She had reserved the honeymoon suite for us. Naturally.
“It doesn’t look haunted,” I said to my wife.
It isn’t the real house,” she replied. That was burned to the ground.”
“A few walls might have survived,” I suggested.
“ ’Tis true,” she sighed. That’s enough to preserve whatever haunts might be here.”
One approached Casdegarry on the traditional treelined road and then turned at the end of the trees to see the house itself—neat, clean, and welcoming. Trim lawns all around it, a freshly raked gravel drive in front of the door, tall but orderly shrubbery, large formal gardens radiant in the sunshine on either side of the house. Someone had spent a lot of money to create an image of a “Big House” that was fit for Hollywood. Well-heeled American tourists would bring home snapshots to demonstrate that they had spent time in a “real” manor house. Their relatives would not dare comment that it looked kind of small, compared to Ashford Castle.
“Your man there in the doorway spent a lot of money on it,” Nuala commented.
Fiona, sensing that the car was slowing down, stood up, arched her back, and licked my hand.
The man in the doorway fit the picture of the owner of a manor house, tall, a bit stout, iron gray hair, a rubicund face, and a bright smile. He was flanked by two servants in uniform, a butler perhaps and a maid.
“Upstairs, downstairs,” I whispered to herself.
“What’s that?” she asked, patting the good-dog Fiona’s large head.
“Series, on the telly, about Edwardian England.”
“Och, I wasn’t alive then, Dermot Michael. Sure, it was never as neat and clean as it is now, not in Ireland, was it now?”
“And it never had eighteen holes tucked away behind that avenue.”
Paddy MacGarry opened the car door for us and helped us out of the car.
“Mr. Coyne, Ms. McGrail, you’re most welcome to Castlegarry … you, too, girl. … Ah, you’ve found a stick, have you now? Would you ever go chase it for me?”
Fiona dashed madly after the stick, forgetting her new friends for an even newer friend.
“Welcome to you, Inspector,” he said to the Garda. ‘We’ve made all the arrangements for you and your colleagues. We’re delighted to have you with us.”
Hotel owners are supposed to be genial. Was this fellow a little too genial? A bit of a gombeen man perhaps?
“Peace be to this house and all who live in it,” Nuala said piously, in Irish of course, as we went in the door.
He replied in Irish that was fluent but not as fluent as hers, “And I hope this will be only the first of many visits to Casdegarry. It’s been in my family for almost two hundred years. Its predecessors have been on this land for almost half a millennium, ah, but that’s another story, isn’t it now. … Come in and look at our great room, as we call it.”
‘You’ve done a remarkable job of restoration, Mr. MacGarry,” I said, glancing around the room, which was both a historical museum and a comfortable place to sit before the turf fire.
Thank you, sir … and Paddy, if you don’t mind.”
“Dermot,” I said tersely. Then nodding to herself, “Marie Fionnuala Anne.”
“Nuala,” said herself as she nudged me.
“The place almost burned to the ground during the Troubles back in the twenties, only two walls standing. Stood idle for a long time till we persuaded a syndicate in Dublin to back us in its restoration. It’s been a very successful project, let me tell you.”
Nuala nudged me again. I glanced at the wall next to the entrance to the room. On the wall hung a fulllength life-size portrait of a beautiful blond woman in a long white dress with a blue sash around her slender waist. She was trying to look serious and responsible, but mischief leaped from her brown eyes and her full lips.
“Gussie Downs,” I said, almost reverently.
“That’s right, Dermot She was the last of the direct line. A wonderful woman, by all accounts. Her husband”—he gestured to a wedding photo on an end table—“was killed in the war.”
The young couple, solemn and aloof as was the style in wedding pictures in those days, looked like children. They were, I thought, about the same age at the time of their marriage as Nuala and I.
‘Victoria Cross,” I said. “Ninth Scottish Division.”
Paddy raised an eyebrow, “You’ve done your research, Dermot.”
“Storyteller,” I said, realizing that an idea for my next novel had been fermenting in the basement of my brain. Gussie and Arthur would not be forgotten.
‘They’re buried out below beyond on the banks of the river. She died in the fire.”
“Tans?”
“Maybe,” he said with a sigh. “Or maybe the Irregulars. … It was all a long time ago.”
‘They became the Irregulars only after the treaty,” I said.
“She didn’t start the fire,” Nuala added softly.
MacGarry showed us to our room, the honeymoon suite, on the second floor. It overlooked a garden of spring flowers and the Shannon Estuary, thirty feet down a cliff. The tide was at ebb. Muddy flats, turned copper in the light of the fading sun, reached out into the dark blue river. Much of the rain that fell on this soggy green isle rushed out to sea from the mouth of the Shannon, only to be picked up by weather fronts rushing over the Gulf Stream and dumped once again on Ireland. River run …
Nuala Anne, in a kind of trance, stared out the window.
‘They’re down there,” she said, pointing to the right of the house.
There were two gravestones only a stone’s throw behind the garden.
Paddy MacGarry seemed puzzled. He had expected a young woman singer and a blond ape. Instead the woman walked in a kind of mystic daze and the ape knew a lot of history, maybe too much history.
If we cared for a bite to eat, they’d saved some supper for us. Would a half hour be too soon?
It certainly would not.
They’d provide a bite for the wolfhound, too. She would spend the night in a kennel they happened to have. During the day she could roam the grounds or ride with us over to Glenstal, which was a grand place altogether. Wonderful men, the monks, let me tell you.
The bedroom of the honeymoon suite was not as small as I had expected. It was supposed to look like a typical “Victorian bedroom, complete with a canopy over the bed, though the bed was substantially less than queen size. There was a screen behind which the woman could dress and undress, a fireplace, a small desk with an inkwell, a lantern with a lightbulb in it, and several deep chairs with thick cushions. Naturally, there was a modern bathroom with a tub and shower, central heating, and a discreetly protected electric heater, just in case the Yank tourist wanted to be toasty warm while pretending that he had stepped back in time a hundred and fifty years.
In the much smaller parlor, we would have a couple of comfortable chairs, a larger desk, a fireplace with turf piled in front of it, a fifteen-inch color TV, and life-size paintings of Augusta and Arthur on either wall, she in evening dress, he in the formal red coat of an English army officer. He was wearing the Victoria Cross. Both paintings were posthumous, though not at all bad.
“We should go down there and pray after supper,” Nuala, still gazing out of the window, murmured.
“Is the place haunted?” I asked
“Not by evil anyway.”
“Come look at the paintings in the parlor.”
She glanced at them briefly. ‘They’re all right, Dermot. She’d like them both.”
Would she now?
Downstairs we were greeted by Antonia MacGarry, a tall, slender, and handsome woman who was clearly in charge of the house. She was from Dublin but spoke with the near-English accent that some of the uppermiddle-class Dublinites affected. She was wearing a long black dress with a string of pearls. Real ones.
“We didn’t know when to expect you,” she said with a pleasant smile. “We knew you didn’t plan to be here for supper. But we
didn’t want you to go to bed hungry your first night at Castlegarry. So we’ve heated up a few leftovers.”
Vegetable soup, Beef Wellington, mashed potatoes, carrots, peas, cabbage, red wine, and apple crunch with heavy cream. Nuala ate sparingly, her mind elsewhere. I had two helpings of everything.
Paddy joined us. I had not made up my mind about him, but I was impressed that he had not claimed to be in the direct line of the MacGarrys.
‘There are easier ways to run a profitable hotel,” he told us with his relaxed grin, “but none which are quite as challenging or quite as much fun. There’s a lot of history in this place, as you know, Dermot. We have a small clientele, but more than two-thirds of our guests are repeaters. They love the warmth and the color and the relaxed atmosphere of the place.”
“And the golf course,” his wife added.
“Do you play golf, Dermot?” he asked me, his small eyes glittering.
“A little bit,” I admitted. “So does herself.”
“I hope we can have a round then while you’re here.”
“I’m sure we can.”
He would want, poor man, to bet on it. Since he didn’t look much like a retired Irish golf champion, I didn’t think I’d lose much.
But, mind you, I’m not the competitive type—not until I run into someone who wants to compete with me. Or, even worse, someone who thinks I’m a pushover.
Why do people always think I’m a pushover?
The castle and the land immediately around it were all that were left of the MacGarry holdings. When all the debts were paid and all the farms turned over to the farmers, Paddy’s father, a pharmacist up above in Clare, as the only surviving kin inherited the strip along the Shannon. He tried to sell it, but no one was interested. Paddy himself had gone to the hotel management school they used to have at Maynooth before it became a fancy university. He’d managed hotels down in Waterford and then in Dublin. He met Tonia at a dance in one of them. On their honeymoon they came out to Limerick. She saw the ruins of the castle and had the wonderful idea of restoring it as a hotel.
“Sure, Paddy, you’re just the man to do it.”
He hadn’t been much interested in the direct line of McGarrys. Rich, stuck-up Protestants, his grandmother had said. But, he confessed, he fell in love with the history and the idea.
Tonia’s father persuaded some of his friends to have a go at restoring the place as an exclusive hotel. They had sunk a lot of capital into it and had made very little money on their investment for several years.
“Now, however, thanks to you Americans, they are very pleased indeed with their return, let me tell you.”
He did not, however, know all that much of the history of the McGarrys. They were warriors, descended from Normans, who fought other Irish lords before the English came, then fought the English, then became Protestants and fought for the English wherever the English fought. They died in places like Saratoga, Austerlitz, Lucknow, Balaclava, Kabul, Khartoum, Isandhlwana, Natal. Lady Augusta’s father had died in the Boer War, leading a troop of cavalry at the relief of Ladysmith. Their graves were over in the Church of Ireland Chapel. They mostly died young, as did poor Lady Augusta’s husband. They were as generous with their tenants as they were with their lives and were well loved by the people in Garrytown. In truth they were neither English nor Irish but a mix of both. They stayed out of local politics but discreedy supported Parnell during the Land League and Home Rule debates. They were Protestants theoretically but were always great friends with the local priests and even the bishops of Limerick.
“There seem to have been rumors,” Tonia continued, “that after Lord Downs’ death, Lady Augusta became a Catholic. The parish priest said mass for her in his church. Every Catholic in Garrytown came. It is even said today that he also blessed her grave.”
“Both the graves were neglected and overgrown when we came back here,” Paddy continued. “We fixed them up. We owed that to two very brave young people.”
“Your father knew nothing about Lady Augusta’s death?” I asked.
“If he did, he wasn’t talking about it.” Paddy shrugged his shoulders. “I think he might not have wanted to know too much about it.”
“Pour some heavy cream on your apple crunch, Dermot Michael,” herself instructed me. “It would be wrong to waste it.” She sounded just like Ma.
“We are not historians,” Tonia explained. “We are interested in history, of course. Who in Ireland isn’t? But we don’t want to disturb the dead, if you take my meaning.”
Indeed I did. If you poked around too much, you might find something that would sour the clients of your nice little gold mine of a hotel.
“Her ancestors seemed to involve themselves in losing battles, didn’t they?” I asked. “Strain of recklessness in the family?”
Paddy laughed. “Not in our branch. We’ve all been disgustingly conservative. However, if you were in the English army in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, there were a lot of military disasters available.”
“The English lost every battle but the last one,” Tonia said.
“Still,” I pushed the point, “they seemed to have led the charge.”
“As far back as you go in our history,” Paddy admitted, “there was always a young McGarry leading a charge somewhere.”
We went into the great room for our coffee and liquor. Naturally, herself and I opted for Baileys. We were not offered an option about drinking it on the rocks. Some of the other guests had drifted into the room for their nightcaps. My wife arranged herself near the harp and plucked on its strings absently.
Actually, it was not absent plucking at all. She was waiting for and indeed expecting an invitation to sing.
“Would you ever be so kind to favor us with a song, Ms. McGrail?” Paddy MacGarry asked.
“Well, I wouldn’t want to bore you now,” she said with totally false reluctance.
“She thought you’d never ask,” says I.
She sang American songs—’The Streets of Laredo,” “Shenandoah,” “Dance, Boatman,” and “Irish Eyes.” Our fellow guests joined in loudly in celebration of the eyes of the Irish.
She did not do “Molly Malone,” for which God forgive her.
When we went back to our room she decreed that we must don our running clothes, collect the darlin’ girl, who needed the exercise after being cooped up in the car all day, and run a few miles. That meant five or six.
Our first stop was at the graves. The gravestones were simple—“Lord Arthur Downs V.C., 1884–1918,” “Lady Antonia McGarry Downs 1888-1922.” A carefully tended garden embraced both resting places. Nuala and I knelt to pray. Fiona, sensing the solemnity of the situation, sat on her haunches and watched us.
After several minutes of intense prayer, my wife stood up, brushed the dirt off her knees, and sighed.
“No empty graves?”
“Not at all, at all.”
“Are they at peace?”
“He is.”
“Tomorrow when we come back from Glenstal, I think we’ll talk to the parish priest.”
“He’ll know a lot,” she agreed. “Come on, darlin’ girl; we all need to run.”
So we ran under the moon, which washed the Shannon silver and created eerie shadows all around us. We visited the various “monuments” that remained from earlier castles—a wall of a medieval tower, an old monastic graveyard with a few tombstones slanting in opposite directions, a pile of stones that, according to the leaflet in our room, was all that was left of the chapel of the great monastery of St. Conan, the vine-covered Church of Ireland church, also dedicated to St. Conan, where Augusta’s brave and reckless ancestors were buried.
“You Irish Catholics,” I said to my panting wife, “are remarkably tolerant of these fellows. They were part of the oppression after all.”
“Sure, aren’t they Irish like everyone else?”
That, I thought, was a typical argument on this strange island where the principle of contradicti
on was considered to be irrelevant.
Then we delivered the good dog to her kennel and returned to our room. I jumped into the shower. A surprisingly amorous Nuala Anne joined me. For a moment I thought we were close to something special, and then somehow, even though we made gentle and tender love, that something special slipped away.
You BLEW IT AGAIN, ASSHOLE, the Adversary informed me. CAN’T YOU TELL THAT THE WOMAN WANTS SOMETHING MORE?
“But what?” I answered, knowing that he had a point.
IF YOU’RE TOO DUMB TO FIGURE IT OUT, WHY SHOULD I TELL YOU?
Since the Adversary was actually part of me, there was no reason to expect that he would know any more than I did.
Could one be tender and fierce at the same time?
Maybe, but I didn’t know how.
—27—
“A WOMAN,” me ma says to me in Irish, when we’re leaving this morning, “has to he generous with her man.”
“ ’Tis true,” I say, thinking I’m plenty generous.
“And doesn’t that mean more than just making love when he wants to?”
“It does,” I say, not knowing exactly what it means at all, at all.
So I think about it all the way down here. Dermot, poor dear man, is interested in what they’re saying on the radio about Father Placid and the investigation of IIA ‘s finances. The money from the concert has been frozen, which means he can’t spend it and neither can anyone else.
Next time I do something for charity, I’ll check into it a lot more carefully. And meself an accountant at that!
Still, I’m wondering what generosity means.
I thought I was very generous tonight, drying him with me towel and asking him to dry me. ’Tis great fun altogether. We drove each other out of our minds, and the moonlight coming in off the Shannon. But whatever is supposed to happen when a man and a woman abandon themselves didn’t quite happen. I think we were close. But somewhere we weren’t close enough.
Should I blame him or meself?
That’s a silly question. I’m ashamed of meself for asking. We both need to get the hang of it.
And we will, damn it.
Sorry. We will with Your help.
Irish Mist Page 23