by Anne Doughty
He listed the well-known viewpoints on the Ring of Kerry route, quoting the guide book which he’d read in detail after finding little to interest him in either The Kerryman or the Tralee Clarion.
Rosie waited to see what her grandmother might say. All week she’d been so excited with everything there was to see and do she never minded what was decided, but she’d begun to wonder why they’d not taken the lakeside road to visit Currane Lodge and the little church a short distance away where her grandparents had been married and where her great-grandmother, Hannah McGinley, lay buried.
‘Well,’ Rose began, ‘seeing my back is behaving itself so beautifully, I thought it would be a good morning for some shopping. There is a birthday present to be bought.’
John suppressed a sigh as he caught his wife’s fleeting glance towards Rosie. Shopping in Cahirciveen or anywhere else for that matter, was not at all what he’d choose, but he knew she’d Rosie’s birthday in mind. She’d mentioned several times already that her only dress, a green and white check gingham she’d had to have for Miss Wilson’s, had never suited her and now no longer even fitted her properly.
‘An hour or two is as much as I could manage, I think,’ Rose continued, ‘so I thought after lunch we might go to Currane Lodge and take a picnic tea. The hotel does a very nice one, I’m told. And you and I could sit in the sun and let Rosie explore all she wants. They say the road is much improved,’ she added, as she saw him brighten.
‘Well, it would need to be better with all the visitors these days driving their motors along the lake for the scenery or going there to fish. Sure wasn’t it the roughness of that road that made Pegasus lose his shoe in the first place?’
‘Not a word, not a word,’ Rose said quickly, putting her finger to her lips as Rosie opened her mouth to speak. ‘We’ve a busy morning and it’s time we were moving. You can ask Granda all the questions you like when we get to Currane Lodge.’
‘Well, that’s fine by me,’ John said agreeably. ‘I found a book in the visitors’ sitting room about this man Lindberg and his flying machines. I’ll just park outside the shop and read it like the way your old friend the coachman used to sit reading his paper waiting for the ladies. What was his name?’
‘Thomas,’ she said promptly. ‘Isn’t it funny how some things come back without you even having to think and others have you puzzling for days?’
The little grey church stood back from the road, a rusted iron gate leading into the churchyard, most of it overgrown, the paths barely visible, the lush vegetation smothering all but the taller gravestones.
Rosie led the way while Rose and John followed more slowly.
In the shadow of the boundary hedge tall spires of foxglove reached up through the tangled grass and bloomed in a profusion of colours. Their first faded blooms had been wafted away to fall among the bright faces of buttercups growing in the sunlight beyond its shadow. The hedge itself was thickly entwined with wild clematis, the fluffy seeds rising like a swarm of exotic insects whenever there was a more vigorous movement of air in the soft breeze from the lake.
Close to the church itself there were new graves, the turned earth still bare, planted with posies of bright flowers in jam pots. Rosie saw her grandmother pause, heard her repeat a name that seemed familiar, but she herself pressed on. Stepping carefully along the overgrown path, drawn by a group of white marble stones, still visible above the sea of ripening grass and wildflowers.
As she had guessed, the slabs were engraved with names she knew. Servants from Currane Lodge from her grandmother’s time lay among neighbours who’d lived in the scattered habitations further along the lakeside. Somewhere, further into the long grass, would be the graves of Lady Caroline’s sons, the longed-for boys who never lived for more than a few months.
She stood reading the dedications, totally absorbed in the lives of these unknown people who had once been an everyday part of her grandmother’s world here at the opposite end of Ireland. Behind her, she heard the low, sad tones of her grandparents. Among the new graves, they’d found a young man whose father and grandfather they had known. He’d been killed the previous year, a victim of the Civil War.
She moved further away, drawn by the older stones where the lichens grew more profusely, spreading their delicate colours so deeply into the cut stone that she could no longer trace the words even with her fingers. She found the grave of Thomas the coachman and his wife, another handsome white marble slab. The dates and places still perfectly legible. Low down on the stone, she read: Well done thou good and faithful servant. This stone was erected by Sir Capel Molyneux in grateful thanks.
A short distance away the upper part of a similar memorial was just visible above a huge mound of briar rose that almost completely obscured its white marble face with its prolific stems and masses of tight pink flowers.
She made her way across the humps of vegetation cautiously, for the strong stems were spiked with jagged thorns. She picked out a stem close to the marble. Taking hold of it by a mass of bloom, she pulled some of the vigorous growth away from the stone. At last, she had found what she was looking for. Protected by the rose, the words on the still-white marble were free from lichen and perfectly legible.
Hannah McGinley, nee Mackay
Born 1815, Drumcraig, Galloway
Died 1886, Currane Lodge
The intertwined stems and dense blooms obscured the rest of the inscription. Should she be able to clear away all of the growth, she was sure she would find Sir Capel had had the same words inscribed, for Hannah too had been ‘a good and faithful servant’.
She stood staring down at the words the dense growth masked. ‘Thou good and faithful servant’. Was that what her own life was to be? Her schooldays were over. She’d stayed on into the senior class at Richhill Public Elementary and then she’d had gone to Miss Wilson’s for a year. But that was over now.
Not a day had passed since Dr Stewart sat by her bedside encouraging her to talk about her family and her plans for the future that she had not thought what was to become of her. When she’d owned up to her anxiety, her grandmother had been reassuring. Told her to forget all about it till she was quite recovered from her fall. She herself had thought it might be easier to forget about the future when she came to Kerry. Every day she promised herself she’d push the question out of mind and then she’d see Bridget in her black dress and white apron and back it would come.
What was there for her beyond the work of the farm? She wasn’t old enough to be a governess like those in the novels she’d read, even if there were any families that needed one these days. So far, the only prospect of a job had been the one in Richhill castle. She’d refused to go to work there and had been roundly abused by her mother for upsetting her Uncle Henry, who had ‘put in a word for her’.
But what else was there? An assistant in a shop in Portadown or Armagh? A worker in one of the mills or the fruit packing factory? The question of whether the jobs appealed to her or not simply didn’t arise, for there was so little possibility of her getting one. Jobs were so scarce, mostly they were filled without any need to advertise in the local papers. Emily got hers because her father worked at Fruitfield and heard about the vacancy in the office from the girl who was leaving to get married.
Her brothers had found out how hard a time it was for everyone, but it was even harder for girls. It was as if no one really expected girls to be fit for any job other than domestic service or shop assistant. If you went into service, you had to accept the regime of the big house, as her grandmother had had to fifty years before, or find one near enough so you could go on living at home, for jobs paid so little there was no possibility of setting up on your own.
She sighed and looked down at the mass of tiny pink roses. Was it a floribunda? It might be. She ought to know its name for she’d seen it before in the garden at Rathdrum, but there her grandmother had trained it to climb a wooden trellis and she pruned it vigorously each autumn so the blooms were bigger and the
thorns not quite so fierce.
Currane Lodge was less than a mile from the churchyard. Set back much further from the road, it had once had a driveway curving through well-kept shrubberies beyond handsome wrought-iron gates. It was no surprise that the gates were gone, that even the pillars supporting them were crumbling, their capstones removed, a generous growth of grass and foliage well-established in the decaying mortar.
After his wife died, Sir Capel had moved to Dublin with his unmarried daughter, Lily. The house continued to stand empty for many years after his death, for none of the English relatives to whom it was entailed had any wish to bury themselves in this remote corner of Ireland.
Only for some years at the turn of the century had the house been wakened from its long sleep. A returned emigrant, his fortune made in the motor industry in Detroit, bought the place, repaired the roof and outbuildings. He then invited his remaining relatives to come and live with him only to discover none of them wanted to leave the homes in which they’d spent their lives any more than they’d wanted to seek a new life in America.
Rosie wondered if her grandfather would risk his handsome motor on the grass-grown surface of the driveway, but he turned between the massive pillars quite confident it would take no harm. The chassis was high off the ground, he told them, and the springs far superior to his own vehicle at home. But he still drove very slowly.
None of them were prepared for the sight that greeted them as they emerged from the shady tunnel made by the over-arching trees and unpruned shrubs. Currane Lodge had been burnt. Only part of the front facade still stood, the windows dark staring eyes, blackened with soot. Most of the roof had gone, except for one fragment, its surviving timbers dividing the startling blue sky into tiny rectangles, its jagged beams in silhouette.
‘Oh my goodness,’ gasped Rose. ‘No one told us there’d been a fire.’
‘Sure who would there be to tell us now?’ John said softly, as he stopped the car on the charred and littered space in front of the stone steps. ‘We never thought to ask at the hotel. They might not have known anyway.’
‘No, why should they?’ she agreed. ‘It’s well out of the way and no one lived here. I wonder what happened.’
‘I expect some of the volunteers thought it was time it was gone,’ he replied crisply. ‘Anything they thought was British would be fair game. Or maybe someone was storing arms there. Black and Tans or Pro-Treaty or Anti-Treaty. You’ve plenty to chose from in the last few years. It could even have been an accident.’
Rosie was puzzled by the strange look on her grandmother’s face. She’d been so shocked when she first saw the burnt ruin, but now, a small smile played around her lips as she stepped down from the motor and walked closer to the ruined house. She ran her eye over the wide stone steps that led up to the empty space where once the front door had been.
‘Lady Anne used to ride her horse up those steps,’ she said suddenly, turning towards her.
Rosie stared back at her in amazement.
‘His name was Conor and he was huge,’ she went on. ‘Goodness knows how many hands high. But she was a wonderful horsewoman, was Lady Anne, and Conor would do anything for her. Do you remember him, John?’
‘Indeed you’d never forget a horse like that. There’d be few enough men would have the way of him, never mind a young girl.’
Rosie saw her grandmother’s eyes blink and move away from the steps.
‘Is Lady Anne dead?’
She nodded sadly.
‘Eight years ago now, though it seems much longer. Her husband, Harrington, died in May 1916 and she had a fall from her horse about a month later. She broke a hip and never really recovered. I don’t think she wanted to recover. She as much as told me so when I went over to see her,’ she added, with a small, wry smile.
‘The worst thing about growing old, Rosie, is that you lose your friends, even ones that are younger than you are. Like Anne and my baby brother, Sam. And Lily, a year later.
‘Lily Molyneux,’ she went on to explain, ‘Anne’s younger sister, the one who painted those watercolours you always admire at Rathdrum. She lived here too, the prettiest of them all.’
‘But she never married?’
‘No, she never did.’
Rosie said nothing. The look that passed across her grandmother’s face was so unlike her she was sure there was a sad story to be told. Too sad for such a lovely summer day standing looking at the ruins of a once handsome house and thinking about dear people now lying under the tangled growth of a neglected churchyard.
Rosie left her grandparents sitting in the motor and walked up the wide stone steps. The lower ones still bore the shallow indentations made by long years of use, but the upper ones were shattered at the edges by the heat of the fire. Grass was sprouting from the cracks.
She moved cautiously. In the soot-blackened gap, she stopped and gazed at the ruins beyond. The upper storey had collapsed, pieces of wall had bent and fallen on top of each other, like a book dropped on its open side, the pages splayed, the binding poking up in the air. The burnt timbers gleamed and shone in the sun. Here and there, small patches of weed and wild-flower, fresh and green, waved in the breeze, thriving in the rich ash.
‘Not long ago,’ she said aloud to herself.
She had seen enough abandoned cottages near her own home to know how quickly tree seedlings could spring up, but even here, where growth was so prolific, there was nothing older than this present season. The undamaged trees in the nearby garden and driveway had not yet colonised the tangled ruin.
She stared at the waving fronds, imagining what they would become. In ten years, in twenty years. Left to the wind and rain, the soft breezes from both sea and lake and the luxurious vegetation all around, the desolate space would close over, settle and heal. Like with the churchyard, you would soon have to know the story to be able to find the fragments that remained.
‘Well, what next?’ asked John as she arrived back at the motor, but made no move to get in.
‘I’d like to see the stable yard and the rooms where you lived, Granny.’
‘Well, I’m not sure what we’ll find there,’ her grandfather replied. ‘The back drive is over there. It looks no worse than the front though. The stable yard is over yonder, beyond those chestnuts,’ he went on, pointing to a gap in the trees. ‘What do you think, Rose?’
‘Why not? We may as well do the job properly and let Rosie have the whole story.’
They proceeded even more slowly than before, but it was not many minutes before the grass grown track stopped at a handsome pair of stone built pillars. The gate had been removed but ahead of them the cobbles of the stable yard were still there.
‘My goodness, that’s a surprise,’ exclaimed John, coming to a halt outside a two-storey building with stone steps running up to the living quarters on the upper floor.
All around them the single-storey buildings, workshop, barns and storehouses, stood open to the sky, their roof timbers green with growth, their slates gone, yet the living quarters Rose and her mother shared and the main stables opposite where John himself had been quartered for the length of his stay, still had their roofs intact.
‘Well, what do you make of that?’ he asked in amazement.
Rosie looked up at the tiny windows above the pale, flaking whitewash. The room behind them must be much smaller than the room over the workshop at home.
‘But didn’t the man from Detroit put new roofs on?’
‘Ach yes,’ said John laughing. ‘I forgot. I thought they’d lasted a bit too well since our time here. But that’s it. Do you want to go up and have a look?’ he said turning to Rose. ‘It’ll be safe enough inside if the roof’s sound.’
‘No, John. I think I’d rather walk a little way down the path and sit by the lake, but I think I know who will want to go and have a look.’
Rosie nodded vigorously and then had a sudden thought.
‘Wouldn’t it be locked up, Granda?’
‘Not
very likely,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘The only thing worth stealing is the slates. They mustn’t have had a ladder long enough.’
Rosie climbed down from the motor, ran across to the foot of the steps, then paused halfway up the steps to watch her grandparents setting off down the back drive. Her grandmother was limping slightly, but she seemed not to notice. As they moved away from the motor, to her great delight, she saw them look at each other and laugh.
Smiling herself, she ran up the remaining steps to the rooms where Hannah McGinley had made a home for her daughter and her youngest son, Sam. She turned the handle on the door at the top and stepped into a room with two small windows and a black metal fireplace. Beyond the windows she could see the clock on the stable block, its face still painted blue, its hands long gone. Below stood the parked motor, its elegant shape in sharp contrast to the mellowed stonework of the old stone building.
She turned back into the room. The floor was dusty, but not as dirty as she had expected. The new planks still showed where it had been mended, much paler than the original ones which were darkened with age and tramping feet. The black metal fireplace was still intact.
Opposite the door by which she had entered stood another, presumably leading to the bedrooms. Suddenly, she noticed something lying on the floor by the bedroom door. She stepped across, picked it up and stood staring at it in amazement. A page torn from a notebook, perfectly fresh and clean with the number six written clearly at the top.
She carried it back to the window where the light was better and began to read what had been written. She studied the unfamiliar hand and the even more unfamiliar words for some minutes before it struck her that her problem was not so much understanding what it said, but how this piece of paper came to have a smudge of ink on it as fresh as if it had only just been written.