There had been no greeting between myself and Lady Maude. After the first moments in the hall, witnessed by the two men whom she had dismissed, she had led me here directly.
‘Sit down,’ she had said. ‘I’ll tell them there’ll be one extra to tea’ ‒ for all the world as if one or a dozen extra made no difference. And then she had left me alone until the moment she had preceded the woman who had struggled in with the huge silver tray set with the Georgian service and the Crown Derby ‒ a tall, bony woman in her fifties, with faded red hair caught into a sagging bun, wearing an apron, blouse and cardigan that flopped over a baggy skirt of the now-familiar tweed. I had the impression, though, that the silver and china were commonplace items to her; she made wickedly strong tea in this pot, and rattled and chipped this china every day, and had no idea how precious they were. She had threaded her way clumsily through the furniture to the door, with many backward glances at me.
‘More tea?’
I was cold, and the room was cold, and the tea had at least a little warmth left in it. The cup rattled on the saucer as I passed it over, and spoiled the aura of calm I had tried to convey.
‘I don’t know why you’ve come,’ Lady Maude said as she handed it back. ‘We’ve managed very nicely without you all these years.’
She included both Blanche and myself in that statement; by myself I could never have earned such vehemence. ‘I imagined so,’ I said, and did not permit my eyes to slide once more over the chaos of that room.
‘Did she send you?’
‘She?’
‘Your mother.’
‘My mother is dead.’
‘I know she is dead.’ She spoke as if Blanche had died twenty years ago. ‘The solicitors informed me. But did she send you? ‒ did she tell you to try to make amends? After all these years did she think she could send you here to do her work?’
I couldn’t stand it any longer; the thin fabric of politeness broke. ‘Send me? ‒ no one sent me! I never heard of you before last Saturday night. I never would have heard of you if it hadn’t been for …’
She didn’t allow me to finish. ‘You are saying that Blanche never told you about her family? ‒ actually that she never told you about the Tyrells?’
‘She didn’t tell me about the Sheridans, either.’
‘The Sheridans …’ The old woman waved her hand in dismissal. ‘Didn’t she tell you that her grandfather was Lord Fermoyle?’ I looked at her blankly, and in a kind of frenzy of disbelief, she swept oft. ‘His grandfather was the Fermoyle of Waterloo. His uncle was First Sea Lord … She didn’t tell you?’
I shook my head, and didn’t try to explain to her that that world was as dead as these names were, and that Blanche had been one of those who early had known it, and had never burdened me with such a past It would have been useless to say to this old woman that the present lords of the earth were the Otto Praegers, whoever he turned out to be. Perhaps what I felt showed, because her features lost their momentary animation; they hardened and the lips grew tight
‘Then why have you come?’ Never could there have been less welcome in a voice.
Indeed, why had I come? Impossible to tell her of the impulse that had sent me, the sudden knowledge, the sense of searching; impossible to look into that cold, wounded face and say that I had come to discover something of myself. Inwardly I shrugged; it had all been a mistake, as any half-wit might have predicted. I would get it over with, and go. I had my small excuse to buffer my pride, and now I presented it.
‘I’ve come to collect a piece of my property which I believe you may know something about.’
‘Property? There’s no property for you! Whatever put that into your head? I owed Blanche nothing ‒ she chose to go and leave it behind. Nothing was ever hers ‒ and her going cost me more than property!’
I took a long breath. ‘Lady Maude, may I finish? I’ve come because a man called Brendan Carroll has something that belonged to Blanche, and which now belongs to me. I’ve simply come to get it, nothing more.’
I wouldn’t have believed that her face could grow even stonier. ‘Brendan Carroll is nothing to me. Why have you come bothering me about what he does?’
‘It was Brendan Carroll who told me that my mother was a Sheridan. It was Brendan Carroll who took the Culloden Cup. He implied that I could have it back if I came here.’
Her hand sketched a gesture of dismissal, of impatience. ‘What has Brendan Carroll to do with this? And why have you come from Otto Praeger? Of all people, these two! Why don’t you come in a decent civilised manner? Better not to have come. Better to have left me in peace. I didn’t ask you to come.’
‘I know I wasn’t asked to come. And I’ll go at once. All I want is to have the Cup back. It doesn’t belong to Brendan Carroll, or you, or the Sheridans. Blanche found it, and now it belongs to me. I would like to have it back.’
‘What Cup?’ the Lady Maude burst out, suddenly seeming older and bewildered, in the way the old are. ‘I don’t know anything about it. I don’t understand all this talk about the Sheridans and Brendan Carroll. What has it to do with me? You are my only grandchild ‒ the only Tyrell left. Why do you come here and talk about something that doesn’t interest me?’
I had to beware of pity. I couldn’t deal with her; whatever had happened between her and Blanche was all too long past and gone. There was no link between this old woman and myself. I began to edge forward on my chair, getting ready to rise.
‘Then I must find Brendan Carroll,’ I said. ‘I had assumed you would know about the Culloden Cup. I’m sorry I troubled you.’ I picked up my handbag and stood up. ‘Thank you for tea …’ It sounded incredible. I couldn’t be saying this to Blanche’s mother, and yet I was. What else was there to say?
‘You’re going?’ Her tone was disbelieving, childish.
‘I don’t want to bother you any longer …’
‘You can’t go,’ he said, calmly, flatly. ‘You have only just come back.’
‘Come back?’ Now it was I who was bewildered.
‘I have been, of course, expecting you for a long time. Waiting. Waiting to see, if, in the end, being a Tyrell would count. And now you have come ‒’
‘But I didn’t know ‒’
She swept on. ‘‒ it is not possible that you could leave so soon. I was prepared for this day never to arrive, but now that it has, we must make of it what we can.’
I didn’t know what to do. She was a little mad, as Otto Praeger had told me. I stood there, uncomfortable under her steady gaze, wondering how I could get out with a little grace and a little kindness, when the noises began ‒ noises as if someone had collided with a pile of furniture in the hall, the slam of a door, the kind of chaotic noises that would go with this household. And a man’s voice. ‘Annie ‒ where are they, Annie?’ A woman’s voice, faintly, in reply. Then the drawing-room door was opened quickly and crashed back against a delicate little rose-wood side table.
‘Oh, damn the thing! I beg your pardon. I’m Connor Sheridan. Otto Praeger sent a message to the works but I was delayed in leaving. You’re …’ He fumbled for a second for the name; it was strange on his tongue. ‘You’re Maura D’Arcy.’
‘Yes.’ There was relief in his coming, a sense of normalcy. He talked as if he belonged to the world of everyday experience, not the shadow world of Lady Maude. His age helped to bring back a feeling of reality; he was older than I ‒ ten years or so ‒ but still of my era. He would understand how little all this would mean. I began to hope that I might now complete the business of the Culloden Cup, forget about the unspoken things that had brought me here, and take my leave.
I wondered why he scowled, and did he know that he did it? Was it at me, or Lady Maude, or simply at the unoffending rose-wood table. He was, I suppose, one of what they would call the ‘black Irish’. With his pale skin the black hair and hooking black eyebrows were startling; at this distance I couldn’t tell the colour of his eyes; they were so deeply set they gave only
the impression of darkness.
‘Well, Brendan has been ‒’ he began.
‘One moment, Connor.’ Lady Maude had cut him short. She had twisted in her chair and fixed her awesome stare on him. ‘It is customary to observe some manners in this house, if you please ‒ whatever you may have learned elsewhere. This is Connor Sheridan. My granddaughter, Miss Maura D’Arcy.’
He acknowledged the introduction and his opinion of such niceties by closing the door behind him with what amounted to another slam. ‘How d’y’do? I suppose you’ve come about the Culloden Cup?’
His action and the kind of bluntness of the words amply conveyed the impression that he would see that I had the Cup and was on my way as quickly as possible.
‘Well, I have it. Carroll brought it to me this morning. He said he believed you might let it stay here, but I told him naturally we’d have to return it. I don’t know whatever gave him the impression that we’d want to keep it. It was a daft thing to do ‒’
‘Brendan Carroll has gone,’ Lady Maude said. ‘You told me he had gone.’
‘Well, he’s come back.’
‘Why?’
‘God knows. Some damn-fool notion of bringing the Cup back to Sheridan Glass.’
‘Cup? What Cup?’ Lady Maude’s voice had grown querulous. ‘Why does everyone keep talking of a Cup?’
‘The Culloden Cup, Lady Maude. One of the two copies of the famous Culloden Cup has been found. Brendan Carroll found it in …’ For the first time he lacked words.
‘My mother found it,’ I said. ‘Brendan Carroll saw it among her personal collection of Sheridan Glass. He decided to bring it back here …’
‘The Culloden Cup?’ She seemed to dismiss it. ‘You mean the one my husband set such store by? I never could remember the story that went with it ‒ there were always stories. I had enough of my own to remember.’
‘Yes …’ Connor could not keep the bitter sarcasm from his tone. ‘Then I won’t trouble you with any more. Let’s just say it is a valuable piece, with historical associations, particularly for the Sheridans. It belonged to Miss D’Arcy’s mother and now to her. She has come to take it back. I brought it from the works and I have it in the office.’ He spoke directly to me. ‘It’s quite safe, I assure you. You can take it as you leave …’ I sensed that he wanted the second Culloden Cup very much, but not enough to hold back my going for the sake of it.
‘She will have what is hers certainly. But she will not be leaving, Connor.’
‘Indeed? We are to have a visit, then? A lost granddaughter restored ‒ it’s quite a fairy-tale, isn’t it?’
‘No fairy-tale!’ The beautiful worn hands clenched the carved arms of the chair. ‘What was always meant to happen has happened. The last of my blood-line has come back. Blood always tells in the end …’
I was appalled by what was being taken for granted. ‘I have to leave, Lady Maude,’ I said quickly. ‘I have to go back to London. I have to go to Spain. I have a job.’
She stared at me, and the stare was quite terrible. ‘Yes, you have a job ‒ a task, let us say. Like your mother ‒ like everyone these days ‒ you will try to avoid it. But you sought the task, it did not seek you. You came ‒ I didn’t ask you to come. You must stay to finish what you have begun.’
I didn’t know what she was talking about. My instinct was to run from the mad obsession betrayed in the words, but instinct held me, an instinct to preserve dignity and the fear of betraying to her that Blanche’s daughter ‒ and the daughter of Eugene D’Arcy ‒ had turned out to be a coward. I looked over at Connor Sheridan, half hoping that some objection would come from him, but he said nothing. But he was not cool, this man; just standing there I sensed a power and a kind of violence of emotion in him that would not permit him not to care. He tried to play it indifferently, but indifference did not live in him. I think he wanted very much for me to go, but he said nothing.
Helplessly I looked back at Lady Maude and was once again caught in the spell of her unshifting gaze. I had told myself that I was winning independence, that I would never again be commanded, but here I stood before this formidable woman, who had no weapon but the force of her obsession, and I was unwillingly compelled. One night, I told myself; just one night I would stay. Perhaps I owed her that, but certainly no more. Having come this far, perhaps I also owed myself these extra hours of discovery. In the morning I would be free to go.
It was Connor who broke the silence. The hostility seemed to have left him. ‘You would like to see the Cup, Miss D’Arcy? Just to reassure yourself that it is safe … my office is just across the hall.’ He opened the door smoothly; I felt that I was being led into something I didn’t understand. I nodded, and it was an acquiescence both to him and to Lady Maude. In some way they had both won something from me, but I didn’t know what.
She knew she had won; there was no uncertainty in the way she spoke. ‘I shall have your baggage sent up.’
She ended the interview by rising and going before me from the room. There was no emotion to disturb that stately tread; she acted as if she had been expecting me for twenty years ‒ and perhaps she had. I followed, but she paid no further attention to me; she seemed to glide through the maze of furniture and was gone.
As I came close to Connor at the doorway I learned the colour of his eyes ‒ the colour of dark grey mud, they were, and I had been wrong, because the hostility was not gone, but only masked and held in check. The grey eyes seemed to be filled with an unexpressed, as yet unshaped, threat. It was the first time in that house that I experienced physical fear.
Four
Connor led me across the hall to the room he called the office ‒ it had served Lady Maude’s husband in that way, and he had taken it over he said. It was a high, handsome room, as all the rooms at Meremount were, its windows looking out over the avenue. It was crowded, of course ‒ no room at Meremount could escape that fate, but it was not chaotic. Mahogany bookcases lined the walls, their shelves filled with files; there were two library tables, and a big, double-fronted carved desk, a sofa before the fireplace, too many chairs, too many vases, too much of everything, but still a sense of order. It was possible to know the function of the room, to move within it, to sense from it what Connor might have made of the whole house if it had been permitted him.
From a bed of shavings in a shipping-box he drew out the Culloden Cup, dusting it carefully with a clean handkerchief, and set it between us on the desk. He gazed at it for a moment, and then he said slowly, ‘Well, there it is ‒ marvellous, isn’t it? ‒ and sad. I never thought I’d see this one ‒ the mate. Let’s have a drink on it’ He reached down and opened the bottom drawer of the desk. ‘I wonder where your mother found it. I wonder where it’s been for two hundred years. I wish she’d told you.’
‘She probably didn’t know herself. She probably found it in some sale, or some antique shop somewhere. If she’d enquired about its history, someone would have discovered what it was. She could never have afforded to buy the Culloden Cup once the owner knew what it was worth.’
‘I suppose not. Pity, though.’ He was pulling a collection of bottles from the drawer and looking at the labels. ‘I suppose you’re used only to eight-year-old Scotch, are you? Well, you’re just going to have to settle for good old John Jamieson. Won’t hurt you. Part of the national heritage.’
‘I think I can stand it.’
He poured the whiskey. ‘Without water? ‒ certainly without ice. A baptism of fire, no less.’ He pushed a glass, which he had also dusted with his handkerchief, towards me, and took up his own. ‘So, here’s to you, Maura D’Arcy. Welcome to your ancestral home ‒ or homes, since you’ve already been at Castle Tyrell.’
I choked slightly on the whiskey, and recovered myself. ‘And you and I, Connor Sheridan, know that ancestral homes are things to be got rid of these days.’
‘So you don’t go for ancestors and blood-lines and all that kind of thing that the old lady talks about? Not heroes of Wat
erloo and all that? ‒ she must have told you about Fermoyle of Waterloo. She tells me every week.’
I shrugged. ‘Heroes in their own time are all right. I just think it takes a different kind of man to be a hero now.’
‘What’s your idea of a hero? ‒ someone who goes to gaol to protest the Bomb.’
‘Are you drunk?’ I said, ‘or just nasty?’
He sat down, heavily. His face, which had worn its mocking, hostile expression, abruptly relaxed and fell into lines of weariness; just then he seemed oddly tired and vulnerable for a man of his strength and age. ‘Drunk? ‒ no. I’m seldom drunk. And when I do get drunk, I do it deliberately, in a congenial atmosphere, with good friends, who wish me no harm. Or rather, I should say, with good companions ‒ I’m not certain I have a good friend. Nasty? ‒ I suppose so. I suppose I’m nasty in many ways. It’s nasty, for instance, to prefer to drink a whiskey or two here by myself, selfishly, than to sit and sip cheap sherry in that impossible place she calls a drawing-room with a crazy old woman. But then, since she considers me her social inferior ‒ to be fair, she considers most people her social inferiors ‒ I’m not very often invited to do even that.’
‘If it’s so bad, why are you here. Who are you, in fact?’
Again he mocked me. ‘Do you really want to hear? It’s a long story for someone who’s only here on a one-night stand to have to bear.’
I sipped my drink. ‘Suit yourself. We’re both Sheridans, aren’t we? I begin to understand there aren’t too many of them.’
Edge of Glass Page 7