The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  He drew her swiftly to his knee and was just telling her that he would prefer to put his lips to better use when her mother came down from the parlour with an empty teapot for replenishing. ‘Nora!’ roared Mrs. Campion.

  ‘Well, I must say that’s a nice way to behave and the priest in the parlour!’ But she wasn’t as cross as she pretended. She lifted up her padded silk skirt and pinned it round her waist, showing a black silk petticoat that was as grand again. ‘Move up there lads,’ she said to the boys who were having snacks at the fire until there would be space at the tables. ‘Make a space for me here and tell me the story of the bride and groom.’

  They were all so full of gallantry and tea and currant cake and port wine that they jumped to her request and left the form without balance so that her huge weight landed on the floor. Young Thomas joined the dozen young men who dashed to haul her up. ‘I’m tellin’ you,’ she gasped as she restored herself and her seven petticoats, ‘that if it had been myself John Keating had to swing in the Cashel Sets he wouldn’t forget me, either. Go on, anyway, and tell us all about it, for it has all the love and none of the poverty and heartache of a young couple that runs away and gets cut off, like the little lady that ran off with Sir Roderick O’Carroll’s foster-brother, Black Pat Ryan. She’s cut off with a vengeance; cut off from her family and cut off from them she’s married into because she’s too genteel to mix with them. Go on with your story!’

  The story was still in the telling when Thomas slipped unnoticed from the kitchen. ’Twould be powerful to linger for the dancing! The squeak of bagpipes and the preparatory scrape of fiddles were all that troubled to follow him out to the road to entice him back. But it was powerful, too, to be alone to ponder on what he had heard the bridegroom whisper to the bride as he lifted her on to the car after the ceremony.

  ‘We must have been meant for each other from the beginning,’ John Keating had murmured, ‘from before we met at the Crossroads dance; before ever we were born.’

  Could such a thing be? Could two people be destined that way for each other? True, the Keatings since the windfall of the field had become steadily prosperous; but John had been reared poor and hard. He could never have raised his eyes to a well-to-do, well-educated girl like Miss Prendergast. Yet it had happened; before Thomas’s eyes. Just as it had happened before Thomas’s eyes, the miracle of the field flying from the castle through the skies to the Keatings. And here was Thomas assisting at the Wedding Mass of one of those on whom the field had descended! A link in the strange trend of events that had started on the night of the Big Wind!

  He vaulted a high ditch. Why should the Keating wedding cause his heart to surge with a gladness that held a sense of hope?

  In the castle kitchen he was plied with questions about the wedding. When he mentioned the bridegroom’s name, Mr. Hegarty lowered the tongs and dropped the red ember it held, without lighting his pipe. Slowly he turned in the chair, revolving himself by his grip on the arms. He gazed long at Thomas and his words, when they came, were grim with outrage.

  ‘Do you mean to stand there and coolly admit that you went forth from this house; this house, I say, and in the time that belongs to the service of Sir Roderick O’Carroll, you accommodated James Keating of Poolgower by assisting at the marriage of his son?’

  Thomas’s heart quailed but immediately steadied. It was unjust to accuse him of disloyalty to the Sir. He, who alone of all of them, had been witness to the terrible thing that had happened on that night. None but he had heard the cry of anguish that had burst from their restrained and haughty master when he saw his land torn from his ground and borne from him across the sky to James Keating of Poolgower.

  Very quietly came his answer and Mrs. Stacey thought to herself that the Sir would not speak more proudly.

  ‘You all know,’ he said, ‘that the priest’s servant boy left word here on Sunday that I was to meet Ulick Prendergast at the back lodge at half five this morning to go serve a Mass at his daughter’s marriage. I was fully vested in soutane and surplice in the sacristy when I heard the name of the man she was to marry. Would you have me profane the Mass by refusing to serve? The Sir himself would not carry enmity that far.’

  The Sir himself would not look more haughty, thought the butler. There’s blood in that lad! But he merely said that there would be law and order in this kitchen from this day forth.

  13

  It was the gayest Season that Dublin had seen for forty years. The Tolka was frozen for weeks. There were skating parties every day and Lady O’Carroll was the acknowledged belle of the rink. Spectators stood to watch her as she cut intricate figures or waltzed to the music of mandolins.

  Roderick could scarcely take his eyes from her as she skimmed over the ice; lovelier, livelier even, than on that day in Antwerp when she had captured his heart. Incredible to associate this glowing girl with the melancholy being, all fears and clutchings; crying out, wild-eyed at the repairing of the castle wall lest it close her in.

  Braziers burned along the banks and hot chestnut vendors did a roaring trade. Vendors of all kinds were doing a roaring trade everywhere. Never had such money poured into the tills of Dublin shops. Never since the parliament house in College Green had closed its Ionic porticos on the last member, and the life force of a splendid nation had drained its way across the seas to another land. But now, by the dedicated life force of one man, those porticos would open soon again, those rusted mill wheels on the Tolka would turn again. Already the feeble pulse of a nation was strengthening. The word Repeal was breathed on the frosted breaths of the skaters. The messenger boys and waggoners sang the word through the streets in their glee songs. Margaret and Roderick heard the Repeal cry echoing down the Dublin hills to the accompaniment of sleigh bells. They heard it at soirées in Merrion Square; at military balls; at hunt breakfasts.

  This Repeal business, Sterrin thought, seemed to be benefiting everyone but herself. It was merely keeping her cooped up in a house that had neither park nor stable and where the only person remotely near her own age was her own mamma! How did they manage to have their knives cleaned! No knife boy and as for a turf boy! Black coal was emptied through a grating on the front steps into a cellar beside the kitchen. Not that it would have mattered about there being no turf boy, if they had a knife boy, and if the knife boy was Young Thomas. ‘Papa,’ she asked suddenly. ‘If Big John were to wash the smell of the horses off himself would he become a gentleman?’

  ‘Egad!’ said her startled papa. ‘I don’t think that Big John needs any deodorising to make him a gentleman.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that Big John, in his own way, is a gentleman already.’

  ‘By the powers of war!’

  Her papa told her sternly that little ladies did not say ‘By the powers of war’ and Sterrin argued that in that case Big John could not be a gentleman, since he always expressed surprise with that exclamation. Sir Roderick sighed. ‘Sterrin,’ he asked gently this time, ‘has anyone ever told you that little girls should be seen and not heard?’

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ she informed him. ‘Someone tells me that every day.’

  It was Sterrin’s turn to sigh. She had heard Maryjoe tell the Professed Cook that the fishmonger had made so much money supplying stinking fish to the military barracks and to all the extra festivities in connection with Repeal, that he had bought a big house in Ballsbridge, and as soon as he had the smell of the fish washed off him he would become a gentleman. It wasn’t so much about Big John that Sterrin had wanted to know, it was about Young Thomas. But, one couldn’t mention him that way to Papa. If Young Thomas, she pondered, were to wash the smell of the knives from him would he become a gentleman? But then Young Thomas did not smell of knives. And he needed no washing. His hands were never dirty and his hair was always brushed back into shiny curls and he spoke nicely. He had learned how to read and read an awful lot of books, like Trinity gentlemen. Yet he wasn’t a gentleman! She sighed again and dec
ided to leave the problem until she would be grown up.

  Her father noted the sigh and took sudden stock of his daughter’s small figure, so remotely still. Was it stillness or was it intimidation from constant repression? For her age she possessed unusual powers of observation. Had she been a boy one might have enjoyed developing such powers. But a girl, and a pretty one, had no need for any developing of the intellect. It might, heaven forbid, make her a blue-stocking!

  He turned towards the door and the sight of his wife’s charming figure dressed for an afternoon’s promenade. ‘What say you, my dear,’ he called out, ‘that we bring this little person with us. Her cheeks seem too peaked and her brain too active.’

  When her mamma consented, Sterrin, in an excess of gratitude, promised to be seen and not heard. And, as her papa escorted his ladies down the steps, one on either arm, she added for good measure. ‘And I promise, also, not to be young more than once.’

  ‘A most praiseworthy undertaking,’ her father assured her. ‘Attempts at repeating youth are rarely successful and always unattractive.’

  ‘Then do you think,’ Mamma asked him, ‘that I ought to change this bonnet? I am perhaps a leetle too old for its frivolity?’

  Sterrin suddenly experienced that shut-out feeling that came so often when she was with her parents. Papa was looking completely away from her towards his wife’s slim figure and at her girlish face beneath the new bonnet of golden chip. But it was a relief to hear him assure Mamma that she would never grow old.

  The shut-out feeling soon passed for there was a lilt in the air of Dublin these days. Other ladies promenading along the Sackville Street Mall had, like Margaret, laid aside their hoods and velvet bonnets for chip ones decked with flowers. There were flowers already in the window boxes of those mansions that were still maintained as dower houses by the great ladies of the past.

  More spectators than usual, Roderick thought, were watching the arrival of the mail coaches. The attraction was the Shrovetide brides in their unmistakable blue bonnets arriving from their country weddings for the Bed of Honour.

  ‘It is almost like watching a play,’ said Margaret. Roderick agreed. All the laughter and quips as one blue-bonneted figure after another was swung to the ground by her brand-new husband, lent a kind of ballet effect.

  He squired his ladies around about and they sauntered back in the wake of those honeymooners who were making for Mr. Gresham’s inn where the Bed of Honour would contain the irreducible minimum of fleas. At the door of the inn one bridegroom was pleading with the innkeeper. But Mr. Gresham kept shaking his head. Between the Castle season and the Repeal movement it was becoming necessary to make reservations in advance. ‘These days,’ they heard him say, ‘honeymoons should not be left to chance, unless,’ he smiled, ‘yours happens to be a runaway one.’ The bride was blushing furiously while the groom protested. Then as Mr. Gresham turned to indicate another inn, the groom’s face showed full and Roderick stopped dead. ‘I’ll wager five crowns that fellow is a Keating of Poolgower!’ he exclaimed. ‘And, ye gods! The bride is old Prendergast’s daughter. The Keating land grabber must be prospering; a honeymoon at Gresham’s no less!’

  Margaret looked from the pretty, radiant face of the bride to Roderick’s, black with anger. ‘Roderick,’ she pleaded, ‘the girl is lovely, and quite genteel. I believe that she was at school with the De Lacey girls. Don’t grudge them their happiness. Neither of these had anything to do with your land.’

  He strode on and for a second both Sterrin and her mamma lost their hold of his arm. ‘Forgive me,’ he said as he slowed for them. ‘But a man’s land is sacred; every acre of it. As sacred almost as—’ he was nearly going to say as sacred as a man’s wife but he was halted again in mid-sentence. The weirdest looking equipage came galloping towards them.

  It had all the appurtenances of a funeral coach; plumed horses, crepe-swathed driver. But when the mad rocking of the coach parted the drawn curtains, Margaret and Roderick recognised to their great delight the gloomy figure of Tom Steele, the Head Pacificator of Ireland.

  He sat with arms folded on chest; uniform covered in a long black cloak, peaked cap bending with crepe. The Repeal movement was in deep and angry mourning.

  When they reached home they found Lady Cullen’s grandnephew, Patrick, and a group of fellow students of Trinity in the drawing-room. Then the explanation for Thomas Steele’s funeral dash came out. The Whiteboys were active again. They had fired into the de Guiders’ house a few nights before, wounding Stephen de Guider and mutilating scores of his cattle. ‘Tom Steele’s animated corpse went down in the Repeal Hearse this afternoon.’

  The news revived in Margaret all the sinister associations that made her dread to return to Kilsheelin. That night there was a beating in her brain that mounted into deafening crashes. The cousins brewed the leaves of the small ivy. It was soothing, they assured Roderick, when the mind was disturbed. They didn’t say that it was listed in their herb book as ‘a cure for the madness’. But the sleep vouchsafed to Margaret by the ivy brew was vivid with the images of white-clad men with blackened faces, and with the red-dripping horror of mutilated animals. And the sounds of screaming winds and screaming cattle that awakened her were still tearing from her own throat when sleep had gone.

  Sterrin, awakened by the cries, crouched outside her parents’ bedroom. Once its door opened and she saw her mother’s face; wild-looking and unfamiliar. Papa was trying to hold her in his arms and where Mamma’s hands gripped his shoulders, the cloth of his robe was torn.

  14

  He had the whole white world to himself. The farmsteads with their roofs of golden thatch were glamorised into fairy palaces of white and gold. As he swung down the road his mood burst into song. The one that Mr. Davis had written under the inspiration of the three hundred Greeks who had died at Thermopylae, and the three Romans who had held the Sublician Bridge...

  When boyhood’s fire was in my blood,

  I read of ancient freemen.

  For Greece and Rome who bravely stood

  Three hundred men, and three men.

  A carriage came round the bend towards him. Heads craned from the windows at the sound of the magnificent voice echoing through the white stillness. Fiona De Lacey, going to her first Moonlight Ball, called excitedly over her shoulder to her sister Eithne. ‘Quick! Who is that divine young gentleman?’

  Eithne squeezed into the window space. ‘I declare I’ve never seen him before. Perhaps he is some visitor to Kilsheelin. My goodness, isn’t he handsome! And what a voice!’

  ‘Let’s have a look.’ Their brother gave them a privileged push. ‘Humph, he’s a mere youngster! Probably he’s that chap from Eton who is staying with Lord Strague’s son. Thinks he owns the bally ground he walks on!’

  The three offspring of a squireen sent their varying looks of envy, longing and admiration after the knife boy from the kitchen of Kilsheelin Castle until he was out of sight.

  ‘I’d vow,’ declared Fiona, ‘that he is going to keep a love tryst.’ She groped in her muff for the flannel-wrapped hot brick and gave herself up to romantic longings.

  Young Thomas, following his own voice and awakening the echoes, would have welcomed any other tryst than this one to scout and scavenge for news about the unromantic preludes to Kitty Dowling’s proposed marriage. Particularly this perfect night! They weren’t that badly off for news in the kitchen, he thought. If Kitty Dowling was going to marry a rich old man, that was her affair. He didn’t want any part of it. Yet he could not deny Mrs. Stacey her gossip and, therefore, found himself on his way to the Dowlings to deliver some dripping. ‘Be sure to tell them it’s our extra,’ Mrs. Stacey had warned him.

  Dowling’s dog ran out barking as Young Thomas opened the gate.

  ‘God save all here,’ said Thomas as he stepped in the house. The girl stooping over a pot on the hearth looked up, startled. She pushed back the jet black curl that had fallen over her nose and answered:

  ‘God
save you kindly.’

  Her mother, mixing a soda cake at the table, took her thumb out of the heap of soda she was about to crush in her left palm. She let her ‘God save you’ slip abstractedly through her open curiosity.

  He stated his errand with such deprecatory civility that the two women were delighted to relieve Mrs. Stacey of the problem of her superfluous dripping. ‘Musha,’ said Mrs. Dowling with great relief. ‘Sit down there at the fire and take the weight off your legs. Didn’t I think for a minnit that you were a gentleman.’

  ‘You had me fooled, too,’ said Kitty. ‘Was it you we heard singing “A Nation Once Again”?’

  ‘I’m afraid I did not realise that I was making so much noise.’

  ‘Noise is it?’ said Mrs. Dowling. ‘’Twas the grandest singing. Sure we thought it might be some of the quality going to the Moonlight Ball in the town. Though I was fearful too that it might be one of the Whiteboys. ’Tis the sort of night they would be up to their andramartins*, only there isn’t one of them could sing like that.’

  Two men, father and son obviously, came from an adjoining room. They didn’t see young Thomas sitting in the gloam of the chimney nook. ‘Kitty,’ cried her father, ‘haven’t you got your good gown on yet. And look at your hair. It is to shame us you would?’

  ‘Whisht John,’ cautioned his wife, ‘we’ve company.’ Her husband craned and recognised Young Thomas. He had seen him often in the farmyard in the castle.

  ‘God save you, you’re welcome here,’ he said, but he was abstracted. There was too much at stake tonight. Men were coming to draw down a match between his daughter and the richest man in the barony and here she was, dressed as if she were going out to feed pigs.

  ‘Go wash your face and put on your Sunday gown,’ he said to her in a low, tense voice. Kitty kicked off her low shoes and put her feet into a big, dirty pair of boots belonging to her father that were drying by the hearth.