The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  By dawn Thomas was exhausted. But his work was accomplished. He had helped to stem the vanguard. The posters would do the rest. They were up now in every village within twenty miles of Dublin.

  As he turned for Dublin he heard his name called and his tired eyes strained through a mask of dust to recognise a lad from Upper Kilsheelin. It was Tim Lonergan, the well-to-do farmer’s son whom he had met at the Prendergast–Keating wedding.

  ‘Why should we go back?’ demanded Tim furiously. ‘Why shouldn’t we fight them? There is an army of us on the march.’

  ‘Hush,’ said Thomas who knew now that this gruelling vigilance of Wardens had been to forestall any clash between the marchers and the military. ‘Is it with your peace twigs you’d fight the army that’s mustered back there with cannon and rifle and ships of war? Don’t speak of fighting. That is all they want. One shot will bring down the avalanche.’

  ‘Avalanche!’ Tim spat the word. He threw his withered peace bough from him and faced for home without a word of farewell.

  18

  Thomas had almost forgotten the incident with the police chief on the day before the rally that never took place when he was summoned by the Sir to the drawing-room. Mr. Lalor Shiel, the member for Dungarvin was with Sir Roderick. As Thomas entered the room the two gentlemen looked very fixedly at him. Thomas had the sudden feeling that the Member’s call had something to do with himself.

  The news was shattering. The Liberator had been arrested. The government had charged him with conspiracy to incite rebellion.

  Mr. Lalor Shiel, who had been briefed to defend Mr. John O’Connell, the Liberator’s son—also under arrest—had heard that enquiries were being made about his cousin, Sir Roderick O’Carroll. A young gentleman who was seen to have been in close company of Sir Roderick at the Corn Exchange and to have taken whispered instructions from him had deliberately given the police a false name. Enquiries at the home of Sir Roderick’s kinswomen, the Misses O’Carroll of Mountjoy Square, had disclosed that no person of the name had either stayed there or called. The police suspected that the name given was a taunt to themselves; it was the name emblazoned on the walls of the Corn Exchange announcing the visit of the famous actor Thomas Young. The police didn’t like being taunted. They had compiled a formidable dossier about the Repeal activities of Sir Roderick O’Carroll.

  The Sir’s face was white with anger as he questioned his presumptuous servant. Thomas’s face was whiter still. He had believed that all that ‘cavalry’ business had gone unnoticed. The whole world knew now that the government had pounced upon the excuse offered by the term when some Repeal secretary had used it in drawing up the programmes and positions for the meeting.

  ‘I have had to speak to you before about your presumptuous activities,’ fumed the Sir. ‘Do you realise what you have done?’

  Before Thomas could reply, the piping voice of Mr. Lalor Shiel addressed him. ‘Do you realise that you have brought your master under suspicion. That he may be arrested?’

  Thomas realised but one thing; that he wanted to die! There and now on the Aubusson carpet that he had swept so often; he ought to have concerned himself solely with sweeping and with every other servile chore, instead of booklearning and politics—the Sir arrested! The great, kind Sir beloved of all his employees and tenants. Miss Sterrin’s Papa! Into his numb brain crawled the Scout’s oft-repeated misquotation of Saint Thomas—‘A thing which is not in its own place is an abomination.’ That’s what I am—an abomination!

  Mr. Lalor Shiel was repeating the question. ‘Why didn’t you give your own name?’ He had been expecting to see some cocky servant, brash and glib and ready to break down into whining denials. But here was natural dignity. Not just the kind acquired in genteel service. He noted the fine head; the sensitive mouth and nostrils. He noted how the shamed colour overflowed into the blenched face as the boy said, ‘I have no name of my own, sir.’

  ‘If,’ he said on a less reproachful note, ‘you felt it necessary to assume a name, why pick on one so illustrious? You might as well have said you were the Duke of Wellington.’ When Thomas explained, Lalor Shiel laughed outright. ‘Mr. Young,’ said Thomas, naively, ‘didn’t want his name any more.’

  Thomas explained the impulse that had caused him to give the name that had stared out at him from the wall behind the police officer. ‘The words of the name were so familiar to me. Sir. They were those by which I am called. I merely reversed them.’

  When Thomas had left the room, Lalor Shiel turned with quirked brow to Roderick. ‘Where on earth did you get him, Rody? Who is he?’

  Roderick was striding up and down, his mind in a whirl. One of the gentlemen arrested with the Liberator had joined the movement only five days before; had attended the Corn Exchange but once. What chance had Roderick? Deep in the affairs of the movement since his enrolment? It was no satisfaction to him to hear Lalor Shiel just now quote the Liberator in saying that Sir Roderick O’Carroll’s road arrangements for the proclaimed meeting, and the subsequent dispersals had been a ‘masterpiece of organisation’. A masterpiece that might land him in jail!

  ‘Where did I get who? Good heavens, I don’t know where half of them came from! The kitchen is always full of God-save-all-here’s and hangers-on and little run-around gossoons.’ He resumed his pacing, then stopped. ‘Yes, I believe the lad was a protégé of Mrs. Mansfield’s—our housekeeper, you remember, who was killed the night of the Big Wind? Some woman brought him to her; his mother probably. She was leaving for America; probably intended sending for him; never heard of again.’

  ‘He reminds me of someone—’

  ‘Forget him, Richard. It was most kind of you to come and warn me. Forgive my testiness. Were it not for the state of Margaret’s health I might find the incident piquant especially about the name that—“Mr. Young didn’t want any more”.’ He told him about the witticism from the ‘gods’ at the expense of Mr. Young’s name. ‘Now that you recall it to me, Young Thomas or “Thomas Young” is even younger than I thought. He is tall for his age. I forced the predicament upon him. He is resourceful; too damned resourceful.’ He pulled the bell rope. ‘Let’s have what Lord Cullen calls a Bumper.’

  Next morning after a fear-racked night, Thomas spied Constable Humphreys walking up the avenue in the wake of a mounted Sub-Inspector of Police. They were coming for him!

  He removed his apron. In a silver cover dish he saw the reflection of curls falling over his forehead. He smoothed them back. As he rubbed his moist palms on the roller towel he wondered would there be time to say goodbye to Miss Sterrin. But, hadn’t the Sir sent for him last night and warned him not to utter a breath of this! He must go without seeing her! And when he returned, when his sentence was served—but then the Sir might not take him back into his service! Anyway she’d be gone by then; married to— ‘The Sir wants you in the library, immediately.’

  By the time he reached the library, the Sir had given the Sub-Inspector the full details about the alleged false name business.

  ‘Nevertheless, if you don’t mind, Sir Roderick,’ said the grandiose official, ‘I shall call upon my constable to corroborate.’

  Constable Humphreys confirmed that he recognised the youth as one whom he had known for some years and whom he had ‘invariably heard apostrophised by estimable and noted persons in Templetown, as “Young Thomas”’.

  ‘Do you know of any surname or patronymic?’ asked his superior.

  The constable wished that he had thought up ‘patronymic’ himself; but he fished out a beauty from his erudite jaws. ‘I have never heard of the existence of any other nomenclature,’ he said. Where the hell, thought Roderick, does he get them?

  The officer was perplexed. ‘This, of course, alters the charge of false representation—somewhat. But, there is still the intent to mislead, by the juxtaposition of words.’

  ‘Mislead whom?’ asked Roderick irritably and changing the juxtaposition of his feet. They were itching to put a toe through all
this bumptious pedantry. He brusquely pointed out that his servant, Thomas, brought to Dublin for the first time had been warned to show caution if any stranger addressed him. ‘How could the boy possibly know that your superior was other than a civilian?’

  The Sub-Inspector bowed and wished Sir Roderick good day. At the door he turned. He had thought of another reason for attaching Thomas to the ironmongery that peeped through the silk folds of the handkerchief up the constable’s cuff.

  ‘He may be required to give evidence at the trials. I take it that he will not seek to absent himself?’

  Sir Roderick pulled the bell rope significantly. ‘I vouch for my servant,’ he said.

  Thomas looked down at the carpet. Again, he wished he could lie down on it and die. This time in gratitude to the wonderful, omnipotent Sir! He raised his eyes for the onslaught, but the face before him was smiling. The Sir was thinking that the knife boy’s face was as fine-drawn as one of his own blades. It would stand no more sharpening. ‘We must see about having you brought to the christening font,’ he said. ‘Can’t have people coming here talking about nomenclature before breakfast. Puts me off my food!’

  Thomas dared not stir from the castle lest he be summoned to Dublin as a witness. But the trial was postponed. It was discovered that hundreds of Catholic names that should have been on the panel of jurors had never been listed. The only Catholic names listed belonged to people who had been dead for years. So the Crown was reluctantly compelled to concede a postponement until January.

  Not since the inquests on Mrs. Mansfield and the others after the Big Wind had a policeman been seen near the castle. Now they had become a daily spectacle. Sometimes from a window Thomas would glimpse the top of a shako as the police peeped over the opening that had been partially built up after that night. On Christmas Eve he almost bumped into his friend Sergeant Flynn patrolling with the pedantic constable. He jumped back as if he were stung. This meant that he would be under house guard for the lovely twelve days of Christmas when everyone went to and fro visiting all the time and only the most essential work was performed. Golden Meadows would be keeping open house; on a big scale. Tim Lonergan had mentioned something about taking him along with the Wren Boys and Mummers. To parade around the countryside behind the omadhawn; playing every instrument that would give music! Every house open to them to come in and play and dance and feast! Oh well, he sighed to himself as he cleaned a knife with a raw potato. I cannot have it every way! I cannot take part in the history of my country and then go codacting around the countryside with the Wren Boys!

  The Sir frowned as he encountered the police patrol on the little bridle road. Was a gentleman to have no privacy even on Christmas Eve? The Sir’s Road was private property. A concession to the public. Not a right. He barely returned the salute. The Sergeant looked after the proud figure. The Sir had always reined in for a passing word with him. He watched him stop no less than three times to chat with farmers and to their wives and children ensconced on feather mattresses that were covered with Christmas shopping.

  ‘This,’ said the Sergeant to his subordinate, ‘is one of the times when I hate my job. When I realise that a policeman is, after all, merely a spy on his fellow men.’

  Roderick’s ill humour melted in the all-pervading atmosphere of good cheer. All the way to Templetown he was hailed; by farmers, their waggons or phaetons laden with good things. At every boreen entrance groups of children watched out for their homing parents and the big three-quart cans of sweets and the bottles of lemonade with the glass marbles in the necks of them.

  Two little boys on top of a fence tugged their forelocks to him and their little ‘big’ sister gave him a radiant smile. As he slowed they jumped down and ran over to him. ‘We got the sheep,’ said one of the boys. They were Black Pat’s children! Every tenant had been given a joint of meat but Black Pat had been sent a whole sheep. ‘Oh boys, o’ boys,’ said the older lad, ‘but we’ll have “maw galore”!’*

  Unlike the children of other tenants they were completely uninhibited in his presence. They chattered to him about the good things that their mammy and daddy would bring them from town. But when he produced silver coins and the little boys thrust out chubby palms their sister stopped them, ‘Mammy does not allow us to accept money,’ she said. This was something out of the ordinary! Roderick decided that he must meet this mammy of theirs. ‘It is a great pity,’ said the little girl, her bright eyes fixed on the money.

  Her brother solved the problem. ‘Father Hickey gives us money when we answer our catechism. Mammy doesn’t mind that.’

  ‘All right,’ said Sir Roderick. ‘Who made the world?’

  They told him with one concerted gasp.

  ‘How many Gods are there?’ He asked the older.

  ‘One, of course.’

  ‘Why are you so positive?’

  Adam’s eyes devoured the half-crown, but the big word had him baffled. His little brother put up his hand. ‘Please, your Honour, I’m not posibet. I’m a good boy. An’ there couldn’t be two Gods because they’d fight. Thanks very much, your Honour.’ He turned and raced homeward in case his Honour might change his mind. The little girl looked at her landlord reproachfully. ‘You shouldn’t have given him a prize for that answer,’ she said. ‘It is not in the book.’

  ‘I know,’ said Roderick apologetically. ‘But his prize was not for catechism. It was for logic.’ He dropped a half-crown into her pocket and gave another to Adam.

  He rode home in good humour, the police forgotten, until he reached the entrance to the bridle road. The peaks of two shakos made a gleam in the twilight. He swerved back and rode in through the main gates.

  *

  In January, Roderick and Young Thomas rode to Dublin for the Liberator’s trial. Young Thomas had thought his hero might be driven to the trial in some kind of tumbril. But, in fact, O’Connell approached the court in triumph, seated in the Lord Mayor’s coach, surrounded by the city fathers. As he entered the courtroom, the members of the Bar rose to their feet. Young Thomas and the Sir joined the witnesses and spectators in shouting: ‘Long live O’Connell and Repeal!’

  But they had to quit the trial almost before it began. While listening to arguments over prospective jurors, Roderick noticed his neighbour’s son, Hubert De Lacey, making his way towards him through the crowded room. Hubert had a message. It was from Nurse Hogan.

  The note read—‘Your Honour’s Sir. I am not happy about Her Ladyship.’ He turned swiftly. His neighbour’s son, Hubert De Lacey was behind him. Roderick left the courtroom with Hubert to question him. His mother, Hubert said, had called on Lady O’Carroll yesterday. The nurse, when she heard that Hubert was coming up to the trials, had slipped him this note.

  Thought Roderick, as the horses were lashed homeward, I had no right to linger there and Margaret in stark terror! Fighting back incipient madness. Women were known to go mad in childbirth. Or, would there be any hereditary—? There was so little about her that he knew really, before that day when he had been halted by the sight of her, floating over the ice. The scene had enraptured him, the red glow of charcoal braziers burning along the lake side, chestnuts roasting, musicians playing violins and mandolins. And Margaret! So lovely, so serene! All he knew was that he had loved her from that moment with a sort of predestined love that had permeated his whole existence ever since. No, there was no hereditary taint. It was nature itself that had gone mad that night when Margaret’s malady had started. The spectacle of the housekeeper’s pitiful death in the presence of Margaret’s agony would have unhinged a stronger mind. Dr. Mitchell often wondered if Lady O’Carroll could have been struck by a heavy splinter of the massive turret. Anything could have happened to her in that inferno through which poor Sterrin had struggled for the gift of life! And then that Whiteboy raid by the Keating brute!

  As he and Thomas approached the gates a scurry of gossoons rose up from the roadway and raced up the avenue. There must be something terrible amiss. He forgot that w
henever he returned from Dublin, gossoons were in the habit of wagering their treasures against the first one to catch the carriage sound and reach the castle with the news.

  Margaret was haggard and wild looking. She clung to him speechlessly. Nurse Hogan told him later that there had been a storm the night before Mrs. De Lacey had called. Her Ladyship’s palms had bled from the effort to keep calm. ‘At last, Sir Roderick,’ said the nurse, ‘she insisted upon getting up, late and dark as it was. I couldn’t stop her. She walked in the park in the open space where there are no trees. She said if the child must come in the storm it would be born where nothing could fall upon its birth or upon its mother. It was terrible, your Honour; to think of a child born in a field like an animal; with respects to you, Sir Roderick, that was why I took the liberty of sending the note by Mr. De Lacey.’

  ‘You did quite right,’ he told her.

  The nurse asked him for the recipe for the brewed leaves of the ground ivy. She couldn’t find it, she said, in her Ladyship’s herb book.

  Roderick had told Margaret nothing about the recipe that his cousins had given him for her malady. He had entered it into his own black record book. When he had scribbled it out for the nurse, she went almost stealthily through the woods and gathered the plant herself; then brewed it in the privacy of her own room. Though she was a scientifically trained Ladies’ Nurse-Tender, she appreciated that the illness that attacks the mind must be treated secretly.

  In the following days, Roderick went no further from the castle than the estate bounds. Margaret grew more distraught. Every gust of wind that blew across the treeless lawns made her dread a storm that would hurl her travail into some windswept Gehenna of desolation. Once, by mistake, Roderick, with a gun under his arm, a brace of dogs at his heels and Mike O’Driscoll alongside with the shot and powder, crossed into the neighbouring estate. He realised his trespass as he was about to aim at a mallard.