Most of the Anglo-Irish had been given land in the time of Oliver Cromwell; the general paid his officers with huge grants of the fertile acres of the ‘Golden Vale’, the rich pasturelands of Cork, Tipperary, Waterford and south Limerick. They built their houses, mostly castles in the beginning and then, in the eighteenth century replaced these with those beautiful Georgian and Regency houses that they filled with lovely furniture and the best of what Ireland could produce in silverware, crystal and lovely carved arbutus wood. They had periodic trips to London returning with valuable paintings and sometimes furniture but, overall, they bought from the country in which they had made their home, and encouraged the native arts and crafts by their patronage.
There would have been rich pickings in these houses.
‘I’ll just drop you off by the front door, Mrs Murphy,’ said the chauffeur over his shoulder. ‘There’s no room in their car park. I’ll find a place by the Holy Trinity Church and come back. There seems to be a lot going on here today.’
And it seemed as though the murder of the priest in the nearby Holy Trinity Church had brought business. There were many expensive cars parked, not just in the shop car park, but also along the quay in front of the antiques shop.
The Reverend Mother got out of Lucy’s car and surveyed the place with interest. Morrison’s Island Antiques was painted on a board above the front door, beautifully lettered in an elaborate Gothic script, she thought, looking at it with approval. The shop, itself, seemed to be occupying a couple of floors of a former warehouse on the corner between two streets.
There had been a time when Morrison’s Island had been a major trading post for the late-medieval city of Cork. Their own family, the grandparents and parents of Lucy and herself, had once owned a building there for the storage of wine from France or Spain and tea from India. That had been on the quayside. Less expensive warehouses were built on the back streets where as many warehouses as possible had been squashed into its limited area. In these two laneways, facing them, some builder had made the most of the space, building terraced warehouses, back to back, each with a frontage on to one of those narrow lanes that segmented the triangular area of the former marsh into a thriving merchandise sector in the eighteenth century. It might have been a disadvantage that there was no back entrance or exit, but the river access was the most important fact for these warehouses, and no doubt the builder had profited hugely from the rents that he was able to charge.
But now the centre of commerce had moved further downstream, to the place where the custom house fronted the two channels of the River Lee. The warehouses of Morrison’s Island, except for a few that faced the river, had been allowed to decay peacefully. Some were, thought the Reverend Mother, looking downright dangerous. Others, she guessed, might be used as places for the homeless to crawl into and to spend a night in relative shelter.
But the young men who ran the Morrison’s Island Antiques Shop had made a wonderful job of converting the old building on the corner of the quay. Walls had been cemented and painted, windows had been restored to their former Georgian splendour, a new front door, Georgian in style, painted in a striking black with brass fittings, and a splendid brass knocker, gave a great welcome to the discriminating buyer. Even from a distance there was a well-lit-up interior, tasteful blinds half-concealing, half-revealing the treasure house within to attract customers. Few people, seeing those windows, would be able to resist coming in.
‘Made a very good job of it, haven’t they?’ said Lucy. And the Reverend Mother nodded an agreement, leading the way towards the shop.
Ever since Dr Scher had told her of a single and damaged Japanese Arita hawk which had taken Dominic’s attention and had caused the grief and upset of that saintly man, and ever since Lucy’s identification of the possible origin of the Japanese hawk with a chipped beak, the Reverend Mother had grave suspicions about this place. And her cousin would be the one to help her draw the right conclusions.
Lucy, unlike herself, had stayed out in the world, had gone on living the sort of life that she had lived as a girl. Both had been from the family of very prosperous wine merchants, who was on easy terms with a good proportion of their best clients, people who lived in these wonderful old Georgian houses and who had inherited a taste for good wine from their ancestors. Her father had often stayed in these places and had brought with him his daughter and his orphaned niece. But that was all a very long time ago and although the memories would be useful, Lucy had gone on visiting these places. And as a solicitor’s wife, she told herself, Lucy was used to being discreet about her husband’s legal affairs.
Lucy made straight for the stairs. The solitary Japanese hawk was not visible now, but there was a beautiful gilt wood mirror and her cousin had stopped in front of it, gazing as though entranced with its beauty. The Reverend Mother joined her.
‘Nuns have no use for mirrors,’ said Lucy in her usual clear tones. ‘I can’t buy you that for a present.’
‘Nonsense,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘How on earth do you imagine that we manage to get our veil properly pinned to our wimple unless we have a mirror?’ Without vanity, she contemplated her image, the pale oval face and green eyes, shrouded in white and black and she repositioned a long pin above her temple. A beautiful mirror, she thought as she stood there. Yes, it was from Shanbally House. She could remember Lucy, even at seventeen, confident and dictatorial, gazing into that same mirror, then spotted and dirty, picking up a pigskin glove from the silver tray on the table below and scrubbing at the damp dust, remarking loudly, ‘How can a girl see her face in that?’ And one of the Wood boys, perhaps the one who dropped dead of a heart attack after his house was burned down, had shouted from the balcony at the top of the stairs, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the ugliest of them all?’ It was well polished now and showed every detail of the elderly face that looked into it.
‘That’s it,’ came Lucy’s murmur now and then she passed on up the stairs. ‘I know what I’ll buy you for your feast day, Reverend Mother,’ she said standing on the top step and calling down to her cousin, ‘I’ll buy you a silver tray for your letters. You keep them in such an untidy heap. It’s just what you need.’
‘Do you know, I would like that,’ said the Reverend Mother sedately. She continued to examine the paintings on the wall of the stairs, but listened intently as Lucy, now back downstairs, was explaining to Peter Doyle about a feast day gift for her clerical cousin and describing the sort of tray she wanted to buy. The shop, it appeared, was full of silver trays and Lucy did a good job of exclaiming and enthusing and then regretfully finding a fault. After a few moments the Reverend Mother went down to join Lucy as the short, dark-haired man rushed around bringing back examples of all shapes and sizes of silver trays. A very good salesman, she decided. He seemed to be genuinely putting himself in the position of the customer rather than endeavouring to make a sale at all costs.
‘This one might suit you,’ he said eventually, producing a rectangular tray. ‘Not as popular as the round ones, but somehow I feel that there is something pleasing about it. Old Cork silver, too.’ He took one look at Lucy’s mink coat and decided not to talk about prices. ‘It wasn’t in the best of condition when we got it, was it, Jonathon? You spent hours on this one, didn’t you?’ He had raised his voice a little and the tall man in the background who was hand-polishing a pretty Queen Anne desk came over to join them.
‘Don’t know what on earth it was used for, but it was as black as my boots. In a terrible state. It’s a beautiful piece; but it’s still got some scratches on it. I couldn’t get rid of them. Let me hold it under the light here and you can see them. Myself, I don’t mind these on an antique piece, but there are some don’t like them. And, of course, it has got one handle missing. Personally, I don’t think it a good idea to put a modern handle on it, but if it distresses you, then perhaps we could do something about that. But, I myself, I wouldn’t do that.’ He was confident and assured. A man talking on a subject tha
t he knew well. Perhaps he had been trained in the trade of restoration in England. Would that have been a likely career for one of the Irish ascendency class? Not in her day, but perhaps she was out-of-date in her notions.
‘How about that one, Reverend Mother?’ Lucy placed a gloved finger on the edge of the tray. ‘That would fit all of your letters, even foolscap size.’
‘That would be lovely, thank you very much, Mrs Murphy,’ said the Reverend Mother. ‘That would be a very useful feast-day present.’ She wondered whether Lucy would want to ask the price, and moved away to look at the desk that was being transformed. Something familiar about this, also, but perhaps they were common in houses that she visited in her youth. And then she suddenly remembered.
‘Has it got a secret drawer?’ she asked as Jonathon Power came to join her.
‘Press that knob,’ he said with a very charming smile. He was a handsome young man, she thought. Quite different in appearance to Peter Doyle. Very much the English type, tall, blond and blue-eyed. She made a show of trying to find the knob, but she could have done it in her sleep. She could picture the house that it came from, also; could see the light slanting in through the corner window of the lobby where the desk stood and making a pathway on the frail pink flowers of the old faded carpet.
‘Well, do you need any further convincing?’ Lucy was, thought the Reverend Mother, unusually silent when they left the shop and walked over towards the Holy Trinity Church. Her cousin had a sharp brain, though, and surely they had garnered enough evidence to satisfy her.
‘I just can’t imagine two such charming young men joining in with the IRA on that awful burning-down of houses. It just seems such a terrible thing to do. Perhaps they just turn a blind eye to whosoever comes offering to sell the stuff.’
‘Well, you know them better than I do, but I tend to be a bit cynical about “blind eyes”. Half the suffering and the abuse that goes on in this city is the result of those famous blind eyes. Myself, I like to look the truth in its face, however ugly it may be,’ said the Reverend Mother trenchantly.
‘You’re just so strait-laced and intolerant,’ complained Lucy. ‘Surely, if they were criminals, they wouldn’t organize a musical society and spend time giving such pleasure to everyone. Peter was saying that he thought they probably didn’t make much out of it, what with the hire of the hall and paying ushers and having costumes made and that sort of thing.’
‘I don’t suppose that they do,’ said the Reverend Mother thoughtfully. A new idea had come to her. ‘Who are in this musical society, the Merrymen, is that right?’
‘Well, there’s that young barrister, Tom Gamble, the son of old Judge Gamble. And his sister, Marjorie – you know her, the headmistress of Rochelle School – and one of her teachers, and there’s one of the Beamishes, the oarsman, that fellow that had been chosen for the Olympics, Robert Beamish. He’s supposed to be engaged to the teacher from Rochelle, one of the Morgan family from Fota, I think. And there’s James O’Reilly from the Savings Bank, his wife, Rose, she’s a soprano, oh, and oddly enough, there’s that girl, Eileen MacSweeney, works in a printers off South Terrace, you know her, don’t you? The Cork Examiner praised her singing voice. Wasn’t she something to do with the IRA at one stage?’
And then Lucy fell silent as she saw outside the Holy Trinity Church, a big picture of a blurred old photograph of Father Dominic inserted inside a glass case, draped in black, and announcing beneath it that the funeral would be on next Wednesday morning.
Eileen, thought the Reverend Mother. Well, that could be a connection. But that meant that the idea that had come to her was incorrect. In any case, she would soon find out. She looked up at the photograph of poor Dominic and thought that he might have meddled with very powerful forces.
‘I wouldn’t say that there is anything wrong with these two,’ Lucy was saying. ‘Two very nice, very straightforward young men. You know, I just can’t believe that they are tied up with the IRA.’
The Reverend Mother led the way to the car, thinking hard. The carefully wrapped silver tray was under one arm and before she got into the back seat of the car, she slid it from its wrappers and gazed at it thoughtfully.
‘That’s it,’ said Lucy in a low voice and with a hasty glance to make sure that the glass panel between them and the chauffeur had been securely closed. ‘I remember it distinctly. It didn’t have a handle on one end and that was where people put their whips when they came back from riding. I suppose that was why it was left on the table for gloves and things. It was useless as a tray once the handle was broken.’
‘Another reminder of Shanbally House,’ said the Reverend Mother as she climbed into the car. ‘The picture is beginning to be filled in, isn’t it, Lucy?’
SIX
St Thomas Aquinas:
Ad primum ergo dicendum quod melius est intrare religionem animo probandi, quam penitus non intrare, quia per hoc disponitur ad perpetuo remanendum.
(It is better to enter religion with the purpose of making a trial than not to enter at all, because by so doing one would afford the possibility to remain always.)
Dr Scher arrived at the convent soon after supper that evening. The Reverend Mother heard his voice in the hallway, joking with a new recruit. It would be a few minutes before he arrived at her room, she guessed. The girl was homesick and her tear-stained face would make him take trouble with her. She would not last long in the convent, in the Reverend Mother’s opinion. Probably quite unsuitable, she had thought from the time when she had first interviewed her, but the parish priest had recommended the girl so highly that she had been given a month’s trial. That was before she had heard that the girl had been seeing visions, just like Saint Bernadette at Lourdes and had imagined herself as a saint in the making. So far, all of the Reverend Mother’s tactful proposals that she go home for a few months and return to the convent in January, if she was still set on being a nun, had not borne fruit and so she had tried another tactic which was to ignore the tears and wait patiently for sense to dawn. Hopefully by the end of the month the girl would be back in her father’s farm in north Cork. Judging by the giggles that greeted Dr Scher’s feeble jokes, she was tiring of the angelic and melancholic pose adopted when first admitted to the convent.
And then there were Dr Scher’s footsteps on the stairs. He was going to visit Sister Assumpta. He would spend five or ten minutes listening to her complaints, prescribing some innocuous medicine. No doubt, he would also make a point of asking any nun that he happened to meet about how she was feeling and would listen carefully to the answer and recommend something for a troublesome cough, or feelings of indigestion. A kind man, she thought.
Sighing heavily, the Reverend Mother turned her attention back to her work.
A leaflet or circular asking for funds had, she discovered many years ago, far less impact than a personal letter, tailor-made for the individual, alluding, if possible, to a piece of family history, a subtle reference to a shared background, a recollection of a grandfather who might have made the family fortune. Most of the businessmen and the professionals, the lawyers and doctors of Cork, had risen out of the poverty of tenant farmers. Denied professional outlets in the past because of their nationality and their religion, their wits had been sharpened and they had gone in for trade, and then accumulated shiny new possessions and newly built houses in the affluent suburbs of Blackrock and Montenotte. Money, though, since it had not come easily, remained of great importance to them and, even when it was for charity, they liked to receive good value in terms of public recognition for it. And, since it was a closely-knit community in this small city, every begging letter had to be quite different to the others. If possible, she found, it was better to ask for a donation to a small individual charity than to that vast crater of poverty that existed side by side with conspicuous wealth in the city of Cork.
Jimmy’s delight in his rubber boots had given her the idea of setting up a rubber boot store in the convent, each pair to be presented a
s a reward for good work, for regular attendance or anything else that her fertile imagination could devise until at least all of the infants were equipped. And surely, the hardest heart could not refuse the price of a pair of wellingtons for a needy child. And then she would find an obliging reporter on the Cork Examiner who would be happy to write an article about this quirky charity and would not be too proud to include a list of those who had donated.
‘I remember how generous you were when I appealed for help to furnish the infant classroom,’ wrote the Reverend Mother, ‘and so I venture to make another call on your kindness. Do give my best wishes to your wife and tell her how much I enjoyed talking over old times with her at the bishop’s fete. And that I still remember the lovely visit that my cousin and I paid to her parents in their beautiful house beside Blackrock Castle. I shall always remember the enormous Monkey Puzzle tree in the back garden!’ Judge Gamble, the only son of a prosperous trading family, had married a rich wife from the Protestant ascendancy and he surely could spare the price of a few wellington boots from the money he accumulated from his years in the law. And this personal note ensured that her letter would be handed to him and not put into the waste-paper basket by some ignorant young clerk of the Protestant faith who did not know that Reverend Mother Aquinas was an important person in the city of Cork. Smiling slightly at her pretensions, she signed the letter, inserted it into its envelope and then carefully placed it on top of Lucy’s present, her new silver tray from the antiques shop.
And, of course, it must be the tray that she remembered! Few trays could be missing that second handle, she thought suddenly, as her forefinger traced the engraved hallmark on its base. She had forgotten, but now she remembered an end-of-September day. Lawrence, standing in the hallway of Shanbally House and saying that Charles Wood had probably taken a handle off so that it did not get in the way of people’s whips when they laid them in the tray. She and Lucy had giggled at that, she remembered. It was, somehow, characteristic of the Woods that no one would mind if one of their sons did something like that. The whole place was so easy-going with meals at any time that was convenient for hunting in the autumn and winter and tennis in the summer. The atmosphere had suited Dominic, but there had been times when it had annoyed Lawrence intensely. A very driven personality, Lawrence, even back then in his youth, taking holiday assignments about reading and essay writing with great seriousness. It could have been predicted that Lawrence would have been the one of the two brothers to attain high honours, though few would have guessed at the position of Prior of the Capuchin order in the city of Cork for the eldest son of a rich Protestant landowner. Amazing how controlled Lawrence was these days. There had been a time when anything had caused his temper to erupt.
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