The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  ‘Go on, your Honour’s Sir,’ urged Mike, disgusted at seeing his master lower the gun. ‘You might as well have a bang as any of the other scoundrels that do be poaching.’

  Before his master could assess the significance of the remark, a figure appeared at the foot of the hill and waved.

  ‘It’s Young Thomas!’ cried O’Driscoll. ‘Her Ladyship must—’

  Roderick made to jump back into his own territory, missed his footing and landed up to his waist in bog. ‘Get me out!’ he yelled. O’Driscoll tugged futilely while his frenzied master sank deeper.

  ‘You see,’ explained O’Driscoll, ‘it is always easier to pull a gentleman out of a bog when he falls in head first.’

  Roderick, when he eventually surfaced, regretted that he had not the time to push O’Driscoll in head first. ‘I’ll be more accommodating the next time,’ he spluttered as he rushed down the hill. He left pools of water on the bedroom carpet. Margaret looked up startled at the spectacle of the black-faced, grimy apparition that stood over her.

  ‘You don’t think that you are going to kiss a freshly accouched lady in that condition?’ The doctor nodded towards the little powder room. ‘Your son is having a bath in there. You ought to join him. You could do with a bath yourself.’

  When Thomas returned with the barrels of porter and jars of port wine for the tenants’ celebration, he saw Miss Sterrin standing gazing upwards at the flag flying from the turret. He crossed to her side. ‘It was I,’ he said, ‘who raised the flag when you were born.’

  She nodded. ‘I know. But it was Papa’s own self who raised it today. You see this is a more important event.’

  ‘Nonsense. You were the first-born. Your birth was a far more important event.’

  ‘But there were no celebrations.’

  Thomas pointed out that there had been a death in the household. ‘Poor Mrs. Mansfield!’ he sighed. ‘It was unfortunate for me that she died then. She knew who I was.’ Sterrin looked at him speculatively.

  ‘Do you think you might be a prince in disguise?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve given up that idea. You see Miss Sterrin, if I were, she would not have put me to clean the knives.’

  * Plenty of good things.

  19

  One early morning the following week, on the way home from Templetown, driving his flour-laden waggon, Thomas saw a crowd gathered on the main street near the Dublin Road. The Scout was there holding a sheaf of papers. Thomas drew rein and watched as the Scout read furiously then looked at his audience.

  ‘Listen to these sacred words!’ he cried. ‘The Liberator has been sentenced to jail.’

  The words that the Scout had picked out were the ones that O’Connell had used to comfort his weeping daughters as he stepped across the threshold of Richmond jail. ‘Thank God I am in jail for Ireland.’

  A woman fell to her knees with a wailing ‘Vo, Vo!’ A shop assistant, taking down the shutters of a shop window, tucked up his blue apron and ran with the news to his employers. Next minute he was being helped by other assistants to put back the shutters. Soon every shop in Templetown was closed and shuttered again. The Scout’s grief was palatably seasoned with pride as he watched the Repeal flag mount slowly over the Assembly Rooms to ride at half-mast for the ‘newses’ that the Scout Doyle had brought to Templetown!

  Clattering of hooves sounded and the Scout hurried to where the future Lord Cullen, his horses a-foam, was reining to a halt. ‘God save Your Honour,’ he greeted him.

  ‘God blast you, Doyle,’ replied the Honourable Patrick. The moment he sighted the kneeling people he knew that he had been forestalled. He was not the first with news.

  It had been like this in Dublin yesterday; people dropping on their knees as the news hit them: regardless of their surroundings. The one who had secured them their liberty to pray in public had lost his own liberty! Their idol, their high priest, now he had become their martyr. Their hereditary sense of tragedy was consummated in this imprisonment.

  Patrick Cullen and scores of his fellow Young Irelanders had ridden through the night for the honour of being the first with the news to their native towns. The Scout looked at the special copy of Nation that Davis had rushed into print—in green ink—the moment sentence had been passed. He repressed a shudder at the thought of how near he had been to the loss of the golden sovereign with which he had bribed a night waggoner to bring him the first news of the verdict—and his fame. Another five minutes and to the Honourable Mister Cullen would have gone the glory of broadcasting the news in a blaze of emerald. ‘Green ink!’ he gasped. ‘Why wasn’t I told?’

  ‘An oversight on the part of Mr. Davis, no doubt,’ said Patrick sarcastically.

  The damned newsmongering shoemaker had crashed his elaborate plans. Along his route he had barely slowed at the gate lodges of a few friends like the Delaneys to send up urgent invitations to dine at Crannagh Abbey that afternoon. Now the Scout was clambering up the fat sides of a big white horse to ride to Kilsheelin Castle.

  ‘Always a white steed for the man who rides forth on high errand,’ he was saying to the ostler.

  Roderick, a rod on his shoulders, was emerging from the hall door when the Scout came clattering up the front avenue, no less! The Scout was disgusted at the cart horse which came to a solid stop when its rider hoped to rein it to its fat haunches and send a dramatic spray of gravel over the surge of his news. ‘’Tis well your Honour’s Sir is not a Greek noble,’ he started off, ‘or I should be beheaded for the tidings that I bear.’

  His head was still intact when he led his charger to the kitchen door. The staff stood round him, spellbound at his ‘newses’. Gradually stable and barn, saddlery and forge emptied into the yard, their occupants crowding the kitchen door and passage. It was the Scout’s finest hour. ‘They have caged the eagle of Derrynane,’ he orated. ‘They have silenced the voice that thundered more fiercely than the waves that beat upon his own wild mountain of Coomakishka—’ He paused to wipe his eyes. ‘Me eyes are wet,’ he keened, ‘and me throat is dry—’ The butler took the hint.

  Johnny-the-buckets laid down the laden pails he had held suspended throughout the dramatic oration. For the first time in his brief career he raised his voice in the kitchen councils. ‘Misther Doyle,’ he quavered, ‘does that mean that the Penal days will come back? Will we have to hear Mass in caves again?’

  Young Thomas drew a large cut potato down from the blade of a knife, then cast it into the pile of cut potatoes at his feet. ‘No, O man of the buckets!’ he cried with a brandishing flourish of the knife. ‘The Liberator, like the dead Cid, will be stronger than ever in captivity.’

  The Scout didn’t like to be placed at a disadvantage by having to admit that he didn’t know who the dead ‘Syd’ was. He drained his glass and instead, asked the youth how often would them cut potatoes be used on the knives.

  ‘They’ll never again be used,’ Thomas informed him. Instead of being downcast like the others he was feeling an inner exaltation. He, alone of them, had touched the outer slopes of this great climax. ‘They have served their purpose. This blade,’ he said raising it aloft, ‘would reject a sullied spud just as a well-bred horse will reject the oats from which it has previously fed.’

  Begob, thought the Scout, there’s blood in that lad! Aloud he remarked that his ould pig wouldn’t reject a ‘sullied spud’. He rode home with a sackful of them in front of his white charger.

  The castle was in the throes of a great campaign of prayer and devotions. Roderick had invoked its privilege of having Mass celebrated in the oratory. Every morning it was offered for the Liberator’s deliverance. Tenants and neighbours came fasting. The congregation overflowed on to the gallery and down the stairs and hallway. Breakfasts went on until early afternoon. When the petition went to the House of Lords the church ordered a special nine-day novena of prayer throughout the land to implore that justice might be done. Sir Roderick gave out the novena prayers at night. Work finished early
; workers streamed in and knelt on the lawn below the oratory window. The waggonette load of De Lacey’s, instead of going home after the midday breakfast, stayed on for the evening novena so that breakfast ran into dinner. It was like a medieval feast of the church.

  The summer days were passed, but the earth still paused on its axis to begin the long descent towards the cold and darkness of winter. Sterrin’s young mind was awed by the solemnity of it all. She was strangely moved by the sound of prayer that came in on a murmuring wave through the oratory window. Her ear caught the faint difference in the usual responses. When her papa gave the invocation of the old Gaelic litany, ‘Oh greatest of women!’—instead of the usual Guide orainn, ‘Pray for us,’ the people answered Guide air, ‘Pray for him.’ When he came to ‘Loose the enslaved! Appease for us the Judge with Thy prayers and with Thy intercession!’ the familiar words took on a special significance. The voices soared with greater intensity to blend with the same pleas rising from homes and churches throughout the land in a great pyramid of prayer.

  In other lands, throughout Europe, in America, the churches offered prayers and masses, but Ireland was a nation on its knees.

  For thirty years this man had been the nation’s right arm, wresting with it, one after another, Ireland’s plundered rights from the flames of an English Parliament lighted to consume them. Statesmen might oppose this petition, lawyers disprove it. The Times might scoff, but this kneeling populace, a people cast in an ancient mould, almost without a counterpart in the world, prayed with sublime and simple faith, for a miracle.

  On the eve of the close of the novena, the eighth night, the Scout decided to perform his devotions at Kilsheelin. He might pick up a crumb of ‘newses’ as to how the petition was being received in London.

  Towards the end of the litany the man beside him seemed suddenly to be directing his prayers sideways instead of upwards. His elbow seemed to drive them with a holy beat into the Scout’s lean ribs. ‘Would you mind prayin’ upwards,’ hissed the exasperated Scout. Another poke and a compelling upward look brought the Scout’s eyes aloft. ‘The flag of privilege!’ he gasped. Ireland’s ancient flag in the delicate tint called Saint Patrick’s blue was being slowly hoisted above the turret.

  In the oratory Sterrin thought that her papa was gabbling the prayers. Margaret glanced sideways at him. Never since she had skated with him in Belgium during their romance had she seen him like this; so flushed and boyish. Thomas, emerging from the turret staircase, had to squeeze a space for himself at the entrance to the accompaniment of ‘Hushs’ and ‘Whists’. The prayers were almost over, but he had accomplished his trust. To him, again, had fallen the glory of hoisting the flag that proclaimed a great occasion. His responses were mechanical as he waited for the announcement that would explain the quick, secret command issued to him as the Sir hurried past him from the library to the oratory.

  Sir Roderick was almost breathless as he rose from his knees and strode to the open window. ‘Tomorrow,’ he called to the kneeling throng, ‘will be the last day of this special devotion offered for the success of this petition that has gone to the House of Lords. Tomorrow,’ he cried on a louder note, ‘our prayers will be offered in thanksgiving, because—’ he paused, ‘the Liberator has been set free!’

  He put out a hand to quell the uproar and told them not to leave without refreshments. Behind him, Phineas De Lacey still on his knees held his face in his hands to conceal the tears. A few minutes later he was dancing a slip jig on the gallery. Sterrin, instead of being lighted to bed, was lighted by torchlights to the great pyramid of branches that awaited the ceremonial kindling from the taper that Young Thomas handed to her papa.

  20

  Roderick was glad when all the fanfaronade had subsided. Now maybe he could get down to the business of the estate, and find some time to spend with Dominic, his newborn son.

  Black Pat had been on to him to let him buy a blood horse he had spoken of selling. Roderick had doubts. It was a horse for a gentleman—and at a gentleman’s price. Still, for old times’ sake, he supposed he would have to let Black Pat have it at his own price!

  Roderick’s thoughts went back to childhood when he had fostered under Black Pat’s roof. Even then Black Pat had been fearless with horses. And it would seem that his foster-brother’s little runaway bride was fearless that way, too.

  Roderick had been astounded to find a reference to Black Pat’s bride in his father’s black book, of all places! The girl had been the daughter of well-to-do people in the South Riding. When they could not persuade her to marry the rich suitor of their choice they called in the parish priest to add the weight of his influence. While the parents were receiving the priest she slipped through a window and made off on the priest’s horse to Black Pat.

  A runaway marriage was something to talk of for nine days of wonder. But to run away on the priest’s horse! That had been something to whisper about in dread. Supposing, went the whisper, that the priest had needed his horse for some sudden and sacred purpose! Rumour strengthened the ‘supposing’ into a fact. Someone had died without a priest, it stated, because of the girl’s profane act. Her family had written her off. There would be no record of her in the manuscript that chronicled her family’s history from one generation to another.

  But Sir Dominic had recorded her in his book when she married his tenant. Her high spirits had intrigued him. And because of his strong sense of the tie of fosterage, he had given an attractive farm to Black Pat. Under the details of tenancy he had written, ‘I trust that its heritage will recompense his little wife Nonie—for the fine heritage she has abandoned in the cause of love.’

  Roderick, too, had been intrigued—and annoyed! Fancy Black Pat being the hero of such rich romance! Extraordinary that he had never mentioned anything of it to him! Roderick could scarcely realise the extent to which he had grown up and away from the little boy who used to trot like an affectionate puppy at the heels of Black Pat. Nor that his remote and arrogant mien was intimidating to the tenants who had been accustomed to the affability of his father.

  He decided to ask Black Pat for her maiden name and fill in the blank.

  He turned the pages back. So much of his father came through the flowing handwriting. There were several references to Malachy. His father had set great store by the fosterage tie. Malachy had been the son of the house where he had fostered until he was eight years old. He seemed to have kept up the link with him until Malachy left to join the Austrian army. ‘I had no shame,’ he wrote, ‘for the tears I shed at parting with my dear foster-brother.’ Further on Roderick read the record of Malachy’s death in Austria. Underneath, his father had inscribed the old Gaelic saying—‘Dear to a man is his brother; but his foster-brother is the marrow of his heart.’

  There was a knock and Hegarty admitted George Lucas to pay his rent.

  ‘I brought it before,’ he explained, ‘but your Honour was—absent.’

  Roderick noticed the deliberate hesitation. No other tenant would have used the word. It savoured of ‘absenteeism’.

  ‘Your Honour!’

  ‘What is it?’ Roderick was making out the receipt. He felt ashamed of his own brusquerie.

  ‘Herself was wondering that Miss Sterrin hadn’t called to see her new little foster-sister.’

  ‘Her what?’

  ‘Aye, foster-sister. Near two months she is now.’

  Blast the fellow’s impudence! To claim the kinship of fosterage because his wife had been Sterrin’s wet nurse!

  ‘...But his foster-brother is the marrow of his heart!’ Roderick couldn’t imagine the darraghadheal being the marrow of any man’s heart. Coldly he yielded to tradition. ‘I’m sure that her Ladyship will arrange for Miss Sterrin to visit the infant.’

  Margaret was contrite when she heard about the new baby. She was anxious not to offend any customs. Her papa used to tell them such droll things in Antwerp about the farmhouse in County Clare where his father had been fostered! ‘And I can no
t go today. I am—what is it, head upon heels? All this excitement.’

  Roderick looked at her. She was holding her own baby son, Dominic. Her gazelle eyes were sheening with vibrancy. Excitement suited her. Life could be stolid in Antwerp. It wasn’t all ice skating!

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘The fellow had a cheek to remind me. Let Sterrin drive that way with the new governess. It will soothe them to have her call so promptly.’

  As the pony phaeton was approaching Ryan’s, Black Pat rode towards them at a sauntering canter, his pipe in the corner of his mouth. He doffed his hat to them and Sterrin impishly doffed her bonnet. Black Pat always made her feel mischievous. He looked at her uncovered head with the most comical consternation, then wheeled round and went pelting back.

  There was not time to query his strange behaviour because it had caused the pony to bolt. By the time it had quietened they had reached Lucas’s. Lucas was not so soothed by the visit as her papa had suggested. He felt it a slight that it was an employee, however genteel, who had accompanied Miss Sterrin. He liked to boast to people that he was the foster-father of Sir Roderick O’Carroll’s child. When he married her wet nurse he had envisioned perquisites and gifts.

  The baby, Sterrin informed her mamma later, was like a halfpenny orange. ‘Not even a penny one?’ asked her papa. ‘By the way,’ he went on, ‘did you happen to see Black Pat? He has not kept his appointment with me.’ When she told him about his strange behaviour he rode down prepared to tell him that he had changed his mind about the horse. The sound of a violin playing ‘Love’s Young Dream’ came to him as he rode into his foster-brother’s yard.

  Black Pat was all apologies. ‘But sure. Sir Rody, everyone knows that if a body meets up with a redhaired woman on the way to make a deal there is nothing for it but to turn straight back.’