside her turned and spat in her face.

  “You’re murderers!” the older woman shouted, her voice already croaking from grief, her eyes and cheeks red with tears. “Don’t tink yer any different from dem over dere, yeh high an’ mighty witch! Dey murdered my Paddy—and you wit’ your grand airs, you just stand by and watch dem get away with it! Dey destroyed his poor body beneat’ the feet of dat monster!” She pushed Daisy aside to aim her spite at the police inspector. “And dey’re going to get away wid it now too! An’ you shillin’-takin’, peeler hoors will just let it happen. What abou’ justice, yiz feckers? What about the law? But den wha’ do deh rich know about such things? Justice don’t matter a spent piss to dem.” She pointed at Oliver and Daisy and Tatty. “Livin’ deh life of deh gods, and wipin’ yer feet on us poor mortals! Suckin’ the blood from our bodies! But yer time will come! Yer time will come, yiz feckin’ vampires!”