Kitty lay luxuriating in the bath for such a long time that Mrs Blythe must have worried because she knocked on the door to check that she hadn’t drowned. After her bath she dressed for supper and went downstairs. The house was large, but Grace’s raffish charm and flirtatious personality ensured that it was cosy in spite of its grandeur. Kitty ate alone in the little sitting room with its bookcases, soft sofa and armchairs. The fire had been lit and her place laid at the round table, in the middle of which was a bright arrangement of red flowers. The food tasted scrumptious. As she forked the chicken and mashed potato into her mouth she realized how hungry she was. The meat was tender and succulent, the gravy full of flavour, not like the meals she’d had to endure in Ireland. Regretfully, she scraped the last remains of it off her plate and rose to go to bed. When her head hit the pillow she was too tired to miss home. Too emotionally exhausted to even think of Jack. Kitty closed her eyes and allowed the sweetness of sleep to release her from her troubles and the uncertainty of her future.
In the morning she was awoken by Mrs Blythe knocking on her door. ‘Good morning, Miss Deverill. I’m sorry to wake you but Lady Deverill is in the hall. She asked me to tell you right away.’
‘What time is it, Mrs Blythe?’ Kitty asked sleepily.
‘Eleven o’clock, Miss Deverill.’
‘Good Lord, I’ve slept the morning away.’
‘You have indeed. It’s a lovely sunny day,’ she said, opening the curtains. ‘Perhaps you might enjoy a walk around the park later?’
‘That would be very nice,’ said Kitty. ‘But first I think I’d better go and see my mother.’
‘I’ve laid up breakfast in the morning room. It’s a lovely room, overlooking the gardens. Lady Rowan-Hampton likes to watch the birds. I’ll ask Lady Deverill to wait for you in there.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Blythe,’ said Kitty, her stomach already cramping with nerves at the thought of seeing her mother.
She dressed in the clothes Mrs Blythe had put out for her. She noticed her travelling clothes had been taken away to be washed. She’d have to ask for the rest of her wardrobe to be sent over from Ireland as soon as possible. When she had made herself presentable she left her room and walked downstairs, wondering what she was going to tell her mother about the baby – she certainly couldn’t tell her the truth.
Maud stood in the morning room in an ivory-coloured dress with a fashionably low waist and tidy black hat. Her blonde hair had been cut to her jaw line which made her face look much more severe, but most notable were her scarlet lips now drawn into a tight, thin line. ‘Hello, Mama,’ said Kitty, taking a seat at the table where her place had been set with a pretty blue mat and matching china. She poured herself a cup of tea. ‘Would you like one?’
‘I won’t be staying long,’ said Maud.
‘Forgive me, but I’m ravenous.’ Kitty helped herself to a piece of toast and began to butter it.
‘So you’ve fled Ireland with a baby.’ Maud was too agitated for pleasantries. ‘Whose baby is it and why did you have to bring it? Couldn’t you have stayed in Ireland? Can you imagine what people are going to say? They’ll think it’s yours. There’ll be a terrible scandal. How on earth do you hope to marry with a child? No man wants to raise another man’s child. For goodness’ sake, Kitty, have you no thought for anyone else but yourself?’ Kitty calmly bit into her toast. ‘Well? What have you got to say for yourself?’
‘Have you quite finished?’
Maud looked startled and sat down. ‘I need answers, Kitty, and you’re going to give them to me.’
At that moment a butler appeared. ‘Good morning, Miss Deverill. Would you like eggs this morning?’
‘I’d love two boiled eggs, please,’ Kitty replied, feeling more confident.
‘Is there anything I can get you, Lady Deverill?’ he asked Maud.
‘Nothing, no, I’m not staying,’ she answered. When he had left the room she looked at Kitty expectantly. ‘Well?’
Kitty sighed. ‘I’ve left Ireland, Mama, because Papa won’t have the baby in the house.’ It wasn’t the whole truth, but Kitty couldn’t tell her mother the real reason she had abandoned her home.
‘Quite right, too. You should have sent it to an orphanage or something. But instead you bring it here, where it’s going to tarnish our good reputation. You know, your brother might have found a bride but this . . .’ She struggled a moment with her emotions. ‘This might just ruin it. Have you considered your family?’
‘I’ve considered the child,’ Kitty replied flatly.
‘Whose child is it? It can’t be yours.’
‘No, he’s not mine biologically, but he belongs to me.’
‘What rot! It doesn’t belong to you. You can’t just take someone else’s child and pass it off as your own.’
‘He’s not just anybody’s child, Mama.’
Maud wasn’t listening, she was so busy calculating how she could get rid of the problem as fast and discreetly as possible. ‘I will arrange for it to go somewhere. There are plenty of institutions in England where it will be very well looked after.’
‘He’s not going anywhere.’
Maud turned on her fiercely. ‘Why? What’s this child to you?’
Just as the butler appeared with the eggs, the maid who had travelled with Kitty from Ireland entered with the baby, wrapped in a cotton blanket. Maud stood up and peered into the face of the child. His red hair and pale grey eyes made her recoil in horror. She turned to Kitty. ‘But this child is yours?’
‘No, he’s not mine.’
‘But he has your hair and your eyes.’
‘He has Grandma’s hair and Grandma’s eyes. As do I.’
Maud turned back to the child, a white hand clutching her chest as if she was finding it hard to breathe. ‘Then . . . then . . . it’s . . .’
‘Yes, it’s Papa’s baby,’ Kitty told her coolly, feeling a sense of gleeful satisfaction at the shocked expression on her mother’s face.
Maud swallowed hard. ‘Take it away,’ she hissed.
‘Thank you, Hetty. I’ll come and see him when Lady Deverill’s gone.’
‘Excuse me, Miss Deverill, but what’s he called?’ Hetty asked.
Kitty considered her question a moment. Maud sank into a chair. ‘Jack,’ Kitty replied firmly. ‘He’s called Jack. Master Jack Deverill.’
Chapter 24
New York, America, 1922
Bridie had to wait on the ship for two days before a small ferry boat drew up to take her and the other third-class passengers to Ellis Island for immigration processing. The first- and second-class passengers had long gone and Bridie had to endure lengthy queues and hours of medical and legal inspections before she was at last claimed by Mrs Bessie McGuire, the housekeeper of a friend of Lady Rowan-Hampton, and passed off as her niece. On the manifest, the official paperwork given to the immigration officers by the steamship’s crew, Bridie’s name had been misspelt as ‘Bridget’. That was the name Mr Deverill had called her. To Bridie it seemed like fate, so she didn’t bother to correct it. From now on she’d start a new life with a new identity. She’d make something of herself. ‘Will I see you again, Bridie?’ Eileen from Co. Wicklow asked.
Bridie shook her head. ‘This is goodbye, Eileen,’ she replied and left Ellis Island and her past behind her.
Bessie McGuire had emigrated with her husband twenty years before and settled in New York with so many others, like them, who had fled Ireland in search of a better life. Her late husband, Paddy, had been a construction worker, building roads, train tracks and skyscrapers in the city until one day the scaffolding had given way beneath him and he had perished in the fall. Bessie’s children were grown-up now and working – her eldest son had gone as far as Texas to labour on a ranch. Bridie liked Mrs McGuire immediately. She was warm, exuberant and efficient, and she didn’t ask too many questions. All she wanted to know was whether Ireland still looked the same.
Bridie had never seen anything like New York
. Not in her wildest dreams had she envisaged buildings as magnificent as the skyscrapers that soared so high the tops disappeared into cloud like mountain peaks. So many of the buildings in Dublin had been spoiled by years of violence; here they were grand and foreign to Bridie’s unworldly eye. Having never been in a car before, she sat rigidly in the back seat beside Mrs McGuire, gripping the leather for fear of falling out, while the chauffeur, sent by Mrs McGuire’s employer, drove into the heart of Manhattan. She gazed through the glass and felt the stirring of hope rising out of the ashes of her desolation.
‘You’re a lucky girl, Bridget. My boss, Mrs Hamer, has found you a position,’ Mrs McGuire told her as they entered the tall brown-stone house by the servants’ door below the sidewalk.
‘Already?’
‘Yes, indeed. You’ll be starting tomorrow.’
Bridie should have been happy with the news, but her body ached with fatigue. She longed to put her head on a pillow and sleep for a week. ‘Who will I be working for?’
Mrs McGuire stopped in the corridor and her face was full of sympathy. ‘An elderly widow called Mrs Grimsby, Mrs Eliot Grimsby. She’s a very wealthy woman but I won’t pretend she’s agreeable.’ Bridie must have looked anxious for Mrs McGuire was quick to reassure her. ‘She gets through maids like my Paddy used to get through socks, but you’re a strong girl, I don’t doubt it. We Irish are as tough as old leather, so we are. With a bit of feeding you’ll feel as good as new. Come now, let’s give you something to eat then a bath and you’ll be as right as rain, so you will.’
Later Bridie lay in bed almost too exhausted to sleep. She could hear loud snoring from the bedroom next door. One of the male servants, whom she hadn’t met, grunted like a pig. For a moment it reminded her of home and she suffered a sharp pang of longing. She hadn’t seen her mother since the previous summer when she had said goodbye before leaving for Dublin. She had lied about the job there when all she had wanted was to tell her the truth about her pregnancy. She had wanted her mother’s sympathy and love, not Lady Rowan-Hampton’s cold, efficient making of arrangements as if she was an inconvenience Mr Deverill wanted to be rid of as quickly as possible. Bridie had seen Michael. He had waited for her around the corner of Lady Rowan-Hampton’s house in Dublin and discovered her extended belly and her lie. ‘You little whore! I knew there was more to it!’ he had exclaimed, dragging her down a side street by her hair and pressing her against the wall with such violence she had panicked and told him that Mr Deverill had raped her. She hadn’t considered the consequences. She knew what Michael was capable of but she prayed he’d let the matter go – after all, he had far more important things to concern himself with like freeing Ireland from British rule. Michael said he would tell the family that she’d gone to America. ‘You can write to Mam from there,’ he had said. ‘But one word about your pregnancy and you’ll be sorry, do you understand? I won’t have you hurting her with tales of rape.’ Just before she had hurried back to the house he had called after her, ‘And don’t tell anyone you saw me. I was never here.’
She wondered where he was now. Whether they were all in the farmhouse together, believing her safe and well and making a new life for herself in America. Perhaps her mother was in her rocking chair, darning, her grandmother putting twigs under the bastible and smoking herring up the chimney for their supper. Perhaps Sean and Michael were huddled around the table with their friends, drinking stout and plotting. Maybe Jack was there, too. She closed her eyes and let her mind settle on his gentle face that smiled at her with encouragement. From there she took herself off into the depths of her memories to the time they had hunted for a frog in the river with Kitty and Celia. To the games they had played on the wall. To the tender looks Jack had given her during Mass when Father Quinn had wagged his long finger at his transgressing congregation and threatened them all with the fires of Hell. Those days had been happy. She knew that now because unhappiness had given her perspective. Those days had been truly happy.
She thought of Kitty, her dearest friend, the woman Jack really loved, and her vision distorted like a pool of water disturbed by the tossing of a pebble. Did Kitty miss her? Did she ever think of her? Or had she forgotten her secret friend below stairs? Bridie rolled over in bed and banished all thoughts of Ireland. She didn’t think of her baby, either, or dare to wonder how he was faring in the Convent of Our Lady Queen of Heaven. The shock of giving birth to two babies, one who had lived and its twin who had died, was too much to withstand. The nuns had spirited the dead one away before she had even laid eyes on it. All they would tell her was that she had been a girl – a poor little girl who was now in God’s keeping. Just as the aching for her lost babies became unbearable Bridie shut that door. She shut it forever and vowed to herself that she would never look back. She listened to her breathing instead until sleep overcame her at last and she sank into the blissful relief of oblivion.
The following morning she was awoken early by Mrs McGuire. She dressed in the uniform she had worn at Castle Deverill and later in Dublin, until her belly had swollen so big she hadn’t been able to wear it. It was creased from being at the bottom of the suitcase Lady Rowan-Hampton had given her, but at least it was clean. After a hasty breakfast of porridge and tea she walked with Bessie to Mrs Eliot Grimsby’s house on Fifth Avenue, which was a pleasant stroll through a large and beautiful park where uniformed nannies pushed babies in prams and stylishly dressed ladies walked their dogs. When Bridie saw the house she was seized with panic. It was a Gothic, fanciful mansion built out of dark-brown stone with an ominous-looking round tower rising out of the roof, capped with what Bridie thought resembled a witch’s hat. ‘Don’t be put off by the house,’ Mrs McGuire said as she climbed the steps to the large double doors. ‘It’s quite informal inside, I assure you.’ Bridie stood beside her and trembled. This was her destiny. This was going to be her home now. She was Bridget Doyle and Bridget Doyle was not afraid.
An aged butler opened the door and asked them to wait in the hall. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll be getting back to my work,’ said Mrs McGuire. She turned to Bridie. ‘You’ll be all right, now, Bridget. Come and see me when you’ve settled in and tell me how you’re getting on. May God go with you and keep you safe.’
‘Thank you for taking care of me, Mrs McGuire,’ said Bridie, suddenly afraid of being left alone in this eerie house.
‘You have a friend in me now, so don’t be frightened. Just work hard. Don’t forget that poverty waits at the door of idleness.’ With that she was out of the door and down the steps before Bridie could grab her by the sleeve and beg her not to leave.
Bridie waited in the vast hall, sitting on a hard sofa, staring at the shiny black-and-white chequerboard floor and the elaborate stone fireplace opposite, above which a portrait of a porcine man in a top hat and winged collar looked imperiously down from a great height. The house smelt of rotten flowers and stale air. There were windows on the wall which backed onto the grand wooden staircase to her right but none of them was open. She heard the regular ticking of a grandfather clock and the distant noise of the city outside, but the house itself was shrouded in a heavy silence like a church where one was afraid to speak for fear of waking the dead.
At length the butler returned. ‘Mrs Grimsby will see you now,’ he said and began to walk slowly upstairs, his stiff knees creaking on the steps. Bridie followed, anxious about the lady who went through maids as fast as Mrs McGuire’s late husband went through socks. She presumed it was a lot.
Down a corridor, at the back of the building, Bridie was shown into a sun parlour with a barrelled glass roof and enormous green plants in brightly coloured pots. In the midst of the jungle a voluminous lady sat on a wide chair, stroking a fat cat with fingers that resembled pink sausages glittering with gems. She wore a frilly white cap and a long black dress that reached the ground. Her bosom was so big it was as if her chins grew out of it, and dangling like a helpless climber over a precipice was a large gold locket on a chain. ‘
Let me see you,’ she said as the butler quietly retreated. Bridie stepped before her and bobbed a curtsy. Mrs Grimsby inhaled through her nose and slowly ran her hooded eyes over Bridie as if inspecting a horse. ‘Turn around.’ She waved a bejewelled hand. Bridie did as she was told. ‘Well, we’ll have to change that uniform and we will cut your hair, you won’t have time to put it up, and you’re much too thin. I could eat you alive and no one would be any the wiser.’
‘Yes, my lady.’
‘I’m not a lady so you will call me “madam”. You’re not a madam so I will call you Bridget.’ She moved her fingers to a silver button on the arm of her chair and pressed it. ‘Miss Ferrel will show you to your room and explain how I like things done. I hope you’re stronger than the last one, and less sensitive. I cannot abide tears. You’re not a crier, I hope.’
‘No, madam.’
‘Good. I trust you can read and write?’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘Reading and writing is imperative. As you can see my house is full of books. I love books above everything else in the world. They are my treasures and you are not to touch them unless I ask you to. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘And you mend and sew and clean and everything else?’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘Mrs Hamer told me you were a lady’s maid for Lady Deverill of Castle Deverill in Cork, is that correct?’
Bridie didn’t bother to correct her. ‘Yes, madam.’
Songs of Love and War Page 28