Kitty was lying in the fresh agony that had come upon her when she realised that the child in her arms was dead. As the slow grinding pains became unbearable she had let the dead body slip to the floor. Pain by pain she was forced to yield to the demands of the one who was clamouring inexorably for the grim heritage abandoned by her firstborn.
They buried little Theobald in a tiny space behind the tombstone that said ‘William O’Carroll, Gentleman of Kilsheelin who was emigrated to heaven in the Year of Our Lord 1678’. As Thomas dug the little grave he recalled how, when he was learning to write from the tombstones, he used to think that poor people emigrated to America and rich people to heaven.
When the box was covered, Sterrin stooped and with great reverence placed her spray of hothouse lilies on the tiny mound. It was then that Mark broke down completely. He threw himself upon his knees and sobbed; for the little one who had been born to die; for Kitty; for himself; for the inescapable anguish of life.
Sterrin blenched. It was terrible to hear a big man sob like that. Thomas looked at her whitened face. This was no place for her! And there would be murder over rifling the glass house for the precious lilies, but she had insisted. Someone, she said, must represent the family in Mamma and Papa’s absence, and do the right thing by Young Thomas’s godchild. She had shown the gardener the same look of Christian ferocity that she had shown Mickey-the-turf when he had stolen her sacrificial jelly.
Thomas dropped down beside Mark. What prayers could he say? The soul of the little white blossom that had bloomed and faded needed no forgiving. He prayed that God might comfort Kitty, lying up there spent, the new-born child in her arms.
Sterrin decided to kneel also; although she had been taught that one did not pray for the soul of an infant. Praying for the souls in Purgatory always reminded her of the salts mixed with senna that she drank once a week while Nurse Hogan held her nose and told her to ‘offer it up for the souls in Purgatory’.
After the ceremony Mark hurried back to Darby’s Scheme for Unproductive Labour. Major Darby had been shot at last night and there was a rumour that all pay was being stopped as a reprisal. Mark found Sir Roderick O’Carroll there demanding the wages that had been refused to Black Pat’s widow.
‘Who is responsible for that whiskey hut?’ Sir Roderick demanded.
The paymaster flushed. From behind a voice called ‘That’s what I should like to know also.’ It was Father Hickey. The priest had driven out with his friend, Master Hennessey, to upbraid the men whom he suspected of being implicated in the shooting of Darby. The sight of the whiskey huts grieved him. Every Unproductive Labour Scheme had a whiskey hut, erected by unscrupulous pay clerks to seduce money from hungry, exhausted men who had not touched alcohol since the Temperance Campaign. ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said the priest to Sir Roderick, ‘but it is rank poison.’
The pay clerk bridled. ‘It is a harmless recipe,’ he said, ‘it gives the men warmth.’
‘Harmless!’ cried the priest. ‘Warms them? Maddens them! Kills them!’ He produced a slip of paper. ‘Listen to this,’ and he started to read a recipe. ‘Here,’ he said to the schoolmaster. ‘You read it. I’ve left my spectacles at home.’
‘One gallon of fresh, fiery whiskey,’ intoned the schoolmaster as though he were giving out a problem in Euclid. ‘A pint of rum, two ounces of corrosive sublimates. Three gallons of water—’
‘It is whiskey like that,’ interrupted Father Hickey, ‘that makes you shoot your landlords.’
‘Aye,’ said the master, flourishing the slip of paper, ‘and it is whiskey like that makes you miss them.’
Father Hickey and Master Hennessey drove on to the scene of the evictions that had caused the shooting. For a moment they thought they must have taken the wrong turn. A hamlet of houses that had crowned the low hill had disappeared.
A woman and a boy came away from a heap of rubble.
‘Was that your home?’ the priest asked.
‘Yes, your Reverence,’ she whispered. He asked was there any place to which he could drive her.
‘Only to the poorhouse, your Reverence; if they will take us.’
He bade the boy hop up behind. The boy seized the rail and swung but fell back. ‘I’m sorry, your Reverence,’ he apologised, ‘the hunger is on me.’ The master lifted the big, gangling boy in his arms. He was no heavier than a baby. ‘Did I ever slap you at school?’ he asked. The boy gave a grin that made wrinkles across his face. ‘You did, faith. Master,’ he croaked. ‘You walloped us every morning. To make spartans of us, you said.’
The lad hastened to make amends! ‘But you gave me ginger lumps, Master,’ he assured him.
‘Did I now? And what betrayed me into such weakness?’
‘Because I was always the first of the lads from Gort-na-roe and I always brought two sods of turf.’
The master drew a check handkerchief from his tail pocket and blew loudly. ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘terribly lazy lads they were from Gort-na-roe, and only one sod of turf under their oxters.’
A group of homeless looked up expectantly at the car but the priest shook his head, ‘No room,’ he said. He looked at the grasslands that had held colonies of homes. ‘No room in their own green valleys; no room on the roadside; no room in the work-house. May the God of all consolation find room for them in Heaven.’
The woman shuddered with cold. She had kept vigil all night by her demolished home. The priest put his surtout about her. A newspaper fell from its pocket. The master took it up and glanced through it. ‘Well, Father,’ he commented, ‘at least they are finding room for them in America. Listen to the latest emigration figures. According to The Times in less than five months, three hundred thousand people have left Cove for America. And listen to this!’ cried the master excitedly. ‘The Times had turned prophet! “In one more generation”,’ he read, ‘“the Irish Celts will be as obsolete in Ireland as the Phoenicians in Cornwall and the Catholic religion will be as forgotten as the worship of Astarte.”’ He crumpled the paper. ‘What do you think of that. Father Hickey?’
The priest flicked the reins. ‘Have you ever read the Religio Medici, Master?’ he said, ‘“Men are lived over again”,’ he quoted, ‘“the world is now as it was in ages past”.’
‘Bedad, Father, I think I’ll write a letter to The Times and quote that. That will wake the prophet up. He’ll need a caputgeredormitor after it to make him sleep.’
‘A what?’ said the priest.
‘Oh, that’s a grand word I got from Constable Humphreys.’
‘Sounds like him. That fellow thinks with his jaws.’ Father Hickey reined in at his door and sighed. His housekeeper was standing at the door wearing a disapproving look. Two more hungry people to be fed! Out of what?
‘Would you like me take them for a bit to my house?’ whispered the master sympathetically. The priest straightened his shoulders for the fray. ‘They are my guests,’ he insisted. He walked them to the door.
The housekeeper eyed them and then the priest. ‘How many times have I told your Reverence that you should christen your own child first?’ she muttered.
‘How many times have I told you,’ he replied, ‘that you should choose a more seemly metaphor.’
*
Roderick, on his way back from the Relief works had scarcely cleared the bay hedge when he was greeted by the gardener with a complaint about the lilies.
He stormed into the drawing-room. Sterrin was playing with Dominic. Margaret was bent over her embroidery. ‘Will you kindly restrain your impulses to strew the graves of the dead with lilies from my glass houses,’ Roderick shouted. ‘I’ve given my trees to make coffins; my food; gone without rents; but I’m damned if I’ll supply funeral lilies!’
Sterrin stood up respectfully to answer the charge. Papa must indeed be angry if he would curse a damn before Mamma. ‘The lilies were for the grave of Young Thomas’s godchild.’
‘Young Thomas!’ her father exploded. ‘Where the devil did he
get a godchild?’
Sterrin proceeded again to give chapter and verse of Mark and Kitty’s love story that had ended in the Wedding Mass that Young Thomas had served.
‘The lovely girl in the scarlet cloak,’ said her mamma, ‘the one we saw at the fair?’
‘Yes, Mamma.’ Sterrin pressed home her advantage. ‘And her baby Theobald, Thomas’s godchild, was born the same day as Dominic.’
Margaret’s eyes went towards Roderick but met no response.
‘And Theobald,’ continued Sterrin, ‘died of hunger but they got a new baby this morning. I thought that you would not like the old one to be thrown into the Dead Pit—’ Margaret’s wince cut through but Sterrin forged on to her final point. ‘After all, Papa, Young Thomas is of our household.’
Roderick’s brows shot up. Despite her recent display of fear his small daughter was indeed cast in the heroic mould. Of our household! ‘All right Sterrin,’ he yielded. ‘Noblesse oblige! But in future will you confine your tributes to primroses.’
‘In faith, Papa, I prefer primroses. Let us hope that the new baby will not need flowers.’
Margaret said that she would take Nurse Hogan and drive to see this Kitty. Roderick was once more struck by the shape of his wife’s face. It looked as if it might have been outlined by one of those little heart-shaped patty tins for cakes. And the rich magnolia tint of her skin had turned lime white.
‘You must not overtire yourself,’ he said. It was the first remark that he had addressed to her since the Ryan tragedy. Fatigue and the continuous association with suffering had drained his voice of emotion; but she thought his dull tone meant sarcasm.
‘I don’t mind “overtiring” myself. But I have no intention of hunting out distress that is hidden under the silly pretence of genteelness.’ Her breathing made the bugles and bells on her key belt tinkle. ‘No hardship that I have known of has gone unaided. No one who comes to me is ever refused, and mon Dieu, they come to me all the time.’ Her eyes were two brown blobs of anger. ‘Your—protégée, or whatever she is to you—allowed her husband and children to die for the sake of her bourgeois pride—’
‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘I won’t allow—’
‘Hein!’ She ignored his interruption. ‘I’d ask for food if I were hungry.’ She whisked out in a whirl of hoops and jingles.
‘I believe that you would,’ he said to the door she slammed behind her.
Sterrin was still in the room; too paralysed to move. Papa shouting at Mamma; and Mamma shouting back! Roderick’s conscience smote him at the sight of her fear. He put his arm about her and soothed her as he had done when she had awakened from the nightmare.
‘Papa,’ she breathed in an awed whisper. ‘Did Mrs. Black Pat really do that? Did she let her husband and little children die?’
He found himself defending Nonie to his child. He told her what he had managed to glean; that Nonie had sought help from her parents but they had been ill at the time and had died, one after the other; that she did not know that Black Pat had the lung disease. It was deep in his branch of the Ryans; in his children, too. A few days’ shortage would finish them. ‘And,’ said Sterrin placatingly. ‘there is a curse on her, Mrs. Stacey says because she stole the Parish Priest’s horse to run away with—’ Sterrin flinched. Her papa had roared ‘Stop!’ at her the way he had at Mamma.
‘Don’t ever repeat that sinful nonsense again!’ He softened at the sight of her lace. ‘Promise me, Sterrin,’ he said more gently.
As he was leaving the room, she said: ‘The De Laceys would not admit that they were hungry either but I met Bunzy this morning at our secret meeting place oh, I never brought food to her. Papa.’
He stopped dead. What was the child saying? The De Laceys hungry! What was going on around him? His neighbours in need; his foster-kin dying of hunger while he was succouring strangers! Like the shoemaker’s family that goes unshod.
‘They are not hungry any more now that Mr. Lubey has bought their estate for a cucumber estate. Bunzy’s papa made her promise not to tell anyone and Bunzy made me promise—’
Out of the chaos Roderick recalled someone, somewhere, saying that there was a risk that Phineas De Lacey’s place might be liable for sale under this new Encumbered Estates Act that was about to pass into law. An act that would give the court the right to sell land that had been in a family for centuries.
‘Bunzy said that Mr. Lubey would prefer Kilsheelin Castle but—’
Her papa let out a roar that sent the chandelier swinging and singing. ‘By the living God! Would he! He’ll never warm his a—’ Sterrin saw her papa’s mouth open to say the shocking word but instead he just said ‘Ah-hem.’
When the door had banged after him and the chandelier now danced to its own singing she put her hand over her mouth to cover the snicker, ‘Fancy Papa knowing a word like that!’
Roderick went down the park at a mad gallop, then wheeled. There was someone he was to see but he couldn’t think who or where? He faced Thuckeen into the niche where the wall had been but partially restored. ‘Why didn’t I build that up long ago!’ He always asked himself the same question when he faced the jump. And always when Thuckeen bunched her dainty hooves and soared over he was answered and restored by a sense of exaltation. He looked back as he landed and caught the quick glimpse of turret and roof that the niche afforded. So the gombeen man had dared to raise his eyes to them. By God! ‘Yup, Thuckeen!’
When he reached Black Pat’s empty house, he realised his mission. Nonie was still at Mrs. Kennedy-Sherwin’s of course, and the three surviving children. Her brother, a doctor and his wife, would be at Mrs. Kennedy-Sherwin’s this afternoon. Roderick wanted to see what the brother was prepared to do for his sister and her orphans before taking action himself. He reined a moment and looked at the shut house. The Chinese roses bloomed on unconcernedly. Life and death were the same to them. They bloomed both summer and winter beneath the window.
*
One morning a few weeks later Roderick, in a cape-collared coat and holding a wide-brimmed hat, unbolted his dressing-room door. That coat gives him an air, thought Margaret. She was sitting up in bed sipping café-au-lait. Or does he give it an air? Anyway he had come back to her! She pursed her lips to check their smiling.
‘I merely wished to tell you that I am off to Cork and shall not be back until tomorrow. I am despatching some tenants to America. Young Thomas will accompany me.’
‘But you despatched them a week ago!’ There had been a general exodus from the estates of Kilsheelin and Lord Templetown and Lord Cullen. The three landlords had assisted with passage money and travelled with the emigrants to the port of embarkation.
‘Mrs. Ryan and her children are going to America with Mark Hennessey and his wife.’
Her cup went down with a bang. ‘Is this necessary?’ He misunderstood her.
‘Mrs. Ryan is unable to work the farm and too poor to employ labour.’
She shrugged aside his explanation. ‘Is it necessary for you to see them off personally?’
‘I might remind you that this particular family has a claim upon mine.’
‘You don’t haf to remind me,’ she panted, going foreign in her anger, ‘that Mrs. Ryan has a claim on you.’
He was walking over to kiss her goodbye but instead turned and strode from the room.
26
Nonie raised her foot to ascend the gangway. A bell sounded. It made a clanging in her heart. Was it too late to turn back? Now! Before this foot took the step? He had paid their passage money; had sent money ahead to a New York bank. She glanced over her shoulder to where he had halted to speak to a dandified gentleman, with shapely legs cased in black silk stockings. She knew that face, beautiful as a woman’s: Father Matthew’s! He had pleaded, she had heard, for her forgiveness with her father when he visited his relative’s estate near her home; had tried to put down the terrible story that the priest had failed to reach a dying person because she had stolen his horse. Her father had
placed the finest horse in his stables at the priest’s disposal. He had made all the right gestures—except the divine gesture of forgiveness to his daughter.
A porter with head bent forward under a laden sack jostled her backwards. She touched the sack to steady herself. ‘What is in it?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Oats,’ he told her. Oats! All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. Nausea awoke in her body. She stumbled forward. She couldn’t get away quickly enough. ‘Three grains of oats!’ She didn’t realise that she had spoken aloud. A firm hand took hold of her and led her on to the deck.
‘Do you wish to change your mind? It is not too late.’
She looked so young and unprotected to go out into that void with her little ones and there was menace that chilled Roderick in the way the ocean had started to wave its white locks. He had asked her this before—if she wished to change her mind—and she had answered him repeatedly that no ocean was wide enough to put between her and the hungry land that had devoured her loved ones. But as she looked up into his eyes now she knew that now more than ever she must get away.
‘Tell me one thing before I go,’ she said. The stretched look had gone from her lips. They had resumed their shapely curving. While she spoke he watched the glancing movement of her perfect teeth. ‘Do you still think that it was I—that the children—’ It was torture still to speak of them, ‘that my pride caused their death?’
He became aware of the terrible words these lips were forming. Did he think? Good God, had he said such a thing to this little blossom? If he had it must have been in the delirium of his own strain and horror that night. He started to reassure her.
‘I did seek help—from my people. It came too late—’
He urged her to forget the past. He almost said that the past was a mistake. As if one could dismiss a past that was charged with the weight of those four lives! But whatever the past, there was, he felt, a positive future ahead of her. There must be; not just because of these strangely beautiful eyes; not even because of the spirit that had endured for so long. Long before the famine had added to her privations, she had had an indestructible reserve of the quality of feminine seductiveness that would always, everywhere, enlist men to her defence.
The Big Wind Page 29