The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

With a long drawn ‘Roder-eeck’ she stumbled towards the door. It opened and there was Roderick.

  She was held firm in the grip of his arms. The noise stopped. The swaying stopped. Everything was suddenly still; only his voice murmuring over and over, ‘My darling! My lovely, lost, terrified darling!’

  She tried to speak but his kisses stifled over vocal breath. At last he held her from him, her arms gripped. Her lovely graceful arms that had carried a great, full-grown woman! His eyes devoured the elegant form that had lain beneath a corpse, rending her as she dragged herself shrieking from the terrible embrace. His kisses spoke his tribute, reverent, tender, passionate.

  She drew away. ‘But I don’t understand. You ought to be at Kilsheelin, ill.’

  ‘So ought you, but not ill—healthy, sound—’

  ‘I’m not sound.’ The interruption rasped out from her, low and tense. ‘You know that I am not sound. I am—’ She couldn’t say the word mad. She looked down at her hands. ‘I’ve read your recipe for—for the leaves of the ground ivy.’ She daren’t look up to see his face. She ought to have let the thing lie. A sleeping dog! A silent menace between them. He drew her down beside him. His arms still about her. At last his voice spoke very low, ‘Is that why you ran away?’

  She nodded. Her eyes were still on her hands where a big tear had splashed. He jerked her chin and forced her to look up.

  ‘Margaret,’ he said, ‘promise me that you will never again let the shadow of such a thought cross your mind.’ He looked straight into her eyes, ‘The mind that I love.’

  His grip on her chin was firm. She had no option but to give back his searching look. Her protests, all the questions she wanted to ask, became void.

  Much later she remembered to ask him how he had come to find her. He chuckled. It wasn’t hard to trace the lady who held up a whole train and then decided to sleep on the project before attempting another start. He dismissed the memory of his terrible all-night search and the frantic gallop with relays of horses to catch up on that ‘special’ train. ‘That reminds me!’ He jumped up. ‘We’ll miss the arrival. I’d never have reached you in time if I hadn’t caught up on the funeral “Special”.’

  She drew back. Twice today there had been references to a funeral. It had conveyed nothing. There were funerals every day.

  ‘Whose funeral?’ she asked.

  ‘The Liberator’s, of course.’

  She had forgotten that the Liberator’s funeral had been winding its slow way across the continent from Italy where he had died. City after city paid homage to his remains. In every port, ships of all nations lowered their flags.

  As Roderick and Margaret came on deck, the emigrant ship Birmingham was moving out. When it passed, Margaret saw, to her amazement, a solid mass of humanity, rows and rows, filling the width of the quay and stretching down its length as far as she could see. More people, thought Roderick, than had stood to witness the Liberator pass in triumph to address a million people at Tara.

  ‘I don’t understand, Roderick, I thought we were at sea. I felt the boat rocking.’

  He explained that what she had felt was when the boat had been hurriedly transferred from its accustomed moorings to accommodate the unusual sea traffic that accompanied the funeral barge.

  ‘Here it comes!’

  Slowly the Duchess of Kent in a great convoy of vessels, steamers, yachts, fishing craft, came streaming up the bay. The Liberator was making his most impressive entry into the country he had served so nobly.

  Nearby a tiny boat floundered wildly. Then another! The fishermen had glimpsed the coffin on the quarter deck, under its vast awning of black crepe. Regardless of safety they knelt in their little crafts to pray.

  Suddenly a wild Gaelic keen throbbed over the waters. The Birmingham was passing the coffin ship and the emigrants had flung themselves to their knees in a passion of grief for the Great One who had raised them up from the prostration of the Penal Law.

  Roderick felt Margaret’s tremor. In the strange mood that had accomplished her flight, how could she have endured this scene alone! He gripped her fingers.

  Hand in hand they stood on the crowded deck and waited. On the brink of another black harvest, midst pestilence and hunger, midst the keen of the death lamentation, the mighty Tribune was coming to his people in their darkest hour.

  Silently the great crowd filed by as the coffin was borne ashore. The quickening throb beneath the deck warned Roderick that the engines were warming for departure. Another minute and they would have been on their way to England.

  31

  Thomas often wondered if he had dreamed the strange man he had encountered that day when he had collapsed amongst the blossoms at Lissnastreenagh. A year had passed since then. The death of Joseph, the footman, of famine fever, left Thomas little time for wandering abroad. He looked at the clock. Now he had an hour and a quarter to himself before the nine o’clock tea tray went to the drawing-room.

  He had crossed two fields before he realised that the footsteps beyond the hedge were padding step for step with his own. He dropped to his knees and peeped. A pair of eyes peeped back at him through the hedge.

  ‘What are you doing there?’ he demanded.

  ‘Following you.’

  ‘You are not supposed to do that.’

  ‘Stop preaching and give me a hand through this.’

  He pulled her through. She loped beside him panting hard.

  ‘Phew! You set me a devil of a pace.’

  ‘I was not aware that I was pacing anyone; and you should not use the word Devil in your conversation. It is most inelegant.’

  ‘You don’t have to correct my speech.’

  ‘No, but I have to take the blame when you speak inelegantly. Then we hear that you are mixing too much with the servants. Meaning, of course, me.’ He suddenly remembered to drop her hand.

  ‘You needn’t have dropped my hand as if it were something nasty. You are rough.’

  He stopped and faced her. ‘Since I am so rough why do you follow me?’

  ‘Because,’ she said sweetly, ‘you might get lost. If I hadn’t followed you last year what would have happened to you?’

  His cheeks reddened at his churlishness. In a low voice he answered, ‘I should have died.’ And now he knew what had really prompted the train of thought that had led him out here this evening; a wild flower whose name meant ‘faithfulness’. He wanted to plant it in the flower-bed he had made for her; a tribute to her faithfulness that kept her searching when the others had given him up as a runaway; a symbol of his own undying faithfulness.

  When he told her about the strange man with the intense blue eyes, her own eyes purpled with the dint of mystery.

  ‘Young Thomas,’ she breathed, ‘and you were keeping this from me. Of course he is the thief.’ She grabbed his hand. ‘Come on, we’ll stalk him.’

  But the man needed no stalking. For suddenly there he was; motionless by a rock, like the wild things of nature that merge into the background of the landscape. When he stepped forward their sense of mystery was jolted. There was nothing furtive about him. As he watched them approaching hand in hand, he might have been yielding an audience.

  ‘Is she your sister?’

  Thomas dropped Sterrin’s hand. ‘She is my master’s daughter.’

  The man scrutinised her. ‘God save you, Daughter.’ And to Thomas, ‘You have been a long time coming back.’ With a regal gesture he dismissed Thomas’s reply. ‘Look down there. Don’t speak; keep on looking.’ Where he pointed a trickle of men kept moving into the gateway of a farmhouse. George Lucas’s farmhouse.

  ‘Is it a wake?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘No, and there was no wake a month back when they gathered there. A game of Twenty-five, one of them told me. A leg of mutton he said the prize was. But it looked to me that every man carried home a prize beneath his cotha mór.’ He put his hand on Sterrin’s head. ‘Your father’s shepherd was missing a sheep that day.’ Thomas whistled a breath of enl
ightenment.

  ‘There was a sheep missing the day before yesterday.’

  While Thomas watched the house, Sterrin sped back to Kilsheelin and gasped out the story to her father. Before he could recall her she was gone again. He overtook her, panting over the grass, her red hair flying out behind her like the tail of a hunted fox.

  ‘Go back home. Keep out of this.’

  She pleaded with him. ‘Please, Papa! I feel responsible. It was my fault that he came here at all.’

  ‘Come on, then. I suppose you are a bit involved.’ He hoisted her up.

  George Lucas’s face turned yellow when his landlord strode into the crowded kitchen. There was no sign of card playing, but a horse skin was displayed prominently.

  ‘It’s a raffle we’re havin’ for the skin, your Honour’s Sir.’ Lucas’s smooth voice was shaking.

  The police Night Patrol that Thomas had been sent for were searching the premises.

  ‘Have you found anything?’ demanded Sir Roderick.

  With unfailing pedantry Constable Humphreys informed him that they had disinterred ‘a veritable mutton magazine’.

  ‘Trust old Constable Jawbreaker,’ whispered Thomas, but Sterrin’s giggle was strained and unnatural. Sir Roderick ordered them outside. As they went they glimpsed the cut-up carcass of a sheep under the stripped floor boards of the adjoining room. They heard words like ‘ingrate’ and ‘thieves’ lash out from Sir Roderick as he recognised his own tenants. ‘I stripped my lands of flocks to feed you. I stinted my own children—’

  An old man with tears running down his face seized Roderick’s hand. ‘The hand that fed us—’ Roderick snatched away the hand. But a story emerged through the old man’s babblings. Lucas had led them to believe that Sir Roderick’s daughter, because of her mother’s delicacy, had lived in fosterage awhile with Lucas and his wife. The men had not questioned the story, ‘though I’ve seen no fosterage since my youth’. No one had questioned it either when it was explained that an occasional gift of a sheep was still sent to Lucas in the old manner. ‘Haven’t I seen a sheep sent to Black Pat’s, Lord rest him?’ The meat was sold under cover of a raffle lest his Honour be offended and curtail his benevolence.

  Roderick recoiled from the flicker of sheer hate in the eyes of Lucas as he walked past him between two policemen. He thought of how he had been duped into giving him employment the day he came with his tragic story of the Big Wind and of his eviction with nineteen other men because one of Major Darby’s sheep had been stolen! Roderick’s instincts had been truer than his judgment when he had likened Lucas to the darraghadheal, the beetle that had been an accomplice to the betrayal at Gethsemane.

  Outside, the hermit brushed aside Roderick’s thanks. ‘’Tis little to do for your father’s son, O’Carroll.’ Thomas started at the man’s familiarity. Roderick assessed the sturdy figure in the green cut-away body coat, knee-breeches, black worsted stockings and old-fashioned square-toed shoes with buckles. The man returned the scrutiny.

  ‘I am the O’Meara of Bannandrum Castle.’ He pointed to an ivy gable wall that loomed against the skyline. ‘But,’ blurted Sterrin, ‘you cannot live in a wall?’

  ‘There was a Mansion there once, Daughter, and the silk of the kine grazed on those pastures—’ He shook his fist in the direction of Darby’s estate. ‘Son’s son of a black thief!’ he shouted.

  Sir Roderick was too distracted to cope with the lineage of the curious stranger. There was something about Bannandrum Castle being appropriated under the Penal Code while its owner served in Austria; something, too about a son, or was it a grandson, who had grown up half-wild, clinging with imperishable optimism to the crumbling walls?

  At his trial Lucas let loose a story of landlordism that shocked the case-hardened courtroom. Eyes travelled to where Sir Roderick O’Carroll sat; haughty and aloof; waiting for them to silence the scurrilous wretch. But Lucas’s defence was too good to miss—that cake! Lucas increased its circumference from nine feet to fifteen; its height to twelve feet. Three men staggering under its weight—one, a boy, almost falling to the ground. The prisoner had dashed to his assistance. ‘’Twas torture, your Lordship, the smell of beautiful food so near me.’

  Roderick had the impression that the judge sent him a look through his fingers. The prisoner’s black eyes missed nothing. Words poured from him in torrents before they could be suppressed. ‘There had been mortal dread on him,’ he said, ‘since his neighbour, Sir Roderick’s own foster-brother, Black Pat Ryan, and three of his children died of hunger; all four of them in one afternoon!’

  Roderick braced against the buzz of horror.

  Lucas was not deported. He was given one year’s sentence in an Irish prison.

  ‘How could anyone believe him?’ cried Margaret. ‘Believe such things of you!’ Roderick sat at the dinner table, tight-lipped and grim; scarcely touching his food. His toil for those terrible years turned into a famine folly! A grass-grown road leading nowhere. His home mortgaged! His children futureless!

  ‘People believe facts when they see them—and the Ryan hecatomb was a fact—inescapable.’

  Only a few weeks later Sterrin raced across the lawns to where her parents were strolling arm in arm. Just as they had strolled on such a lovely evening as this, unconscious of the Blight that lurked unseen amid the rich growth of that radiant summer.

  ‘Papa, I’ve just seen the darraghadheal—George Lucas.’

  Her father frowned impatiently at her. ‘Nonsense! The man is in prison.’

  ‘He is not, Papa. I saw him up there.’ Where she pointed they could see a small figure moving inside the hedge that separated the front lawn from the adjoining pastures.

  ‘He was peeping in here through the hedge, Papa.’

  Sterrin was right. Although the Queen on her recent visit to Ireland had withheld her clemency from political prisoners, a number of ordinary prisoners had been released under her amnesty. The story of one prisoner in particular had touched her sentimentality. She felt that the long arm of coincidence had guided her clemency towards the wretch who, while starving himself, had assisted a starving servant to carry the great birthday cake that had been presented to herself by the Duke of Devonshire. She had requested that George Lucas be released forthwith.

  Tim Lonergan hailed Thomas one morning to tell him that South Tipperary was ready to take the field in rebellion; Thomas Francis Meagher and Smith O’Brien had sent a fierce arousal across Slievenamon to a vast mustering. Tonight Meagher of the Sword would hold a meeting at the crossroads.

  Thomas listened at the crossroads enthralled. The knightly grace of the speaker, the glowing words sent pictures flashing across his mind; peasants pouring through the gap of danger; camp fires reddening the darkness. ‘...shall we snatch victory from death?’ cried the rousing voice ‘...shall the spirit that has survived the penalties, the savageries of centuries, the sword of famine, shall this spirit sink at last?... then up with the barricades... should we succeed, the joy, the glory. Should we fail...’

  They failed. Hunger and disease had burrowed too deeply into the soul of patriotism. The great columns of marching men proved to be a handful of youths. The great revolution was over before Thomas had word of its starting. Meagher and Smith O’Brien and the other leaders were ‘on their keeping’; hunted outlaws, stealing through the woods by day, hiding in mountain cabins by night.

  Late one night Thomas opened his door at a sound. The Sir, of all people, was moving stealthily down the passage towards the Bard’s room; behind him moved a slim figure, half military, half civilian, cross-belt, coloured sash, sword hilt over plain dark clothes. The Sir turned sharply at the sound of the opening door and came back. ‘What are you doing up so late?’ he demanded; without waiting for a reply he went on: ‘Forget whatever you may have seen! You understand?’ He gave Thomas a penetrating look. Thomas returned it squarely. ‘Yes, your Honour.’

  Next morning the Bard’s tray was handed to Thomas by Hegarty instead of by t
he cook. In addition to the Bard’s plate of bacon, soft bread and a jug of ale there was a covered silver dish, a pot of coffee and a rack of toast. When Thomas started to lift the cover from the breakfast dish the old man snapped his head off. ‘Leave it be and be off about your business,’ he said. Then when Thomas stooped over the hearth flags to add more turf the old man became quite agitated. ‘Get away from there! Get away!’ he kept repeating. When Thomas was half through the doorway he added: ‘And don’t you be gallivanting near the rath of Lissnastreenagh, Thomas Og. The spells of the Spéirbhean are direful to youths that are comely.’ Thomas went off, hoping that his idol would show up for the next meal. But there was no extra food on the next tray. Long before it was due the news of Meagher’s arrest had arrived.

  Sir Roderick attended the trial in Clonmel and Thomas risked bribing a lad to hold the horse while he ventured into the back of the court. The last time he had stood in a courthouse had been at the trial of the darraghadheal. This time there was no whining protest. The figure that he had seen moving towards the Bard’s room was standing in the dock, upright, defiant, listening to the death sentence.

  Then, miraculously, within hours of the scaffold, came Sir Charles Napier’s letter that disclosed how the Prime Minister and some of his colleagues had once, many years ago, plotted treason against the government. The death sentence was transmuted to transportation for life.

  When Thomas told the Bard the old man’s eyes found their tears. ‘Once more,’ he quoted, ‘shall oft-widowed Erin mourn the loss of her brave young men,’ and he made no protest when Thomas busied himself at the hearth slabs. Spéirbhean inagh! thought Thomas. From somewhere under these slabs the exiled patriot had made his way to Lissnastreenagh; not into the direful spells of the Fairy Queen but into those of Her Majesty’s police.

  32

  Christmas that year was something like the ones that Sterrin vaguely remembered before The Hunger. Dominic had no recollection of such wonderful preparations as were going on in the kitchen. The poultry stock had been built up; turkeys and geese hung over the fires in a molten glow of savoury gold. He was allowed to turn the spits. He took a hand at stirring the vast pudding for the staff dance; joined in threading twine through the holly leaves to make chains for the big barn for the dance. Spicy smells steamed out from the wall ovens where the porter cakes baked.