The Lady

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Eamonn’s fine,” Michael replied blandly. “Shirley’s well, and all the children.”

  Isabel waited through his pause, unwilling to give him any satisfaction by giving in to the suspense. Michael glanced about the table, his eyes pausing on Philip only briefly before he turned to his wife again.

  “He was wondering if we’d mind having Patricia here for the summer.”

  “Patricia? Here?” Isabel had to reassemble her thoughts. She had been so positive that the letter concerned Philip. A wave of totally irrational fury surged through her, quickly suppressed. With as good grace as she could manage, she added, “Of course, but why Patricia?”

  Michael gave one of his cryptic smiles and then looked at Catriona, who was busily eating.

  “Trina?”

  Fork suspended, she swung her head around to her father. “Daddy?”

  “Your uncle Eamonn wants to send your cousin Patricia to spend the summer with us. She’s only a year older than you are. I’m sure you’ll be good company for each other.”

  Catriona slowly lowered the fork to her plate, her eyes unblinking on his face. Michael frowned. What response he had hoped for he didn’t know. His youngest child was so self-contained. Or was she quiet simply because, as the youngest, her opinions and wishes were so rarely consulted?

  “Your uncle Eamonn wants us to put some polish on her riding, bring her up to an Irish standard.”

  “She rides?” Catriona blinked, and some stirring of emotion crossed her face. Whatever was the child thinking? Michael wondered.

  “So Eamonn says. She has won one or two equitation prizes.” Michael’s opinion of the source was not high.

  “Can she jump?”

  “I expect we’ll find out. Isabel, please write Shirley tomorrow, will you, and extend the invitation?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. She’ll be here the entire summer?”

  “Why not?” he said. “The Pony Show’s mid-August, and if we can make any sort of rider out of her, Eamonn can boast about her Irish successes. You know how keen the Americans are to be international.”

  “The pony show?” Owen scoffed. “International? You must be joking, Uncle Mihall.”

  “If she’s American,” Philip chimed in with a glint of devilment in his eyes, “and we’re across the ocean, it’s international to America, isn’t it?”

  Isabel sniffed. At least Philip masked his disappointment well. “Catriona,” she said, “it’s impolite to stare so.”

  “I wasn’t staring, Mummie, I was thinking.”

  “Then do so with your mouth closed. And can’t you express some appreciation of your father’s invitation to your cousin? It isn’t always that you have someone to share your activities.”

  “What if she’s cack-handed? And falls off all the time?” Catriona sounded aggrieved. “And who will she ride? You wouldn’t let her ride Ballymore Prince, would you? Oh, Daddy, you couldn’t?”

  Michael regarded his daughter with some surprise.

  “Don’t worry, pet,” Philip said with a sideways glance at his father. “Old Blister’ll do fine for any Yankee cousin. Isn’t it about time Trina graduated from that old soldier anyway, Father?”

  Catriona’s eyes widened as she turned to gaze adoringly at her brother.

  “Well, Blister taught all of you how to ride. He can do the same for little Patricia until we can check her standard.”

  “There, now, petal,” Philip said, leaning across the table conspiratorially to Catriona, “both Blister and the Prince are saved once more!”

  4

  IMMEDIATELY after Catriona had helped Auntie Eithne clear the table, her aunt said that she would help Bridie with the washing up, so Catriona was free to scamper to the library to find the box where her mother kept family photos.

  Aunt Shirley kept her Irish connections supplied with photographic records of her family on holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, and Christmases. Owen had been heard to remark that there were more than enough pictures of the Connecticut Carradynes to make up for the lack of both the New York State Carradynes and the Marshall branches in Australia.

  She found the latest photo of the Connecticut Carradynes, posed in front of their Christmas-card-bedecked mantel, everyone dressed as befit the occasion. Catriona squinted to see Patricia in her green A-line dress, her brown hair drawn in two ponytails, one over each ear, tied with wide satin bows. Her expression was brightly smiling, but there wasn’t all that much to show Patricia’s personality or, most particularly, to reassure Catriona’s mind on the vital questions of how good were her cousin’s hands and her seat in a saddle.

  Auntie Shirley had on a shiny red dress, and she wore lots of jewelry. “Dressed up like a Christmas tree herself, she is,” Isabel had remarked enviously to Eithne when the card had been examined last December.

  “I suppose she has to now that Eamonn’s the plant manager,” Eithne had replied, placing the card carefully in a prominent position.

  Auntie Shirley looked cute, Catriona thought, with short curly hair in a fringe framing her face. Uncle Eamonn, on the other hand, looked like a blurred photo of his brother, sort of sloppy on the edges. Eamonn carried more weight than her father ever would. He’d ride at seventeen or eighteen stone, Catriona found herself thinking. Well, Minister and Jerry were up to weight. Then she remembered that Eamonn hadn’t liked horses, which was one reason he’d gone to the States as soon as he could.

  Just then Owen swung into the room, grinning when he saw her kneeling by the shelf.

  “Checking up on the cousins? Any hope in her?”

  Catriona shrugged. She had never particularly liked her cousin Owen. In her opinion, he was a sneaky one. When he was younger, he used to get Philip and Andrew in trouble with their grandfather and father. But his real disgrace in Catriona’s eyes had occurred two years ago when he had been hunting Harp, one of Tulip’s more promising geldings. It had been a marvelous day, with several long gallops and some good fences. Owen had brought the horse in lame on the off fore. Any horseman would have felt the unevenness in the horse’s going, pulled him up, dismounted, and carefully walked him home.

  The worst of it had been that there’d been a German buyer about to shake on a deal for the gelding. Her father had been a long time forgiving his nephew for that day’s work. Michael Carradyne was all too familiar with the nasty habit horses had of going unsound just when you counted on them the most, but riding a horse to ruin was something else again.

  Still and all, Catriona had been impressed by Sister Mary Josepha’s continuous lectures on forgiving trespasses and made a conscious effort to forget Owen’s grievous sin. Especially since he would give her a lift to the top of the road in the mornings, if she was ready on time, which saved her the long cold walk to catch the school bus.

  “She looks nice,” Catriona said noncommittally, and put the picture back, her eyes on Patricia’s smiling face until the lid covered it.

  She went back to the lounge then, taking her usual place at the old table to finish her preparation for school. Her mother and her aunt were watching a TV program, but Catriona had long since learned to discount that noise. She did her Irish first because it was an easy assignment, then her French, and finally tackled the maths. Sister Conceptua had given them an awful lot of problems, and she didn’t understand the method at all. She put down lots of figures in case Mummie wanted to look at her prep. It was as well her father had gone out: she couldn’t have fooled him so easily.

  Then she slid out the uncompleted essay. Five hundred words, Miss Prendergast wanted. Was she likely to check every word from her twenty-nine students? Diligently Catriona counted. Some sentences were ten words long and some fifteen where she had used a lot of the smaller words, but she was nearly a hundred short of the requirement.

  Five hundred words was an awful lot to write about your first memory. How could you have much to say about it, when you were so terribly young at the time? Well, if she wrote larger . . . no, that was not a trick t
o use on Miss Prendergast. Maybe if she just made longer loops between the letters.

  “Are you scribbling again, Catriona?” her mother asked. There was a commercial blasting about motor oil, and Isabel had remembered to check her daughter’s progress.

  “No, Mummie. I’m doing my essay out.”

  “Hold it up.”

  Catriona did, thankful that she hadn’t been sketching and all her mother could see was handwriting.

  “All right, but see that I don’t have another unpleasant interview with Mother Immaculata this term.”

  “No, Mummie.”

  Catriona sat looking at the unfinished, but undecorated, page, wondering how she could possibly enlarge it. Then suddenly she knew.

  I think that the reason my first memory is so vivid is because it was about horses. Horses were my first memory because the business of my family is breeding and training horses. When I grow up, I hope to continue in this exciting work. I love horses and anything to do with them, even mucking out. That is why my first memory is about horses.

  Sixty-six more words. Still short of the mark, but she couldn’t imagine Miss Prendergast counting every word in twenty-nine essays. It had taken her long enough to count one.

  To have touched on that first conscious memory produced a train of them for Catriona, every one connected with horses and many linked to her irascible grandfather, who had not, in fact, been so snap-tempered with her.

  “Good blood in her, Michael, already has a feeling for horses.” She could hear her grandfather’s husky voice. They had been in the barn, her grandfather holding her up to peer over the door at Frolic’s latest foal.

  “Don’t be daft, Father. She’s only repeating what she’s heard you and me say.”

  “Hmmm, but she’s using it at the right time.”

  Catriona could not remember what she had said but five years later that colt had taken first prize as a medium-weight hunter in the Royal Dublin-Horse Show. She remembered that she’d cried bitterly when the animal had not come back to Cornanagh in triumph so that she could tell him how proud she was of him. He’d been sold, at a very good price.

  She looked down at the recalcitrant half-filled page and gasped, glanced hastily over her shoulder at her mother, and, relieved that she was engrossed in the news, surreptitiously scratched out the half-realized head of a horse that now decorated the sheet. The sketch would have been of the gelding but it clearly was not one of her first memories!

  Catriona grimaced at her essay. She’d have been away in a hack if she could have added the sketch. Or the other extraneous thoughts that kept crowding into her mind.

  Grandfather had taught her to ride, too. On Blister. First on the long lunge rein until she had developed some confidence and balance, then on the leading rein on the ride. She did remember the heated argument when her mother had seen her, sans leading rein, careering down the last stretch of the ride at full gallop, Grandfather on old Tulip beside her, shortening the stallion’s stride to match Blister’s pelter.

  Her mother had tried to snatch her off the pony while she had held on to the reins, obeying one of her grandfather’s many injunctions. Her mother had hurt her that day, slapping at her hands and her face to make her let go. She remembered screaming that she couldn’t, she couldn’t, until Mick was prying her fingers loose and trying to soothe her.

  “She’s well able, Isabel”—Catriona remembered the tone of contempt with which Tyler Carradyne had addressed his daughter-in-law—“and you will kindly not go into hysterics when the child is quite competent. As if she were on her own. I was right there beside her all the time. Now stop your carry-on, woman. I’ll not have you prejudicing a good rider by your vapors. She’s a rider, that one.”

  Catriona remembered being sent to her room. She remembered finding refuge under bedcovers to escape her mother’s shrieking, her father’s baritone bellow, and the almost continuous loud comment of her grandfather. She could not recall the upshot of that furor, but she distinctly remembered riding out the next day. She also remembered that her mother had been red-eyed and silent for days afterward, and that Catriona had been quite in a fret wondering how to appease her.

  Well, she honestly couldn’t think of anything to add. It would just have to do. And if Miss Prendergast rated her, she’d just say she must have miscounted somehow or other, or lost her place and counted one line twice, or something like that. That was only a little sin, a venial one. And it would be something to tell Father John in confession. He got very annoyed if you couldn’t confess anything, for he wouldn’t even allow that the Virgin Mary had been totally without sin, her being a woman and all.

  She shoved her books back into the school bag and, kissing her mother and her aunt good night, left the warmth of the lounge. She dropped the bag where she could reach it on the way out of the house the next morning and took the steps two at a time to reach her bedroom. It was right above the kitchen and so generally retained some of the evening warmth. But she’d forgotten to close the curtains when she’d gone out for evening stables, and the room was chill.

  She tested the foot of the bed and felt the lump of warmth that was the hot-water bottle Bridie would have put there. She blessed the woman as she made for the bathroom. That was warm, and she slipped off her clothes and changed into the pajamas she kept on the door hook. Then she had only to dash out into the cold hall and back into her room and shove herself under the covers. Her feet connected with the soothing warmth of the hot-water bottle, and she made her body relax.

  Her last conscious thought was whether her smiling, pony-tailed cousin would be able for Blister. And if she wasn’t, would the pony then be put down?

  Michael Carradyne shrugged into his raincoat and left the house, pausing for a moment in the courtyard to listen. His keen ears picked up no unusual banging or kicking from the hunters or old Tulip. He walked to his left, stepping close enough to the main yard to take a second moment’s listen, before he went through the iron gates to the drive, making certain that the latch had caught. This was an automatic habit, born of the incident when he’d spent half the night searching Cornanagh for the Hussy, a mare who specialized in undoing her stable door, no matter what sort of fastening they tried to keep her in with. They’d had an unwanted and unplanned foal from her that year—tinker in origin, if its broken color was any indication. So automatic was it for Michael to close gates and check locks that, were he to be asked a moment later if he had done so, he could not have sworn that he had.

  Once beyond the yard gate he turned left again, to the graveled parking space where his Austin Cambridge sat by itself. Owen and Philip had gone off in Owen’s banger, promising to arrange for the exhaust to be fixed on Saturday.

  Michael had a curious affection for his old Austin: in the first place, his father had bought it new in 1959, swearing in his vociferous fashion that Austin knew how to build a motor to last. A sturdy car, it needed only regular servicing, unlike his wife’s rather nuisancy little Fiat. Isabel was forever having to phone up the AA. He willingly paid for that service since it kept him from having to rescue her at ill-timed moments from Dublin or Kildare.

  Isabel! He sighed, turning the ignition key and listening to the well-bred rumble from the Austin, a thoroughbred of a car. A fine thing when a man could feel more affection for his vehicle than for his wife. And why must the woman nag at Trina so much? He had, reluctantly, stopped giving Trina good-night hugs or kisses since Isabel was certain such demonstrations might have a bad effect on her preadolescent daughter. Michael had been incredulous at first. Did the woman think him incestuous? Did she recognize incest at all, except as something to be prayed against? She’d not had the same fears about Sybil when his older daughter was growing up, so where had she acquired the notion that he might “ruin” the child closest to his heart?

  But when Isabel had reacted with even harsher criticism of Catriona those times he had forgotten and embraced the girl, he had stopped doing so. There were other ways he could show
affection and approval. Suddenly he hoped that Fiona Bernon would be at the pub tonight.

  He swung the Austin past Mick’s cottage, noticing the blue TV glow and almost envying Mick his solitude and his freedom to retreat to his own uncluttered bastion. Yet Michael knew that was nonsense, even if Cornanagh and its horses seemed to fill Mick’s life totally.

  Michael Carradyne turned his thoughts to more positive matters, such as getting Jack Garden’s active support for the Horse Board Bill. Garden was exactly the sort of small horse breeder that the Survey wished to encourage, with its premium schemes for mare, foal, and stallion. Jack might not see the merit of hanging on to a promising animal, breaking and schooling it, but he did understand the importance of putting good mares to good, and hopefully registered, stallions. Which brought the Chou Chin Chow gelding readily to Michael’s mind.

  He’d seen the animal in Jack’s field—Jack had been sounding off about his most recent losses of newborn lambs to loose dogs. The gelding had been startled by their approach and charged off down the field, clearing the bramble hedge, five feet high and at least the same in width. Michael didn’t buy many animals outside Cornanagh, so he’d have to go very carefully with Jack or the man would hike the price out of sight. Michael could point out that the gelding was on the small side, couldn’t be more than 15.2 hands high. These days even sixteen hands was considered small for a show jumper. As if height had anything to do with innate ability.

  Michael had a hunch about that chestnut gelding. He slapped the steering wheel with excitement. His father had been a great one for following hunches.

  “They don’t come often, Michael,” he’d say, “not the real gut ones, so pursue one even if it seems irrational. I did when I paid two hundred pounds for a little brown mare in foal to Cottage, and none of us have ever been sorry for that, I’d say.” From that mare had come the Tulip and most of Cornanagh’s current success.

  Christ, how he missed the old man! Even his interfering ways and contradictory orders when Cornanagh was not running the way old Tyler had expected it to. Odd to realize that what he missed most about the old man were their arguments. Particularly on the subject of horses and their training. Now, what would old Tyler have had to say about his intention to get the Chou Chin Chow gelding?