The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  The ostler knew those words like his prayers; like a holy prophecy that had come true. ‘Vo, Vo, to the great man that’s gone. May the angels spread his bed in Heaven!’

  ‘Amen!’ said the Scout. ‘And you offer me cake!’ He turned very slowly.

  ‘Faith, I didn’t,’ cried the astonished ostler.

  ‘Figuratively speaking,’ said the Scout. ‘Not,’ he continued, out of hearing, ‘that I’d object strongly if a hunk were offered to me just now—in substance.’

  The Coffee house was deserted. Half the officers were down with plague, the waiter told him. None of the gentry had come. The Scout turned away. ’Twas amazing the weight of this old hat of his. He had gone a few paces when he turned nonchalantly. Was there any special sort of food on the menu today; a special cake or the like? He wasn’t going to ask direct about the cake, the ostler might have been having him on.

  The waiter told him that a duke had got his cook to make a birthday cake for the Queen and she couldn’t reach on eatin’ it. It had been put up for auction and knocked down to the Colonel of the 93rd and he over in London on holidays. He had sent it back ahead of him to have a raffle here today for the famine. He thought the usual crowd would be here. The waiter drew back a screen and revealed the tallest cake the Scout had ever seen.

  ‘Be the powers of wars!’ Weariness fell away from the Scout. ‘Sure the little lady—no disrespect to her Majesty—would need a ladder to climb up to that.’ It was level with the top of his Hardy Bastard.

  Five feet eight in height it was, the waiter told him proudly, and nine feet six in circumference. The statues round the first tier were the Nine Muses. The top tier represented Mount Parnassus.

  ‘And the lad sittin’ on it, holdin’ that yoke like a harp, is called Apollo. Belike he’s the Queen’s Bard.’

  ‘Belike,’ said the Scout scathingly.

  Next morning the Vicar found the Scout in a classical delirium.

  ‘God save you, Mr. Debenham,’ he raved. ‘Will you have a piece of Terpsichore. No, I don’t blame you. Sure your poor throat is burning and she is terribly sugary.’

  The Vicar lifted him on to the front of his horse and rode with him to the hospital. ‘Take him to the quarry,’ the doctor ordered. The Vicar continued to stand at the ward door holding the Scout’s bony weight, doubting his own hearing.

  ‘Yes, the quarry,’ repeated the doctor. ‘Out there!’ He waved impatiently in the direction of the window. ‘There’s no more room in the hospital.’

  The Scout peered up at the grass and lichened wall of the quarry that rose up sheer to meet a dappled sky. ‘Apollo with his lyre,’ he croaked. It was Young Thomas, poised on the brim of the quarry with prong suspended, after dropping down some of the straw that it was now his daily chore to bring to the hospital to help the shortage of beds. He gazed in amazement at the extraordinary spectacle of the Scout being lowered into the quarry by the Vicar. To lie sick in the open quarry!

  It was the first piece of ‘newses’ to interest the kitchen for a long time. Men in fever put out to lie in the open air! ’Twas as bad as an eviction.

  ‘Even cattle,’ said the butler, ‘are brought in from the fields in sickness.’

  That night after the kitchen rosary he added the Scout’s name to the long list of Souls to be prayed for. But next day when Thomas returned with a special load of straw for the quarry, the Scout’s soul was still there. So was his body. It was there until it was able to clamber out embodying its own incredible ‘newses’; a living legend, the Scout Doyle who had been put to die with other plague victims in a quarry outside the hospital! Who throve and recovered—the others, too—whilst men died hourly in the reeking wards across the yard!

  *

  Sir Roderick stopped dead at the spectacle of the big white structure that towered from the dining table. ‘What in Heaven’s name is that?’ he exploded. Lieutenant Fitzharding-Smith, Margaret informed him, had purchased hundreds of tickets for a cake raffled for the Relief Fund. He had directed before he left that if one of them were lucky the cake was to be delivered to Kilsheelin Castle.

  ‘And who is going to eat that—that iced orgy?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought we might give a treat to the tenants’ children.’ She could have bitten her tongue. Instantly his bitter expression told her that he was thinking of those three dead children; seeing them as he had last seen them!

  ‘Quite in the Marie Antoinette tradition,’ he said at last. ‘A child with an empty stomach would prefer a hunk of that monstrosity to—to—three grains of oats.’

  She put her hands over her face, ‘Roderick, stop! Stop reminding me! I need no reminding. That is why I thought to give those other ones a treat.’ It had been a joy to come home from her grim tasks in that deserted town and find this gorgeous spectacle almost blotting out the light from the dining-room windows. But now she knew that it would not blot out the spectacle she wanted to forget. Nothing ever would.

  Roderick had moved to a window that overlooked the Sir’s Road. ‘Look, Margaret!’ A bread van, its driver flanked by policemen holding carbines, was passing. ‘James Wright dare not let his plain bread out on the road without police protection. If hungry people saw this—’ he was going to use some caustic term for the inoffensive cake when he saw her tears. As she turned away the bells on her key ring made a tinkle of protest into the folds of her gown. The sound came to him like a crystal echo from her falling tears. ‘My dear,’ he called after her. ‘All right. Give a party for the helpers. Ask the De Lacey girls. They’ve done heroic work for me. This will be a treat for them before they emigrate.’

  The terrace, the only secluded place since the ravages of the Big Wind, was chosen for the setting of the cake party. But its seclusion didn’t screen the fantasy in flour from George Lucas.

  Sir Roderick was in the act of signing the ‘bit of paper’ that would give Lucas the lease of his wife’s holding when the cake was carried to the terrace.

  ‘Be the powers of war!—beggin’ your Honour’s pardon for makin’ so bold,’ said Lucas, ‘is that a real cake?’

  It would be you, Roderick thought. The last one of his tenants he would wish to have seen the wretched thing. Rumours, ugly whispers about deaths on the Kilsheelin estate had reached him. On the estates of Lord Cullen and Lord Templetown tenants had died of fever; but none of starvation. Through the window both he and Lucas saw Young Thomas lurch as he helped the butler and O’Driscoll to carry the cake.

  He turned impatiently from the man’s thanks for the lease and his good wishes for the afternoon’s entertainment. ‘...an’ I hope her Ladyship and the children will enjoy the wonderful cake. Sure there’s a power of eatin’ in it entirely.’

  It is probably, thought Roderick, trying to overcome his distaste for the man, that he is not a born tenant. I tend to regard him as an interloper... His face clouded and he threw the quill from him. Black Pat had been a born, hereditary tenant; sinew and bone of the soil of Kilsheelin.

  Surprisingly, Roderick found himself enjoying the afternoon. It seemed æons since he had savoured the grace and charm of social life. The young girls in their crinolines and sashes and flower-laden bonnets looked like a garland of flowers around the cake. They oohed and ahed over it and strained on tiptoe to see the muses. Three of the Delaney girls, despite the short notice, had arrived almost first. From one Bianconi driver to another the invitation had sped from the lodge gates of the castle to the lodge gates of Moormount in Queen’s County within an hour and a half.

  The Bard was enraptured with the cake. He expounded the Gaelic version of the muses to the girls. ‘Nine Brightnesses carrying nine lanterns. Only maybe,’ he said drolly, ‘the great Queen’s cook hadn’t enough sugar left to make the lanterns.’ He looked about him like a naughty child to see if anyone was looking, then broke off a toe from the dancing foot of Terpsichore. He murmured, ‘You’re a sweet little colleen,’ sucking the toe, ‘but you won’t be so nimble now, grá gal.’ This was the way f
ood should be served; a cake like a snow mountain; a whole side of beef; a pyramid of potatoes. ‘Too much talk there is of famine,’ he said to the girls. ‘Now I remember the Great Scarcity of Seventeen—’ Roderick gave him an affectionate shove. ‘Go and play for the guests, Bard.’

  The old man sat under the cake and winked up at Apollo. ‘Yourself and your sugarstick lyre! Listen to this for sweetness.’

  Margaret was in billowing white with a great white hat tied beneath her chin. Suddenly Roderick experienced that sentient feeling of having relived this scene before, an afternoon of brilliant sunshine; Margaret in bridal white planning a Belgian honeymoon! He walked towards her. And that tune the bard was playing... It was the tune the piper had played when they had watched the dance at the crossroads; and, later, tragic little Nonie had flaunted her saucy tune on the violin. Where was she? Where were the boys and girls, the long-haired Naiad? Was it only ten months since he had listened to the piper play that thing the Bard was now strumming? And ’twixt the two playings of the lovely melody a million people had died of hunger.

  Tiredness flowed back. His head felt strangely light. Mrs. Kennedy-Sherwin looked over her shoulder and drew in the spread of her skirt from that of Mrs. Appleyard with an inviting gesture. He was glad to ease himself down between the billows of their crinolines.

  Roderick thought how entrancing was the line of cheek and throat that showed beneath his wife’s hat brim. He must tell her... He must tell her. But he never wanted to stand up again. How blissful to sit forever in this sun-drenched terrace! A low diapason filled his ears, not sound but vibration, like the buzzing of hundreds of bees. What on earth was Hegarty doing? Standing over him with a sword in his hand? Of course—the damned cake! He must cut it. He struggled to his feet. His body had become an automaton, blindly obeying some inner force that drove relentlessly. As he raised the sword that the butler had handed to him, a movement caught his eye. Only the cuckoo had that curious habit of slipping over a garden wall. Someone used to say something about that habit; someone in his childhood. Funny how many of these childhood associations obtruded of late. Not funny! So many of them were connected with Black Pat. It was Black Pat who used to say that if the garden wall were raised a foot the cuckoo would be trapped and good fortune would come to the garden. The government ought to have raised the nation’s sea walls against the cuckoo merchant ships. ‘The cuckoo,’ he cried to Margaret, pointing his sword towards the wall. But the bird had slithered out of sight. Margaret saw nothing. She merely heard the terrible thing her husband was saying. ‘My dear,’ he was saying, ‘I ought to have raised the wall. Then there might have been no—’ No famine was what he meant to say but on a sudden he exclaimed. ‘Why then there might have been no need for Fitz’s cake!’

  He brought the sword down through the cake, unconscious of the sudden silence, unconscious of his wife’s white face. She did not possess his lore of wild life. But she did know that the cuckoo was the symbol of unfaithfulness. The guests knew it. It was in their faces. Even Lady Cullen who adored Roderick, thought that he had taken leave of his senses and publicly accused his wife of cuckolding him with the young officer who had presented the cake.

  Roderick, unconscious of the drama, was prising off sugar muses with his sword tip. Catherine Delaney went all coy and blushing when he handed her Erate and explained that she was the female of Eros, the God of Love. ‘What shall I do with it?’ she murmured, though everyone knew she would put it under her pillow. ‘Keep it for a fast day,’ he suggested. ‘No, wait!’ He took back Eros and gave her another muse.

  With Eros poised on the sword tip he crossed to Margaret. ‘My dear,’ he said making a knightly obeisance, ‘the very young do not fully appreciate the significance of Love’s symbols.’ He was offering her again his own love; but she made no move to accept the figurine. Her face was as white as though the sword tip had pricked her heart.

  The little figure toppled from the blade and fell to the ground. Roderick rose wearily. She was keeping up the bitterness! And in front of this crowd! He resumed his seat and closed his eyes.

  Sterrin stood forlornly in the empty terrace and watched Young Thomas and Hegarty carry away the cake. Where the sword had cut, a brown gash bled a trail of crumbs and fruit. Hungry as she was for sweets, Sterrin had no craving for that monstrous confection. She had a strange feeling of being grown up. It had something to do with the strange look on her papa’s face when Hegarty had rushed to whisper that the Delaney girls were wanted at home urgently, Sterrin had not known that sorrow could come like that into the midst of fun and brightness. She was sad as she waved goodbye to the Delaney girls. Would there ever again be a truly gay party at Kilsheelin?

  29

  Mr. Delaney was dead, struck down by famine fever. Young Thomas was ordered to dress in livery with a mourning swathe about his cockaded hat. Big John and Mike O’Driscoll, with blunderbusses concealed, had to journey for a grain consignment. Young Thomas must supply the ceremonial courtesy for Mr. Delaney’s funeral.

  It was the strangest funeral Thomas had seen; even of famine funerals. Five of the Delaney girls were ill with fever. Fever was raging madly about the district. The Delaneys’ nearest neighbours were all down. The three daughters who had been at the tea party at Kilsheelin still wearing their muslin gowns, only sketchily covered by cloaks, looked strange. And strangest of all was the absence of even one clergyman to breathe a prayer at the graveside. The curate had collapsed, plague-stricken, between the hospital beds where he had been administering the viaticum to the dying. The parish priest was struggling single-handed night and day.

  Mrs. Delaney looked vaguely about her. She caught the movement of a rose-coloured sash as it fluttered from a cloak. She moved forward and someone said, ‘Make way for the widow.’ She made way with the others until she realised that they meant herself. She was the widow. She, who had deplored all her married life that she was nothing but a widow because Rodney had been so—so gently unobtrusive! She forced back the tears because there was something grievously lacking. Not just the absence of relatives and friends, of tenants and workmen—except those three helping Ned Rua with the burden that four must carry. It wasn’t even the absence of mourning black, Syrilla looked grotesque in a black riding coat over the rose-sprigged white gown she had worn at the tea party. There were but two figures in black; one was her kinsman, Rody O’Carroll. The other looked like an O’Carroll too. But there was no black figure wearing the white linen bandolier of mourning across his shoulders. No priest to breathe a prayer. ‘Rody,’ she whispered, ‘the Latin!’

  Roderick swayed out from a trance. ‘De profundis clamavi ad te Domine,’ he prayed, with a sort of blind obedience that carried him for about two lines. His voice trailed away from the void of his mind into the one that gaped at his feet.

  Then out of the silence another voice took up the Latin words, ‘Si iniquitates observaveris domine; Domine, quis sustinebit.’

  No one seemed to notice that it was a scullery boy who was murmuring that cry from the depths on behalf of the scholarly son of Sir Dowling Delaney. Cathleen Delaney stifled the recollection of some poem the O’Carrolls’ Bard had quoted yesterday—something about a chieftain who had stood like a lance uplifted.

  Roderick, after the ceremony wanted to ask the girls to come back to Kilsheelin with him. But already they were rushing back to their plague-stricken sisters.

  ‘It is sweltering there, Rody,’ their mother said as she answered his queries. Thomas, holding open the brougham door as erect as ‘a lifted lance’, heard his own voice saying, ‘Put them in the quarry.’ Roderick explained about the Scout and the others who, when struck down with the plague, had lain in the quarry in open air and had been cured. The idea didn’t shock Mrs. Delaney. It appealed to her sense of the out-of-doors, but Ned Rua was horrified. ‘Miss Katie,’ he urged, ‘you’re not yourself. If you do such a thing I’ll—I’ll—’ Automatically she finished his oft-repeated threat. ‘You’ll leave me in the mor
ning.’

  Ned turned away and wiped his eyes. ‘I’ll never leave you, Miss Katie.’

  On the way home in the brougham Roderick dozed. He awakened with a jolt. Thomas had just made the discovery that he was asleep himself and in a panic had chucked the unoffending horse to a stand-still. His master, still fuddled with sleep, had stepped to the ground before he realised that they were halted at a wayside tavern. The clamour of Roderick’s weary body and dry throat propelled him inside.

  No one answered his knock. When he called, his voice went off through the house on its own. He could hear its echoes. But apparently no one else did. On his way out a man jostled him in the doorway and continued down the length of the shop. Roderick watched him help himself from a big whiskey jar that materialised out of the gloom at the far end of the counter. Copper coins were piled about its base.

  The landlord and his household, Roderick learned, were down with fever, as was the entire neighbourhood. People were to help themselves whether they could pay or not. Whiskey was the best antidote for the fever. The man tossed down two pence. ‘It’s killin’ people like flies,’ he said. Roderick thought he was alluding to the unrestricted whiskey. ‘Particularly,’ the man said, ‘the gentry. They make no fight. Take another noggin, your Honour.’ Roderick did so, then bade the man send in his driver.

  Thomas knew he was in for it! The enormity of falling asleep driving was scarcely as terrible as what he had done at the burial when he had suggested putting the Misses Delaney into a quarry. He had no idea how the words came to be said; but when he heard them coming out of his own lips he had the same sensation that he had known in a dream, when he thought he was sitting in his nightshirt in a Bianconi, and all the people in the long row opposite him staring out at him over their travelling coats.