The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  His master’s face relaxed into its first smile for many an hour at the unconscious irony of the lad’s logic.

  ‘It is better that I stay with the horse,’ he said. Young Thomas jumped down and disappeared in the wake of the sparks from the burning sod.

  A moment later an old crone stood beside the horse and peered up at its rider. ‘Is it a thing that the great lady of Kilsheelin Castle has need of Mag Miney this night?’ He could not see her face but there was mockery in the cackling voice.

  ‘Is it true that you have skill in childbirth?’ he demanded coldly.

  ‘Aye, ’tis true an’ many a one has blessed that skill without any big wind blowing. Oh I...’ he cut her short.

  ‘Come with me at once.’

  Thomas helped her up behind the Sir. Her body reeked vilely. There was a stench from the basket that she carried that made him want to retch. She was chuckling away to herself at the idea of riding behind the Lord of Kilsheelin when suddenly her chuckling ceased. The wind was veering from southeast to southwest. Suddenly a fierce blast came from the west and the two winds met in a whirlwind that drove the breath from horse and riders. The horse was flung back on its haunches and brought the old woman to the ground. The boy was on the ground helping the maddened horse. The master dismounted and pulled on the reins with all his strength.

  Then it happened. A wild whistling filled the air and before their eyes the field in front of them rose from the earth and soared into the sky. It paused motionless for an instant, suspended in the grasp of the whirlwind, then soared away into the western darkness; acres of unbroken sod and grass floating through the sky like a magic carpet.

  The three stood speechless, the little knife boy and the witch and the Lord of the soil, their eyes straining upwards through the darkness. Suddenly a cry burst from the man, ‘My land, my land! It is not possible!’

  The boy clutched him, forgetful of rank. ‘We’re left behind,’ he wailed. ‘The whole world is going up into heaven and we are left behind.’

  Behind them the old woman was keening and mumbling. ‘You have angered them. Sir Roderick O’Carroll. There was Hungry Grass in that field. Grass where fairies hold their revels. They make hungry those who walk upon it. You walked on it with your proud feet and you cut down the ring of hawthorn trees. Never before have sperrits taken a man’s land. I wish you no harm, but no man can prosper after the sperrits have taken his land.’

  ‘Shut up, you old harpy!’ Roderick struggled with the horse that was pawing for a footing, its hind legs on solid ground, its front lunging over the brink where the field had disappeared.

  At last they reached the stable yard. When the old woman entered the kitchen the people there edged away from her contact. They edged further still when she placed her basket on the table and drew from it a mess of unsalted butter, rancid and green. She had herbs as well and took them to the pot that hung over one of the fires that smoked without blazing.

  Mrs. Stacey turned the fanwheel to make a flame and watched every movement the old creature made. When she threw a handful of raspberry leaves into the water the cook was reassured. She grew fearful again when strange leaves with strange smells were added.

  Sir Roderick came in from the stable and stopped short at the sight of the old woman bending over the fire. ‘Why has she not been taken at once to her Ladyship?’ he demanded.

  ‘She’ll have need for what I’m making. I’m ready now if you’ll show me the way.’ She poured the brew into a jug and taking up the foul butter mess she followed the Sir.

  ‘She’ll put a spell on the child if ever she brings it to the world,’ hissed the big cook.

  The lodge-keeper’s wife nodded agreement. ‘She’ll leave a changeling in its place. It’s not the first time she has done it.’ Mrs. Stacey drew her chair near her and looked fearfully towards the door.

  ‘The Sir can scoff at the prophecies but did he ever think he’d live to see the day when Mag Miney would bring home the heir of Kilsheelin?’

  ‘’Tis the truth you’re sayin’, Mrs. Stacey. But did any of us think we’d live to see a wind like the one that’s blowing tonight?’

  ‘Mrs. Murray, acquanie,’ the cook bent towards her and lowered her voice, ‘the prophecies are comin’ back to me. There was some I couldn’t remember.’ She enumerated on her fingers. ‘The graves will open...’ Mrs. Murray nodded, ‘...that has happened without a doubt.’ The cook pressed down her index finger. ‘The Russians will water their horses on the shores of Lough Neagh, and...’ she pressed on her big second finger until it cracked, ‘women will walk the earth in trousers!’

  Mrs. Murray gasped. ‘God forgive you, Mary Anne Stacey, Saint Columcille had something better to do with his time than making that kind of prophecy. I can see reason in the graves opening. It has happened before an’ I’ve seen the tombstones meself tonight. The Russians might come too. Didn’t the Danes come? And Cromwell? And Strongbow? Maybe the Russians will have a try too. Much good may it do them! But if the world won’t end until womankind walks the face of the earth in—throusers! Then you can take it from me now, Mary Anne Stacey, the world will never end!’ She shook the water from her feet, gathered up her basket of chirping chickens and their squawking mother and went from the kitchen.

  In the bedroom Sir Roderick found his wife kneeling on the Flemish tick, unrecognisable. The frilly nightcap was gone. The glossy hair was bedraggled and dank. The puffed face shone with the dew of labour. The old woman held the jug to her lips. ‘Take this, asthore!’ The girl turned wild eyes towards her. ‘Maman!’ she gasped. But she saw only a dirty old woman with a lump of rancid butter and a jug.

  Sir Roderick moved down to the drawing-room but turned back at the sight of its havoc. He went on to the dining-room. It did not seem so bad here. At least in the darkness there was form and line. He called for lights and as the footman lit candles he felt relief to see the long table and the familiar chairs reflecting the light in their dark surfaces of Domingo mahogany. He never liked Domingo mahogany. It was a post-Cromwellian innovation. He had intended to replace it with something lighter. Then he remembered his treeless land and the field that had blown away before his eyes. My God! What a fantasy! Did it really happen? He would know tomorrow, if tomorrow ever came. He was too tired to think of tomorrow. He stretched his arms out on the table and laid his head on them. In a moment he was asleep.

  It was half-past five when the footman called to say that Big John had arrived with the doctor. The doctor had gone straight upstairs. Roderick hurried up and as he knocked at the bedroom door he realised that it was the first time that night that he had done so. There was no wind roaring outside.

  Dr. Mitchell opened the door. ‘I’m sorry that I could not be here to deliver the child but everything seems to be all right. My God! What are you doing?’ There was a roaring now and it was not the wind. He strode across the room and knocked from old Mag’s hand the butter she was about to use to heal the lacerated tissue. He turned back to Sir Roderick. ‘If I was not in time to deliver the child, thank God I’ve been in time to save your wife from childbed fever. Stinking butter! No wonder wimmen die! Get out!’ he bawled.

  And then from the bed came a sound that gladdened the ears of the man who had lived through a night of fearsome sounds. It was the sound of a newborn baby’s cry. He made a quick move in its direction but the doctor waved him back.

  ‘Leave us a while. There is nothing to worry about.’

  Roderick’s step was light as he moved down the stairs. As he passed old Mag muttering and groaning with the effort of the unaccustomed steps his heart smote him. It was sorry treatment to give the poor creature who had brought his child through storm into the world. He paused to give her a gold piece, then hurried from her blessings; and her smell.

  As she came chuckling into the kitchen, Mrs. Stacey stopped turning the fanwheel on the fires that now blazed, all eight of them.

  ‘Is there anything in it yet?’ she asked Mag. Big John put down t
he mug of tea he was sipping.

  Mag placed the butter with tender care into her basket while the kitchen reeked. ‘To be sure there is. I done what I came to do.’

  ‘Praises be to God,’ said the coachman, rising to his feet. ‘Is it an heir or a child?’

  ‘’Tis a child that’s in it.’

  Mrs. Stacey dropped the wheel handle and straightened up in her chair. ‘Welcome be the holy will of God,’ she said with pious disappointment. ‘Sure, isn’t it better than nothing?’

  A bell swung wildly in the row that hung near the door. Before its tongue could clatter the Sir himself gave tongue from the library door. ‘Hegarty! The flag!’

  The butler came shivering and blinking from his pantry. He had slept through the last episode of the drama. The flag! Céad míle curses! The heir was born and he not standing by to hoist the flag!

  But there was no getting to hoist it. The turret stairs were blocked with part of the turret itself. None of the men could squeeze past; not even the gossoons, Mickey-the-turf and Johnny-the-buckets. ‘Where’s that new gossoon, the knife boy?’ the butler demanded. ‘Surely he is small enough to make his way to the turret.’

  Young Thomas was found stretched across two wooden chairs under a big rug. The Sir, it seems, had noticed him there when he passed with the doctor and had bidden someone to put a covering over him. The old-fashioned man’s ‘trusty’ that had trailed about him the day a few weeks back when a respectable-looking woman had brought him to Mrs. Mansfield, trailed from him again as he edged his small body past the massive piece of turret that jammed the stairway. Young Thomas raised the standard of the O’Carrolls and watched it float high above the broken turret. He could see the family arms and the picture of the hawk and although he couldn’t read he knew that the words beneath were An seabac abú, the rallying cry of the O’Carrolls—The hawk to victory!

  The storm, like the lady of the castle, was spent. The air was still, a sigh of a breeze scarcely unfurled the folds of Saint Patrick’s blue. Down in the great yard, workers and homeless tenants gazed up in awe. The wonder of it surged through the shivering Thomas. They were looking up at the flag that none but he could raise! The newcomer to the castle! Its smallest and youngest member except for that other newcomer, the girl-child whose birth he was proclaiming. He turned suddenly and edged down again. From the turret entrance he could see the hall door standing open. There was no one around. Instead of going down the servants’ stairway he came forward and put a timid bare foot on the top step of the grand staircase. Fearfully he craned over each shoulder then with a swoop he bunched the old ‘trusty’ up under his armpit and skeeted down the stairs.

  He walked backwards over the gravel to the lawn, his face straining upwards intent on viewing his handiwork, oblivious of Roderick who stood gazing at the flag. Roderick looked down at the small boy who appeared suddenly beside him, draped in a garment belonging to the past century and to God knows whom else. About three feet of brown frieze fell in a train behind and left two little skinny legs unhampered and unsheltered. ‘So it’s you again!’ said Roderick.

  Young Thomas gave a frightened glance sideways and was reassured. He resumed his rapt contemplation of his achievement. This wasn’t any of the staff hierarchy. It was only the Sir, Godlike and remote and unlikely to threaten a body with a skelp on the lug. ‘Yes, your Honour’s Sir, it’s me,’ he said; ‘and,’ he continued, pointing an arm upward and letting another few yards of the frieze flop to the grass, ‘it was me that raised that flag. Not a one in the whole castle but me was able to do it. Only for me the world’d never know that we have a little colleen-uasail—a girl of the nobility inside in the castle.’

  Sir Roderick looked down at the grotesquerie of brown frieze and muddy flesh that had travelled with him in some perimeter of space and time while the world had fought against the heavens for its existence. A figment of the night’s fantasy! He handed Thomas a crown piece.

  The child looked down at the big coin and, like his master, wondered if this too were a figment of the night. Only he didn’t think in terms of figments. He wondered if his Honour’s Nobility had been having a swig of the bottle on account of the great event. ‘You haven’t a sup taken, your Honour’s Sir?’

  His Honour told him not to be so demmed impertinent or he would take back the money.

  ‘It’s not—imperance—your Honour’s Sir. Gentlemen throws money in drink; but not this much. Look at the size of it!’ It covered the small hand he held up. He also held up two fan-fringed eyes so blue that they held Sir Roderick’s gaze. ‘I wouldn’t like to take—to take, an—advantage.’ The big word was hauled up with a jerk from mud squelched toes.

  ‘Thank you,’ his master replied. ‘But I shouldn’t be too conscientious about—advantages. Just grab them.’

  Young Thomas grabbed so tightly that he let his ‘trusty’ fall where it would. ‘I will, your Honour’s Sir,’ he breathed, and shot off, but stumbled over the ‘trusty’. Out of its folds a muffled voice insisted, ‘Oh then, indeed and indeed I will.’

  Roderick watched amused as the small object scuttled away cautiously ahead of its own fanned-out tail, like some little brown thing of the earth; not a fox, not with those blue and candid eyes; a squirrel perhaps, or maybe, a leprechaun.

  4

  Men worked furiously to make a passage for the Sir as he rode out to seek a foster-mother for his daughter. This mission, he thought, was all of a piece with the mess of unreadiness into which nature had plunged all of them. He chucked his horse to order. There was no need for it to take fright at the little doe whose gentle eyes pleaded timidly from a lifeless body.

  Everything had been so neatly planned. Months ago he had arranged the novel luxury of a Professed Nurse-Tender trained at Dr. Mosse’s famous lying-in hospital beside Dublin’s Rotunda Gardens. No handy woman for his lovely Margaret! Instead, she had been delivered by the black arts—and hands of an old witch who was, even now, standing at the gates of the castle watching the men remove the topmost tree that blocked the entrance, and boasting of her role in the night’s drama.

  Roderick cleared the underneath tree and cantered down the carriage road. He halted in sudden amazement. How could I possibly have gone astray he wondered! He had turned into a tiny boreen known as the Wolf Track. Long after the last wolf had been exterminated from the Tipperary hills at the turn of the previous century the Kilsheelin O’Carrolls had kept alive the rumour of the wolves that had originally beaten this track. The scare intimidated all unwarranted approach to the black density of forests that screened the existence of the Catholic O’Carrolls from hostile powers. But now Roderick felt disorientated. Trees and familiar landmarks had vanished overnight. He found himself looking at strange vistas. He could see the windings of the four cross roads that met at Kilsheelin Cross. He could glimpse, for the first time, the distant turrets of Strague Castle.

  Strague Castle was one of the survivors of the thirteen castles of the O’Carrolls. Its branch had held through the centuries a recurring record of treachery. Or was it, Roderick reflected, just practical expediency? When Cromwell rode up to its door the owner had played the game. A smiling welcome and, ‘My castle is at your disposal Lord Cromwell’. It worked. When Cromwell rode out of the gate again with his sword and his Bible and his wart and with his soldiery all refreshed, Calvagh O’Carroll was still in possession of Strague Castle.

  A century later, while another owner was serving in Austria, his youngest son turned Protestant and claimed thereby the castle. From a nearby cabin where the absent owner had spent his early childhood in the old fosterage custom of the nobility, his peasant foster-brother set out for Austria to warn him. O’Carroll hastened home but was denied admission to his castle by his own son. He was forced to shelter in the cabin of his fosterage. A few months later, broken-hearted, he died there in the arms of his foster-brother.

  Again, just thirty-eight years ago this very month, when the Irish Parliament was voted out of Ireland by the in
famous Act of Union with the British Parliament, the father of the present owner voted against his country. As a bribe for betraying it into its present beggary and decay he had been given the peerage of Strague, suitably financed.

  Yet, Roderick reflected, not all Strague O’Carrolls had been traitorous. Generations of its occupiers had averted the eyes of authority from the castle of the Catholic O’Carrolls living their hidden lives behind a wooden curtain of almost impenetrable forests. Planter statesmen and lawyers, vague about the land they were seizing and reparcelling, looked no further than Strague Castle with its loyal Protestant inmates. They remained unaware of the life that teemed beyond that wooden curtain which each succeeding generation trained to grow taller and denser and blacker about the hidden castle of Kilsheelin. From beneath the leafy folds its sons had slipped out by night to Europe, fighting on its battlefields, Spain, Austria, France, Holland; basking in the glitter of its court life; from time to time they would return, along this very track, bringing with them the gossip of the countries of their affiliation, their languages and their culture.

  He turned in his saddle. Like a woman surprised half-dressed, Kilsheelin Castle was standing partly exposed. Never before from this point, had one been able to glimpse even a stone of its structure. Now the remaining trees hung about it, brown and dishevelled like inadequate garments. Like the brown trusty around the urchin who had raised that blue flag fluttering there above a broken turret. My God what an indignity! That miniature ragamuffin! This storm had certainly acted like a dredger; casting strange elements up through the cool, proud surface of Roderick’s life.

  The flag recalled him to the existence of his premature daughter and her needs. These treeless vistas had beguiled him down vistas of time! The man he had come to see hailed him from the roof he was repairing and started to climb down. Black Pat Ryan was Sir Roderick’s foster-brother. The custom of fosterage had died out before Roderick’s birth but when business had taken the elder Sir to the Continent after Roderick’s birth, he took his fragile wife with him and left the baby at the house of Black Pat’s father to be nursed by his widowed sister, Mrs. Stacey. Mrs. Stacey had lost her baby as well as her husband, so that Roderick received the clamouring tide of her love. He had grown up with her dark-skinned, black-haired nephew, Pat; together they raided the castle orchard, poached its streams, and when they encountered Sir Dominic, the heir would touch his forelock to him as Black Pat did, not realising that the grand gentleman in the carriage or on horseback was his own father. When the time came for Roderick to return to the castle, Mrs. Stacey, rather than be parted from her foster-son, took service there.