Just as Margaret put her foot on the first step to make the ascent of the bed, a thunderous crash shook the castle. The room vibrated. Margaret pitched forward, clutching one of the bedposts. It moved and something came away in her hand. A shriek escaped her. She thought the great bed was crushing down upon her.
Candle sconces were thrown on the floor. Down the chimney came a deafening noise like a bombardment from Heaven. Something fell on the stone hearth with a resounding crash. A black cloud of smoke blew across the room. Candles were blown out and from somewhere near she heard a low moan. ‘Mrs. Mansfield,’ she called. There was no answer.
She struggled to rise and in the light of one broken candle hanging loosely in the brass arm of a big walnut sconce lying on the carpet, its candles quenched, she saw the prostrate body of Mrs. Mansfield. The housekeeper’s head was in the shadow of the open door of the wardrobe where she had turned to put away the blue gown. The girl could not see the blood.
She rose to her feet, terrified to hold on to anything lest it give way and bring her down again. The whole castle was an inferno of roaring winds. Every blast was followed by crashes from roof to cellar as if the wind were carrying out a systematic dismantling of the castle and all its proud possessions.
She stood there alone in the smoke-darkened room and suddenly her calm broke. ‘Rodereeck,’ she screamed, ‘Rod-er-ee-eek!’ She dragged out the last syllable in a thin, long-drawn pleading. But the sound was not thin enough to pierce the massive door that was voicing its own groans against the merciless battering.
At last he came. For a moment he stood aghast. Like the lawn outside, the contours of the room had changed since he last saw it. It had lost its familiar outline. The furniture that, for him, had represented form and symmetry since his earliest recollections, had somehow vanished.
Heavy objects loomed in disorder from the floor. The only object that was upright was the tall four-poster bed, its white canopies and curtains gleaming ghostly in the darkness.
He moved towards it to his wife. Then he saw her standing motionless at the far side. She had ceased to cry out. She could feel her throat torn and a sensation like blood in her mouth. Some fundamental instinct caused her to marshal her energy and emotion for the ordeal that was yet to come.
She raised her arms to him. As he drew her to him the thing she held fell from her hand. It was the fluted top of the bedpost with its gay carvings of acanthus leaves and bunches of grapes.
‘Rodereeck, do not ever leave me again,’ she whispered.
‘My poor little love. I won’t leave you and soon the doctor will be here.’ Dear God, he seemed to be repeating that assurance all night. He pressed his cheek to hers and then he became aware that Mrs. Mansfield was not in the room.
‘Where is Mrs. Mansfield? I cautioned her not to leave you.’
Margaret turned her head towards the housekeeper’s prostrate form. ‘She’s there,’ she whispered.
He looked over her shoulder. The broken candle gave a spurt of flame and this time Margaret saw the blood. It had almost covered Mrs. Mansfield’s gentle face. Margaret fell against Roderick in a dead faint.
He placed her on the bed and ran to the head of the stairs. Across the banisters he saw the servants in the hall below. A group of them surged up the stairs. He was almost relieved to see Mrs. Stacey in the vanguard. Was she not his own foster-mother? She had borne children. She would sustain Margaret. As they approached within two steps of him, a long thin whistle of wind came in an icy blast down the two open storeys of the hallway. A huge painting by Rubens—a Madonna and Child—swung from the wall and crashed at their feet.
The sound of Mrs. Stacey’s lamentations challenged the wind. ‘It’s a sign!’ she yelled. ‘When a picture falls there’ll be a death in the house. Oh! The poor young mistress!’
Roderick suppressed his urge to strangle her. There was no hope of help for Margaret from this quarter! Sternly he ordered the butler to have the cook battened downstairs and on no account to let her within sound of her Ladyship for the rest of the night.
In a few moments it seemed as if the omen was fulfilled. The servants shivered as Mrs. Mansfield’s lifeless body was borne past.
Hannah, the most responsible of the womenfolk, took over the vigil in her mistress’s room.
Sir Roderick strained his ears towards the windows that he did not dare to open. If only he could stand at a window and watch out for the doctor! The very motions of watching would be an outlet for this tension.
He kept on chafing Margaret’s wrists while Hannah dabbed vinegar on her forehead and held smelling-salts to her nose. ‘There must be something I can do,’ he told himself, but his confused brain offered no suggestion. He felt trapped. The roaring of the wind did not unnerve him, nor the crashes. But when it came in long thin screeches down the length of the denuded park and crashed against the windows with a wild laughing sound like the mocking of demons, he wanted to run and bury his ears.
Hannah had lit fresh candles and now he recognised the bulky mass that lay on the hearthstone and blocked up the entire fireplace. It was a section of the tessellated tower that had blown down the chimney, crushing the fireplace to rubble. For the first time he realised that the castle was in danger! It had stood up through the centuries against raids and wars and sieges. It had escaped the ravages of Cromwell. Now the elements had hurled themselves against its powerful battlements.
Roderick pulled desperately at the heavy masonry to free the chimney opening and clear the room of swirling smoke. From the bedside a sharp yelp of pain told him that Margaret had regained consciousness. He moved back to her.
‘Are you in pain?’ he asked her, and thought immediately what a stupid question to put to a woman in her condition!
‘It is not the pain that disturbs me. It is the shaking of the bed. I fear that I shall be thrown down and the child be killed before it is born.’
He reached out as if to steady the shaking of the huge mahogany bed that held his wife’s frail body. Oh, for the sound of hooves! But there was nothing to be heard above the fierce sound of thundering winds, the crashing of falling timber and a great wailing as though all the Banshees of the race of the Tuatha de Danaan were outside, keening, not for one soul, but for the souls of all the people in the world. Was it the end of an era? Or was the cook right? Was it the end of the world?
The bed rocked and Margaret moaned again. She thought longingly of the snug sleeping berths built into the wall, one above the other, in the room she had shared with her sister in the Belgian villa overlooking the Lake of Nightingales.
In lulls between storm and pain, she thought that Yvette was popping little hard objects like beads on to her face from the berth above. Yvette was always tossing things down at her! Margaret put up her hand and pushed away the pieces of flowers and fruit that so embellished the reeds and fluted columns of the bed. Mr. Chippendale had never envisaged a wind that could blow his carvings about like papier mâché.
A freakish wind blew round the room in all directions. With a weird whistling sound it scattered candles and ornaments again and with a long-drawn scream it loosened the carved crane from the great headboard—intended by its designer to be the emblem of care and watchfulness. It fell straight on Margaret.
It was more than she could bear. She threw herself into her husband’s arms and implored him to take her to some safe place. He held her to him and tried to think of some refuge. Some place where she could lie in safety to endure the pain and fear.
He thought of the flooded basement, the wrecked drawing-room, the bedrooms all around her, all shaking and shuddering and clanging. At last he thought of something. Because of the flooding, most of the household and refugees were now in the front hall, and the passages behind it. He called some of the men and had them remove the big Flanders tick and place it with all its bolsters and pillows on the floor in a corner of the room furthest from the window and fire. Whilst he directed the men he held Margaret in his arms and his heart
contracted as he felt her agony.
Where was Big John?
*
In the tempest Big John thanked the good God that the master had allowed him to take the Rajah. No other horse in the castle stalls could have stood up to this storm: no other horse in Ireland!
Three times they made the road, only to be driven back to the fields by the barriers of uprooted trees. The fields were completely under water. Sometimes the seventeen-and-a-half hands horse sank to his shoulders. Big John spurred him, but feared to dismount lest he be sucked under. It went to his heart to add his weight to the struggle of the horse as he floundered to lift himself and his rider from the down-suck of bog. Once, when the powerful horse could struggle no longer and it looked as if itself and rider must perish in the morass, a wind came thundering across the earth like thousands of horsemen. A rick of turf stood near the submerged horse and rider. In an instant it was tossed in the air and a shower of black sods were scattered around them for hundreds of yards. A sod struck Big John on the side of the head and he felt stunned for a moment and dropped the reins. Instantly he felt the horse lifted bodily out of the swamp. It gave a whinnying cry that chilled his veins.
Somehow they found firm footing and rode forward. And now a faint glow rose in the darkness and lit the way before them. As he drew near he saw that it was Carney’s shebeen on fire. A group of men and women stood helplessly watching the flames. As they saw the horseman approach they ran to him. Carney recognised Big John and asked him to help with the flames.
‘The lads were playing Twenty-Five for a leg of mutton and all of a sudden a great wind blew down the chimney. There was a fire on the hearth that would roast an ox an’ Felix Downey had just banged the Five of Hearts on the table when the flames flew around the room and before we knew where we wor me house was on fire.’ Then he said simply, ‘I’ve no house now, Mr. Dermody.’
Big John felt the pathos of the simple statement. ‘God knows,’ he answered, ‘I’d like to give a hand but I must go for the doctor. Her Ladyship is in a bad way. The child is coming before its time and it has taken me an hour to get this far.’
John Carney forgot his own trouble in his sympathy for the sweet young Ladyship. ‘Go on your way and God be with you,’ he said. ‘There is nothing you can do here.’ His wife and two other women crowded round the horse’s head, full of concern for her Ladyship.
‘God carry you safely,’ they cried as he urged Rajah forward.
To right and left of him cabins were levelled to the ground or on fire. Once he passed a group of naked children shivering and crying in front of the ruins of a group of cabins. And once, as the horse took a fallen tree in a jump, he fell from the saddle and his shoulder gave him fierce pain. The side of his head was aching, too, where the sod of turf had struck him. He did not notice that blood poured over his ear on to his shoulder.
Templetown was close now but all he could see was a great red glow in the sky and clouds of smoke. The wind had shifted from southwest to sheer west and was blowing louder and wilder. Showers of stones and branches blew about him incessantly—once a brick hit Rajah on the head and it reared and plunged panic-stricken. Big John held on madly, the force of his hold torturing his injured shoulder.
Dr. Mitchell lived on the Mall. Big John never remembered how he got there. It hadn’t occurred to him that midst this havoc and disaster others would have need of the doctor. When a servant told him that the doctor was not at home, the utter dismay unmanned him. He suddenly felt the pain in the side of his head and for a moment his knees sagged with weakness and exhaustion.
The doctor had gone to the barracks near the Mall where a sentry box had been lifted from the ground and blown down the street with the sentry still inside.
When Big John came upon Dr. Mitchell, he was bending over a policeman who had been helping with the sentry and had got his leg and thigh broken. The wind-borne sentry, miraculously unhurt, was helping him. A group of frightened, wailing children were waiting by the road.
‘Is it mad you are,’ the doctor said, ‘to talk of going to a confinement on a night like this?’
‘Her Ladyship is bad,’ urged Big John. ‘It’s a month before her time an’ the midwife not due from Dublin till Monday. Night or no night, the child must be loosed.’
The doctor straightened his back. ‘I’m not talking about the night, I’m talking about its victims. Listen to these children. Do you know what’s wrong with them? They’re blind.’ The force of the wind had dashed fiery ash into the eyes of the terrified, homeless children.
Dr. Mitchell never knew how near he was to being lifted bodily into Big John’s arms and brought off by force. ‘For the love of God, Dr. Mitchell, come with me! I wouldn’t face Sir Roderick. He’s counting on my word, an’ I never broke it yet.’
‘Yourself and your word,’ shouted the doctor. ‘God damn it into hell and out of hell! Can’t you see I’m wanted worse here? Anyone can have a baby.’
The sentry chuckled. He was feeling very happy about being alive. ‘I couldn’t,’ he said.
A military surgeon came on the scene to attend the sentry. He had striven through the storm from a card party outside the town. The sight of him cheered Dr. Mitchell. For the first time he noticed the blood on Big John’s face, and that he swayed as he stood.
‘Come up to the house till I look at you,’ he said more kindly. ‘We’ll tackle the baby afterwards.’
3
Margaret, lying in the comparative security of the floor, at last became aware of the storm that was rending her body. Until now the tumult and the swaying had imbued her with an all pervading fear that dulled her sense of physical pain. Now pain was in possession. Although outside the storm was approaching the highest pitch of its fury, it was in abeyance for her. As tree by tree was uprooted and the earth seemed to groan with anguish, the child within her clamoured, pain by pain, for the gift of life.
She tugged at the pretty bow beneath her chin. Her husband leaned over, glad to be of some help. But the neat bow of Mrs. Mansfield’s contriving eluded his fingers and he bungled. In a frenzy of pain Margaret tore the ribbons from the cap.
His ineptitude upset Roderick beyond all proportion. He rose from his crouching position. The noise began to beat against his brain. Panic assailed him. It must be the end of all creation. How could a man-made world survive when all nature was crashing? Why then should this futile anguish be forced upon the being he loved so dearly? The child was being born to die! Still, in birth was hope. Let the world crash! Margaret would bring new life and a new world. She was like Eve outside her lost Eden expecting, not just her first babe, but the first babe of the human race.
For a moment the storm seemed to quiet, lull, then all the winds converged about the castle and hurled themselves with a murderous roaring upon walls and roofs and windows. Roderick staggered backwards to the door and leaned there, his hands about his ears, until there was an easing. Then quietly he slipped from the room to see what fresh disaster had befallen.
In the front hall servitors and tenants were clinging together for support and comfort. Children still wailed but the injured child lay in a half-fainting stupor. He splashed his way to the back door. He must see what had happened outside! He must get a respite from this prisonhouse of storm! But the opened door yielded nothing but darkness and rain and icy, screaming winds. Above the wind he detected a scream more eerie still. It was the screaming of horses in terror. In despair he turned inward only to hear the worst scream of all, the first long-drawn scream of abandon echoing down through the spaces from his wife’s room.
As he reached her door Hannah came to him. ‘For God’s sake, your Honour, Sir, will you send someone for Mag Miney. ’Tis gettin’ terrible an’ I’m no use. ’Tis no easy birth.’
‘Surely you don’t mean that old witch near the front lodge?’
‘The same one, your Honour. She’s a great hand at childbedding. Her Ladyship’s past carin’, Sir Roderick. Let you go in God’s name!’
What Hannah said was true. Margaret was past caring. And she had ceased to be his Margaret. Her face was purple and swollen. Her fine nostrils were distended and coarsened. Her sensitively curved mouth was a maw from which animal sounds emerged.
Young Thomas begged to be allowed to accompany his master on the ride to the midwife. It was a proud moment for the boy when the groom hoisted him up in front of Roderick and placed a burning turf sod on a stave in his hand to guide them.
Sir Roderick knew every inch of his estate but Thomas knew it better. At least until tonight.
Showers of sparks from the smouldering sod made a trail of light for them. It gave a thin, flickering light for a few yards. ‘The path is gone,’ Thomas said, peering forward. ‘It was there this evening and I coming back from Lady Cullen’s.’
‘Were you at Lady Cullen’s today?’ Close as they were together he had to bend his ear to the boy’s mouth to hear his reply.
‘’Twas something your own Ladyship was sending her for “little Christmas”. A grand little box from Belgium and a bit of chaney in it.’ Thomas had thought the handsome box grander than the china ornament it contained.
Little Christmas! Of course! This was the feast of the Epiphany. Or had been. They must be well into the small hours of another day. Roderick fumbled inside his cloak for his watch and held it towards the light. Half-past two and the night stretched long in front of them though they had lived through Eternity.
There was no need to skirt the estate wall. It was no longer there. The horse was stumbling over the big stones that had held the privacy of the estate in their long-knit framework. Once it baulked and shivered. The dancing sparks showed them a dead cow.
‘There’s her house,’ said Thomas and as the lanthorn picked out a house he crossed himself. Sir Roderick saw the gesture.
‘If you are afraid to go in for her I shall go myself.’
‘No, indeed, your Honour, it is just a habit I have when I pass her house. I’m afraid of no human being tonight. What can anyone do to you fornint that big wind?’
The Big Wind Page 3