David’s name was Thomas David but everyone called him David or Davey. His other names were ‘His Lordship’ or ‘The Viscount’ or ‘Viscount Roundstone’. All of David’s family had three names, at least. It must have made dinnertime confusing.
Spifflicated. Ossified. Under the influence. One over the eight. Three sheets in the wind.
Sometimes if his aunt was in bed, or drunk, her mother would bring him down to her own house for a few hours. He liked to play in the ash-pit or to wrestle with the dog. He liked the way her mother would empty the great black cauldron of potatoes straight on to the table. He loved to eat potatoes with his small, bare hands, licking the butter from his knuckles like a puppy. Some days he went out in the currach with her father and her brothers, out past Blue Island and Inishlackan, where the mackerel and sea salmon were fat as piglets. He’d come back to the house with the men at dusk, quivering with glee, riding on her father’s shoulders; brandishing a switch of blackthorn as a cutlass. ‘Tan-tarah! Tan-tarah!’ One night he wept bitterly when Mary Duane’s mother was bringing him back up to Kingscourt to put him to bed. He wanted to stay where he was, he said. He wanted to stay for ever and ever.
But it wouldn’t be right for him to sleep down here, her mother had told him. When he asked her why, she had quietly answered: ‘Just because it wouldn’t.’
Mary Duane thought her mother was cruel. Other children were sometimes allowed to stay, even though they had mothers of their own at home. Poor David Merridith had no mother to mind him. Really he had no father either, because his father was always away at the war. He was all on his own in that big dark house, except for his drunken mustachioed aunt and the rooks. And there might be ghosts up there, when you thought about it.
‘There certainly might,’ her father remarked.
He had looked across at Mary Duane’s mother then, but she had given him that little head-shaking signal she used when she didn’t want something discussed in front of the children.
In the middle of the night they had woken to a frantic hammering on the back door. It was David Merridith, wailing tears of dread. He had run all the way down in his nightshirt and nightcap, even though the thunder was shaking the ground and the lightning was splitting the sky in two, and the rain was so torrential that November night that the lowlands of Galway were flooded for weeks afterwards. His feet and his calves were flittered with thorn-cuts, his abject face splattered with mud. ‘Please let me in. Don’t send me away.’ But her father had put a coat on him and taken him back up to the manor.
Her father was gone a long time and when he came back to the cabin he looked older. He gazed around the small, dim kitchen, like a man who was lost, or in the wrong house, or waking from a dream in which he had seen something frightful. The latch gave a rattle in the draughting wind. Mice were scuttling in the walls of the cottage. Her mother had gone to him but he had drawn away, as he always did when upset about something. He took a jug of ‘beestings’ milk from the press, the milk of a cow that has recently calved, and drank it down in six big gulps. Mary Duane had run at him and tried to bate him. He had held her closely and kissed her hair, and when she looked up she saw he was crying himself, and so was her mother, though Mary didn’t know why.
On Easter Sunday morning, 1819, Mary Duane was on her way to the well at Cloonisle Hill when she saw a beautiful lady in a sky-blue hooded cloak descending from a coach outside Kingscourt Manor. Her father explained. That was David Merridith’s mother. She must have come home from London to mind him.
He didn’t come down to her cottage quite so often now, but whenever he did he looked happy and well. He wore a white sailor suit she had fetched him from Greenwich. Sometimes he brought soft little sweets called marshmallows. Greenwich was the place where time was invented. The King of England invented time. (‘I don’t know why the Jaysus he did that,’ said her father. ‘We’d all be a track happier if he hadn’t.’)
His mother was the most graceful human Mary Duane had ever seen. Immaculately dressed, willowy and poised, elegant as the blossom of an English Bramley, she seemed to Mary and her sisters to glide across ground. ‘Verity’ was her Christian name: an English word for truth. She was related to another Admiral: Francis Beaufort. He was the man who discovered the winds. Her shoes were always exquisitely made. Her eyes were the green of the Connemara marble on the steps of the pulpit in Carna church.
Lady Verity was beloved by the tenants of Kingscourt. When a woman on the estate gave birth for the first time, the Countess would call to the cabin with fruit and wheatcake. She would insist that the man of the house go out so she could sit and talk privately with the new mother for a while. She would leave a gold guinea to hansel the baby. She visited the sick, the older people especially. She set up a laundry for the use of the tenant women in an obsolete stable on the bank of the watercourse, so that even in bad weather they might have somewhere to wash clothes. Every year on her birthday, the seventh of April, she gave a party in the Lower Lock meadow for the children of the estate. It was known among the people as Verity Day. The servants and farmers sat down with the gentry.
When potato murrain struck Connemara in 1822, Lady Verity herself ran the Model Farm soup kitchen, ten-year-old Mary Duane and David Merridith helping to chop the turnips and pump the water. Tuppence a bushel of whin-tops she would pay Kingscourt’s children, who roamed the estate collecting them in baskets, mashing them up for His Lordship’s sows. David Merridith used to steal them out of the pigsty and smuggle them back to Mary Duane’s brothers, who would sell them again and give him a ha’penny. Lord Merridith’s tenants, the people of Kingscourt, were envied by those on the neighbouring demesne, that of Commander Blake of Tully. He didn’t give a devil’s damn for them, blight or not; that was what Mary Duane’s father had said. He was only a bloody devil himself: no better than any absentee rack-renter. He had scuttled up to Dublin as soon as the crop failed, the dirty cold-hearted whoremaster. He’d steal the spittle from an orphan’s mouth. The Blakes were turncoats who’d changed from Catholic to Protestant. If he saw an Englishman walking the highway without britches, he’d walk it without underdrawers to go one better.
Ninety of his tenants had died already and his agents were evicting families who had fallen into arrears. Masked men would come, usually early in the mornings. They had to wear masks, these filthy traitors, for if they were recognised they would get what they deserved. They’d be captained by a ‘driver-out-man’, a bailiff or sheriff, who would order them which cabins to smash and which ones to spare. They would clamber onto the roofs of the doomed cottages and saw through the mainbeams until the walls collapsed. Sometimes they’d simply burn out the people. The families would have to live in the woods or in ‘scalpeens’ of turf-sods on the side of the road.
Lady Verity sent the men of Kingscourt into the woods to find them. They could come and be fed at the manor, she said. Nobody hungry would be refused. It was a time for all Galway to stand together.
Sometimes David Merridith wept with fear when he saw them approaching across the wheatfields, the battalion of white-faced, lurching phantoms, and he wanted to run away. But his mother wouldn’t let him. She always made him stay. She was never unkind but she was firm all the same.
One day Mary Duane heard her say to the little Viscount: ‘In the eyes of God that poor man is exactly the same as you or I. He has a wife and family. He has a little son. And he loves his little son just in the way that I love you.’
Another day, just as the blight was ending, Lady Verity and Mary and Mary Duane’s mother were cleaning the gigantic copper boiler from the soup kitchen when suddenly Lady Verity fell down on her bottom, as though she had been shoved by a bullying boy. Mary Duane laughed to see her on the ground. Her mother told her crossly not to be laughing but Lady Verity laughed too as she got back up, dusting off the skirt of her beautiful dress. Brushing the wisps of eelgrass off her bottom. She said she had a little headache and might go up to the house for a nap.
Late
r that day Dr Suffield from Clifden had called, remaining in the house until well after dark. For six months nobody on the estate had seen Lady Verity. Her son was sent away to friends of his parents at a place named Powerscourt in County Wicklow. She didn’t go visiting the sick any more. Babies were born, and old people died, and still Lady Verity didn’t come out of the manor. The laundry on the riverbank fell back into disrepair. Snipegrass began to sprout in the thatch. It was said by some of the very old tenants who remembered the starvation of 1741 that Lady Verity must be struck by the death kiss now; that she must have inhaled the breath of someone suffering from blight fever, or looked too directly into his eyes. Mary’s mother told her those were only silly superstitions. You couldn’t get the fever from somebody looking at you.
One morning at dawn Mary Duane and her father and her youngest sister, Grace, were gathering mushrooms in the Lower Lock meadow when they heard a scream coming from Kingscourt Manor. A long moment passed. Wind buffeted the scutch-grass. A rabbit looked up from a clump of whins. Another scream came, then: louder than the first. So loud that it drove the blackbirds rocketing out of the Faerie Tree.
‘Is that the banshee?’ Grace Duane asked, frightened to stone by the terrible sound. Never before had she heard the banshee, but she knew what her wail was said to mean.
‘It’s nothing at all,’ her father said.
‘Is it the banshee calling out for Lady Verity?’
‘It’s only auld cats,’ Mary Duane said. ‘Isn’t that right, Dada?’
Her father turned around like a rusting weathervane. He stared, unblinking, into her eyes, the dew-soaked puffballs in his mud-stained fingers. It was the first time she had seen him appear afraid. ‘That’s right, my kitten. That’s it exactly. Now hurry along and we’ll all go in home.’
She dated her adulthood as having commenced at that moment. The first time she had donned a mask for reason other than play.
Physicians from Dublin arrived at the house. A famous surgeon travelled from London with a flock of nurses in crisp, cream uniforms. One midnight Lady Verity was seen by the gardener, passing an upper window with a candle in her hand. On St Patrick’s Day, 1823, at six o’clock in the morning, she died.
Her funeral was the largest ever known in Galway. Seven thousand mourners crowded into the cemetery at Clifden and filled the streets half a mile around; Protestant and Catholic, planter and native, the rich and the ragged side by side in the rain.
Lord Merridith’s two daughters had been brought from London. Mary Duane could not remember seeing them before. One was tall as a beanpole, the other short and pudgy. Natasha Merridith. Emily Merridith. They looked like two sisters who had escaped from a nursery rhyme.
A rector from Sligo had recited the prayers. Reverend Pollexfen, a name Mary Duane had never heard. He was an angry looking, blond-haired, barrel-chested prophet with enormous hands and unpolished brogues, and when he spoke the sombre words of the Psalms, he trembled like an oak in a storm.
Lady Verity’s coffin had been lowered into the grave. The bell had rung. A cow uttered a bawl from a nearby field. A loose buckle was clinking on Lord Merridith’s belt. Drops of rain were spattering on the epaulettes of his uniform. The wind rustled quietly in the chestnut leaves.
And then another sound had begun.
A single voice, from the crowd behind her. An old woman’s voice. And then another.
Soft at first, but quickly loudening: spreading out around the crowd in twos and threes. Men, now: and small children. Rising as people took it up, as a new part of the crowd began to add itself to it. Growing in volume, swelling like a wave, echoing against the granite-stone walls of the church until it seemed to Mary Duane that the sound was coming up from the wet, black earth and might never be stopped.
The Hail Mary, spoken in Irish.
Till the moment of her own death, she would never forget it. David Merridith – her David – in his father’s raincoat, staring into the open grave, praying in Irish with his future tenants, mumbling the words as though speaking in his sleep, lifting his beautiful face upwards to the rain, and the terrifying sight of Lord Merridith weeping.
Anois, agus ar uair ár mbáis: Amen.
Now, and at the hour of our death.
CHAPTER VIII
THE THING NOT SAID
IN WHICH THE DRAWING OF MISS DUANE’S EARLIER LIFE IS CONTINUED: THE DISCOVERY OF GEOGRAPHY, AND CERTAIN MATTERS TOUCHING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Lord Merridith began to neglect his appearance. His trim, white beard grew ragged and coarse, his fingernails dirty, his teeth discoloured: yellowed and blackened as antique piano keys. The blisters Mary Duane had seen on the backs of his hands now appeared on his face and his neck. They looked so painful. Sometimes they bled. She saw him walking the Lower Lock meadow one dawn, flailing his cane at the broken stones. He looked up and roared at her to get out of his sight. It was said by some that he smelt like a busted drain. Others reported that he had taken to drinking whiskey. His clothes were often dirty now.
Sometimes at night, in her family’s cabin, quarter of a mile across Cashel Bay from the manor, they could hear Lord Merridith bawling in the yard. Strange rumours about him began to go around the estate: that he beat his son until the boy screamed for him to stop; that he had made a pile of his late wife’s gowns and burned them. It was whispered by his stockmen that he was cruel to his animals; had whipped to its death a horse which had belonged to Lady Verity. Lord Merridith doing that was unimaginable to Mary Duane. He loved his horses.
‘More than his people,’ her father said.
As a magistrate he became feared all over Connemara. Once widely admired for being scrupulously fair in his judgments, for taking the side of right against influence, now he was dreaded from Spiddal to Leenaun. He would rage at the prisoners who came before him. If a man addressed him as ‘Lord David’, or even ‘Lord Merridith’, as has always been the local custom, he would stand up and bellow: ‘My name is Kingscourt! Address me properly! Disrespect me again, I’ll have you flogged for contempt!’
On the fourth of May, 1826, he sentenced a local man to death. The prisoner, an evicted tenant of Commander Blake of Tully, had stolen a lamb from the Commander’s meadow and fatally stabbed the gamekeeper who had tried to arrest him. The case was closely watched in Connemara. The accused had five children; his wife was dead. Even the gamekeeper’s wife had pleaded for clemency. What the man had done was a terrible thing but one day his God would have to be faced. One day we would all have to face our God. There had been too much killing in Ireland already. She did not want to see more children made fatherless. But the man was hanged in Galway Barracks a week to the day after sentence was passed; his body dumped in a quicklime grave in the yard. His children were sent into the almshouse at Galway, as, within the month, were the gamekeeper’s children. And the seven children fathered by killer and victim were buried in the same pit-grave before the year was through.
A ballad was made about Lord Kingscourt’s cruelty. Mary Duane heard it one morning in Clifden market.
Come all true native Connaughtmen, and listen for a while,
Of the tyrant lord of Carna and his breed that blights our isle.
The maker of misfortunes and the breaker of our bones;
To keep him up, he keeps us down, and grinds us on the stones.
She went up to the ballad-singer and told him to stop it. He was an ugly little man with one seeping eye. Lord Merridith was a man who’d had troubles of his own. There was nothing in the song about those, she said. And this shite and ‘raiméis’ about ‘true native Connaughtmen’? Wasn’t His Lordship born thirteen miles out the road, like his father and six generations of his people before?
‘Where in Hell were you born?’ she asked the ballad-singer.
But he scoffed and pushed her away with his elbow. ‘He can make his own bloody songs if he wants to, the murderer.’
That night she dreamed of the laundry on the riverbank. Women washing clothes and
singing a hymn. Lady Verity rubbing her bottom: laughing. While around her the white sheets fluttered like sails. Wet with water and stained with blood.
David Merridith was sent away to a boarding school in England. When he came back to Connemara for his half-term holidays he described the school in detail to Mary Duane. Its motto was ‘Manners Makyth Man’. It was near to a place called the Water Meadows. It was founded nearly five hundred years ago, in 1382, three centuries before Cromwell’s lieutenants ever came to Connemara. She liked saying the beautiful words of its name.
Winchester College, Hampshire.
Winchester.
Hampshire.
David Merridith goes to Winchester College, Hampshire.
It had eleven ‘houses’ and its own special rules for football. The village of Carna had eleven houses too, but the word ‘house’ meant something different in Hampshire. A house was a building where many boys lived, but no girls or ladies. The boys slept in dormitories, like soldiers or lunatics. They had ‘masters’ but not like a servant would have a master. If you lived in a house you hated all the other houses. You stuck up for the honour of your house to the end. But if it came to a fight you’d fight fair and manly. You never gave a chap a biffing when he was down or injured, and you never ever peached on him to his master. If you did you were a bladger, a croucher, a toady, Even under attack, there were rules.
Hampshire was a county on the south coast of England. She questioned her parents about it a couple of times – as a young man her father had gone to England in the summers to find farm work – but they didn’t have anything to tell. One day she sneaked up to Kingscourt Manor and asked Tommy Joyce, Lord Merridith’s valet, to show it to her on the atlas in the library, which had a gazetteer.
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