My grandfather said nothing further for a moment – for a moment, in fact, stood quite still on the road – then he let go the name a final time. “Small.” He sighed. “I said my prayers on the night that that body was recovered from the Mill Dam, said them as I had never in my life till then said them, and when I unclasped my hands at daybreak I was as a new man.”
He performed the clasping and unclasping of his hands as he spoke, the latter not without difficulty. It had been a long time since any bit of him was new.
The ointment on my ankle the day I was carried into the house after the tumble on Cave Hill . . . He had known at once that he had smelt it before, although it took until later that evening, by which time he had been driven almost to distraction, for the “what” and the “where” of it to fall back into place: a night more than three decades before when a party of drunken dragoons went on the rampage through the town. There had been an altercation earlier in the day involving a townsman whom some of the soldiers had accused of showing insufficient respect in refusing to doff his hat. Their officers had reined them in then, but now, under cover of darkness, they were out for revenge. They found their way at length to Sugarhouse Entry where they set about trying to remove Dr Franklin from his bracket above the door, cracking the head of any man foolish enough to protest. They cracked my grandfather’s, who was doubly foolish, being the father of two small girls. “I was already walking a different path from the Muddlers and the Barclays and even Dr Franklin, but it was the principle of the thing,” he told me that morning. “Our Lord himself would not have stood idly by. And the dragoons were most dreadfully drunk.”
Peggy Barclay, when the storm had passed and my grandfather could be got into the tavern, had attended to his injuries in person: welts on his back as well as lumps on his head. And, yes, the ointment had smelt as rank then: rankness was written into the recipe; rankness, Dr McDonnell said, was half the good of it.
(I did not even stop him to ask where Dr McDonnell fitted into this. Years passed before I learned of his gift to Wolfe Tone of a medical kit to take with him into exile; of his failure, only a few years later, to respond to the summons by Miss McCracken to try to revive her brother after his body was taken down from the scaffold, although her brother was in any case quite dead.)
Peggy Barclay was one of those people, it was hard to put an age to her: old enough to command that large household, young enough to adapt to whatever life brought her way, early hours and late nights, informers among her serving girls, assaults by the military.
“Even after the Rising was put down and the prisoners released the soldiers would not let her be. I would hear whisperings now and then when I was out about my business of some new raid or other act of harassment. Then her husband died – this would have been 18 and 9, or 10, before you were born certainly. He was not too many years back from the Scotch prison. It must be asked whether his confinement there hastened his demise. She carried on for a few years more in Sugarhouse Entry before giving up the tavern to a man named Bambridge, and I heard no more about her. I had thought it likely that she was already dead. So many I knew then are.”
Peggy Barclay, it seems, had thought that my grandfather must be dead too. When the “young woman” had mentioned my name, though, and where I lived, she at once made the connection. Rice was not at that time a common surname in the town, and she remembered having been told, some years past, of the unfortunate series of bereavements, ending with a son-in-law of that name, that had delivered me into my grandfather’s care. She remembered, too, the assault by the dragoons on the Dr Franklin Tavern. It had been a long time in coming, but she was pleased at last to be able to do him a kindness in return.
We had paused for breath beneath a stand of beech trees near to where a lane joined the road on the eastern side running up from New Forge. The horse, standing apart from us, raised its tail and dropped four grassy balls of dung. Another day it might have been a source of awkwardness between us. My grandfather scarcely noticed it. The traffic, almost non-existent when we had emerged from the Giant’s Ring, had grown now to a steady stream, all of it headed in the opposite direction to us: gigs, sociables, landaus, vis-à-vis (broughams belonged as yet to futurity), even hay carts and coal carts, taking the hopeful of Belfast – who would have guessed there were so many? – to Derby Day at the Maze. I did not see among them the car carrying my colleagues from the Ballast Board, although for the first time in weeks I found I could smile at the thought of the figure it would cut, Ferris and Bright hallooing from the windows.
“I do not presume to know what you were hoping to achieve,” my grandfather said, apropos of nothing that had passed between us in the minutes immediately preceding. “As to the harbour, though, the Donegalls will back down, if not on this Bill then the next, or if not on that one then the one after that. It is the way that change most often comes about in this country, by brinkmanship and amendment. And, besides, Reform is coming. Not the variety that I would wish for, although I will keep toiling, as we should now keep walking.”
A quarter of a mile further on we stopped again to breakfast at an inn that resembled more a dwelling house whose occupants had made a bit of room at their table. On the floor by my chair lay an infant in a cradle, being rocked by a sister who could not have been long out of the cradle herself. Various older children took turns in the chairs facing ours, applying themselves to a large loaf, whose eradication – and that of a saucer of butter – appeared to be their common goal. The man of the place, all the while, smoked his pipe and read an almanac, as naturally as if he had exhausted his conversation with us at a convivial dinner the night before. His wife served us porridge followed by boiled bacon with bread off the griddle, and tea as black as the great battered pot from which it was poured. I believe it may have been the best breakfast that I ever ate.
I was almost able to forget for the duration of it that I still had in my possession a loaded pistol. My grandfather had picked it up and handed it back to me as we prepared to leave the Giant’s Ring. A gun had no place there and even if buried in the countryside round about, as I had suggested, would only be the cause of some mischief or mishap when at last it came to light, as come to light one day, not in my lifetime perhaps, certainly not in his, it inevitably would. The river, likewise, was too unreliable a repository. A furnace was the only fit place for it.
Back on the road again, the gun, like my shame, weighed heavier the closer we drew to the town and the more obvious was my grandfather’s fatigue. It was three minutes past noon by the clock of the White Linen Hall when we came into Donegall Place. The street might have been evacuated overnight. The doors of the bank were closed. A notice hung from the knocker that I could not read and did not need to: Gone to the Races. Only Hercules Street, to gauge by the sounds reaching us from that quarter, was still going about its business unaffected by the distractions elsewhere. In the summer above all a town must re-provision itself daily.
Not one of those few neighbours and tradesmen around to bid us good day could have guessed what we had been about in the hours previous, any more, I realised now, than I could have guessed what they had been about in the years before I first trod the streets of the town. They had not all been killed or shipped out, presumably, the pitch-cappers and half-hangers, the spies, the volunteers and the assassins, the turners of blind eyes. There were different orders of silence. Maybe the soonest way to mend the wounds of that time was to say as close to nothing as possible. Maybe.
Nisbet met us in the hallway, his face a perfect mask of horror at the sight of my grandfather.
“Well?” my grandfather said, waving away his attempts at assistance.
“The groom had already brought the horses round to the front of the house when I arrived. Five minutes more and I would have been too late.”
“But you were not,” said my grandfather and sat – “Ooph!” – on the chair next to the hall table.
“His lordship was perplexed to know how I had been appr
ised of the contents of his mail, although he himself in his blustering and his expostulations supplied me with most of the detail . . . A racehorse,” Nisbet said in an aside to my grandfather, who with all else that had passed between us on our walk had not thought to enquire how I had meant to entice the Marquis into our rendezvous. “It was to have been shown or offered for sale. Lord Donegall, I think, was half inclined to see my having gone there as an attempt to gull him out of an opportunity, but the groom persuaded him finally. His lordship appears to set great store by his opinion.” He turned his eyes towards me then away. “There had been some injunction in the letter against bringing servants, but Lord Donegall meant to defy it. Not only the groom to look the animal over, but also a stable-lad with a cudgel in case an attempt was made to rob him.”
Either I would have had to kill three men with two shots or, which was a thousand times more likely, I would never have made it away from the Giant’s Ring with my own skull intact.
My grandfather’s thoughts were evidently following a similar line, for, raising himself first out of his seat again, he insisted we pray where we stood in the hallway, kneeling being thought to draw attention to the sinner and not the sin, and kneeling in any case being far beyond him at that moment. His hand found out my shoulder.
“Oh, Lord, you have reminded us again this day of our all-too-human failings. We are all, Lord, as children without your guidance, prone to err. For your deliverance of us from greater error, for the promise made, in blood, at Calvary to forgive whosoever shall embrace you, Lord, we humbly thank thee.”
Nisbet’s “Amen” was loud enough for three, but mine was in there too, make no mistake.
A letter was lying, folded small, on a salver on the table. I recognised Millar’s hand even before my own name. I picked it up at the same moment as my grandfather opened his eyes and instructed me to accompany him to the kitchen. “We will join you again presently,” he said to Nisbet, who having already taken one step forward was now obliged to take it back. I passed the letter from palm to trouser pocket, and in the welter of that morning’s events, put it almost instantly out of mind.
Hannah stood up from the kitchen table as we came in. A tousle-haired boy sat there, who, Molly explained, snatching up the plate from in front of him (there was still a slice of black pudding on it), was the lad who had earlier brought the horse from Dr McDonnell’s, and whom she had found twenty minutes before in the corner by the dresser, dead to the world.
“It is little wonder you needed the sleep, the early start you had.” My grandfather addressed the boy directly and at once Molly relaxed her guard, although not her hold on the plate, to the boy’s obvious dismay. “Perhaps Hannah would help you pick some raspberries to take back with you to Dr McDonnell.” Having just seen the last of his breakfast whisked away, as though he had been the one who had put it there, the boy looked bewildered at finding himself now hauled up, given a bowl to hold, and hustled towards the door. Hannah, doing the hustling, looked only too glad of the excuse to get out. Molly waited a moment more in the kitchen, glancing from me to my grandfather. “Perhaps”, she said, and took down a colander from a hook by the window, “the doctor would like some peas too.”
When we were safely alone, my grandfather handed me a poker and asked me to open the door in the wall below the oven and make a deep well in the coals. The heat, when I laid the fire bare, almost took my eyebrows off. “And now,” said my grandfather, “let us be rid of the item once and for all.”
I removed the gun with care from my pocket, though it was now neither cocked nor primed, then, abandoning caution, flung it into the well I had made and shut the door fast behind it. For a few seconds more, we stood as we had at the Giant’s Ring, paralysed by anticipation and dread. Then, one after the other, the powder charges in the barrels ignited, though if the balls were discharged the firebrick and the cast iron absorbed the force of them and reduced the reports to beer-cork pops.
And that was that.
After another minute or two my grandfather suggested that I give the fire a rake. Already, when I opened the door the second time, the “item” had ceased to be a gun. Flames bloomed yellow and blue the length of the stock; the barrels glowed as though alchemised. How much better, I thought, if we too could be as quickly translated from one state to the next: no ground elder, no dandelions, no decay. I covered the remains with the fieriest coals and walked with my grandfather to the hallway again.
Nisbet had not moved an inch, but moved now, shadowing my grandfather as he began his ascent of the stairs, one hand light on the tiller of the old man’s elbow. I stood for a few moments, before following behind, alone in the hallway, silently rejoicing in its ordinariness. Not an object in it but had been standing or hanging there on the day I was first brought, blinking, through the unlocked door.
My own room was another matter. You would have thought the dragoons of old had been let loose on it: chairs upset, clothing and papers tossed about. The end of the brush that Molly had used to retrieve the telltale letter was still sticking out from under the bed. Even the chest of drawers had been shoved aside. The bed-warmer lay sideways across the top, leaking water.
Later, I told myself. I would start to put it all back together later.
I cleared a space on the mattress and lay down, first on my left side then on my right then on my back then on my left side again, but each time I closed my eyes Maria’s face came to me. “In great distress,” he had said. I sat up. If only to let her know that I was safe, I had to see her again.
Nisbet was easing the study door closed when I arrived on the lower landing. My grandfather had just that minute fallen asleep in his armchair. “I would not advise disturbing him any more today,” Nisbet said. “As it is, it is a miracle that he is not in the infirmary.”
Whatever about God and my grandfather, I did not imagine that Nisbet would find it in his heart ever to forgive me.
I asked him, were my grandfather to rouse sooner than expected, to tell him he was not to worry himself on my account: I had some business to attend to. I would try not to be too long about it.
I was already past the middle stair before I heard him say, “You may be less time about it than you think.” I turned, but saw only his back, receding down the landing. Even calling on him to explain himself would have meant wasting precious seconds. So too closing the door.
Half a minute only brought me on to Hercules Street. To enter the street on a warm afternoon was to pass through an invisible curtain. The air was thicker here, almost pulsing. Besides the butchers, there were fruit-sellers’ and egg-sellers’ barrows to negotiate, every stray dog in Belfast to avoid tripping over, but there were too, from the day’s beginning to its end, horses and vehicles coming and going . . . I begged a lift with a carter, just leaving from the north end of the street, who told me he was happy to oblige if I did not mind a bit of company in the straw: two whole beef carcasses bound for the kitchens of Mr Simms at the Grove, which was not more than a quarter of a mile from my destination.
He talked as he drove, over his shoulder and through the pipe clenched in his nut-brown teeth, of the “extraordinary vision” he had had this morning on Donegall Street, like the destruction of King Solomon’s Temple, “if I knew my Bible”. I assured him I knew it very well, thank you, but between the pipe and the bumps and the need not to get too close to my straw bedfellows – “Boaz” and “Jachin”, as my driver would have them – I could not altogether follow him.
I leapt down before we had come to a halt at the gates of Grove House, shouting my thanks, and pulling at my shirt as I ran to shake off the straw and the cloying smell of freshly slaughtered meat.
A haze lay over the surface of the road ahead, so that when at last it came into view the Mill for Grinding Old People Young seemed to hover uncertainly between this world and the world of my own imagining. A blink now and it might disappear irretrievably into the latter. As I drew nearer, though, it took root again on the corner of Buttermi
lk Loney, with its dozen front-facing windows, its hydrangeas, its double gateway, from out of which Dorothy strode, carrying a pail, whose contents she flung – grey water momentarily silver in the sun – across the road and into the Lough beyond. You would not have put it past her to have been filling the entire Lough in this way – in defiance of a belief only in people and dumb animals – since the days of Finn McCool. Seeing me, she drew herself up and rested a hand on her hip.
“She is gone,” she said. Her tone was as harsh as ever I had heard it, but her eyes had more in them of pity than mockery. “I told you all along you were wasting your time.”
I must have known deep down that Maria would not be there, for I felt now no sudden jolt of despair.
“When did she go?”
The pity vanished from Dorothy’s eyes. She turned the pail upside down and hit it with the flat of her hand, dislodging something unsavoury. It flopped into the dust at her feet. “An hour and more since,” she said. “Mistress herself took her into town for the Liverpool boat.”
I looked over my shoulder at the Lough as she unleashed an invective against the preferment shown to Miss High and Mighty.
Not a funnel, or a mast of any size moved on the water.
The invective stopped. I glanced back. Dorothy shook her head. “Well, run then,” she said. “You look to me as if you would be quick.” She swung the pail from one hand to the other as she turned towards the inn. “Too quick.”
I ran.
I never in my life again ran as hard.
The steamer Hibernia sailed from Donegall Quay on the high tide, Maze Races or no Maze Races. By the time I arrived at the quayside the engines were already being fired and the mass of people milling about had begun reluctantly to separate into those who meant to travel and those whose lot it was to tarry here. My head was turned this way and that, that way and this, by one woman after another who on second glance was as unlike Maria as it was possible for a woman to be.
The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Page 20