The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  ‘I—apologise—for the scandal that I have given to all of you, my classmates, my teachers—’ Her red, streaming eyes followed around the watching faces until they rested on her mother’s face. She gave a choking sound and covered her face with her hands. Sterrin averted her eyes. They went round the rows of faces that were smugly watching—accepting this act of human abasement. The big Parlour Boarder was the only one seated so as not to obstruct the vision of those behind. She caught Sterrin’s glance and gave a self-satisfied nod. Sterrin’s disdainful glance travelled down the whole six feet one and a half inches of undesired body length. Sitting there with her feet stuck out and her twenty thousand pounds and a hole as big as a shilling in the sole of her mean blue shoe. As though a blast or a hell would scandalise her!

  Something was rising in Sterrin and this time it was not panic. It shook her hopefully, invigoratingly, as water welling up beneath the parched earth shakes the water diviner’s testing rod. Mists and uncertainties vanished. Sterrin stepped resolutely from her place and walked down the centre of the hall. All eyes watched her. When she reached the kneeling girl she bowed and smiled her apology for passing in front of her. It was obvious to the amazed assembly where Sterrin O’Carroll’s sympathy lay.

  Sister Mary Aliquo recovered her composure at last. ‘Miss Sterrin O’Carroll!’ she called, but Miss Sterrin O’Carroll had taken the forbidden Grand Staircase two steps at a time and was now at Reverend Mother’s door.

  In the act of knocking she halted to recover her breath. There must be no more headlong entrances.

  ‘Reverend Mother,’ she said when she had been summoned inside, ‘I wish to renounce my vows.’

  Reverend Mother’s lips twitched. ‘I was not aware that you had taken any vows.’

  ‘I mean—I wish to renounce my decision to take vows.’ Reverend Mother refrained from pointing out that the decision to take vows did not rest entirely with the aspirant.

  ‘What has prompted this sudden change?’ she asked.

  Sterrin glanced through the window. A group of tiny children were playing on the croquet lawn. One little girl reminded her of Dominic. She had fair hair and brown eyes and the same helpless air. Probably lonely, Sterrin thought. She was one of those boarders whose papas were campaigning in the Crimea and whose mammas had gone to be near them. Sterrin knew that Dominic must be lonely, too.

  She turned away. She had meant to express her disapproval, to disassociate herself utterly from the scene she had witnessed downstairs. Instead, to her amazement, to her horror, she heard her own voice saying, ‘I wish to get married and have children of my own.’

  37

  Nurse Hogan made off with the post bag that lay on the butler’s table. Hegarty would be furious but he was up to his eyes in silver polish and her Ladyship could not bear to be kept waiting to know if there was a letter from Miss Sterrin.

  She riffled through the fashion catalogues that continued to pour in from London since the Sir’s assassination. Themselves and their claims to supply the ‘most Lugubrious Appurtenances of mourning. Widows’ bonnets weighted to the ground with crepe; mourning rings; lockets to hold the “loved one’s hair—”’ Suddenly, incredibly, she found herself reading an envelope addressed to Mrs. Hogan, Housekeeper, Kilsheelin Castle. Who in wonder would be writing to her? She that hadn’t a soul belonging to her since the night of the Big Wind that had robbed her of husband and child!

  After ten minutes of speculating that ranged back to her childhood Nurse Hogan decided that the only way to find out who the letter was from was to open it.

  Lady O’Carroll, coming through the communication door—the nurse now occupied Sir Roderick’s dressing-room—was startled to see the woman who was the bulwark of her life sitting with her face in her hands. But the nurse looked up to the sound of the bells and keys in the chatelaine belt and her eyes were shining. ‘It is from Young Thomas, your Ladyship. He is not in Van Diemen’s Land; not in prison. He is in America; doing well!’

  The news brought no added light to Lady O’Carroll’s brown eyes. She murmured some remark that approved his liberty but left no doubt that there her approval ended.

  The nurse had finished her reply and was sanding over the envelope when a hackney fly drew up on the gravel. She peeped through the window then with a cry she ran to the next room.

  ‘It is Miss Sterrin, your Ladyship!’

  Margaret skimmed across the landing, then suddenly stopped.

  Nurse Hogan was saying something about having to open her letter and change it—‘And I had barely finished writing Young Thomas that Miss Sterrin had left us for ever to take the veil.’

  Margaret turned back and faced her purposefully. ‘Nurse, do not alter what you have written. Let your letter go as it is.’ She moved down a step, then stopped. ‘And Nurse,’ Margaret was no longer the uncertain personality who leaned upon her companion-nurse-housekeeper, ‘I do not wish you to mention to the staff—or—’ she glanced towards the hall door, ‘anyone that you have heard from—America. Do you understand?’

  The nurse looked beyond her mistress to where a young gentlewoman, with friendly but sure authority, was tossing an order to the butler about paying the hackney driver and seeing to a feed for his animal ‘before it drops dead’. Sterrin then ran with arms extended towards her mother.

  Nurse Hogan, standing respectfully apart, addressed to the back of her mistress’s bombazine gown, ‘Yes, your Ladyship. I understand.’ She dropped the letter into the leathern post satchel, locked it with her own hands, then handed it to Big John. At Templetown the postmaster, and none but he, would open the bag with his own key. No one at Kilsheelin would ever read the address on that envelope.

  Not since the days before the tragedy had Margaret sat up so late. When Sterrin finally reached her bedroom, she found Mrs. Stacey herself drawing the bedwarmer vigorously up and down between the sheets. Hannah wanted to know was there anything else Miss Sterrin required. She half regretted the query when Miss Sterrin actually asked for a bath. Hot water at this hour of the night and the fires ashed down!

  But nothing was too much trouble to take for Miss Sterrin. The servants hadn’t realised until after she had vanished so inexorably, how much she had meant to them. It was not, they realised, her Ladyship, vague and remote; and certainly not the little ‘young sir’ timid beyond his years, who was the head of the house. It was the tall, poplar-straight girl with the darkening hair, darkening her looks into a replica of her father’s.

  With Miss Sterrin the servants sustained the old, homogeneous relationship that had existed between their forebears and hers; an association based upon a tradition of shared disasters in life and hearth, and in creed sustained; unifying master and man in mood and outlook. That spirit was not in her Ladyship, no more than in the ordinary gentry. But it was in Miss Sterrin; inculcated into her blood, fostered in her mind by her father and by the Bard.

  Mrs. Stacey went on drawing the long handle up and down although the bed was as warm as a thrush’s nest. She was on thorns to ‘draw’ Miss Sterrin about what had prompted her to give in at last just when her Ladyship and Mr. Maurice had withdrawn all further opposition and decided that she must have received a True Call. She ducked as a shift came flying over the screen and landed with a slosh at her feet.

  ‘If only I had known you were coming I’d have had hot bricks in the bed all week.’ She looked hopefully towards the screen and her eyebrows went up under the frills of her white cap. A long, shapely leg was protruding in mid-air beyond the screen.

  The cook had been muting her tones to suit the cloister that still must cling to the body in the hip bath. And here was half that body up in the air—the second leg was there now—stark naked!

  Sterrin contemplated her limbs with satisfaction. The clammy rule that had insisted upon her retaining a garment during her bath had irked her at the convent. She waggled her legs. She was free! No cloistering garments. Nothing would ever again induce her to risk her freedom. No matter w
hat happened. And nothing ever again could be as terrible as the things that had happened.

  Sterrin slipped back into youth’s heritage. Life stretched out endlessly before her. The desolateness of the Bard’s passing had cleared from the air. The loneliness for Young Thomas still lingered; but locked in a secret compartment; not weighing her down all the time. Her stay in the convent had given her the strength to shoulder her crosses high. She was glad to be home, and Margaret was delighted to have her back. For she blamed her preoccupation with her own grief for much of Sterrin’s unhappiness. Now she fussed over her; took her with her to pay calls. Once again there was a cosy family atmosphere at meals, with Margaret at the head of the table and young Sir Dominic and Sterrin at either side. Margaret even set her music boxes in motion and their tinkling made harmony with the crackling of pear logs on hearths that had lain so long empty. Sterrin felt encompassed with love and protection. Except for that raw, secret place that held her love for Young Thomas.

  To forget him was impossible. Once, when she fell asleep thinking of their last morning together, she was awakened by the stable clock striking four. She jumped from the bed dazedly thinking that it was time for their parting rendezvous. She had started to dress before she realised that she had been dreaming, but she completed her dressing and went out.

  As she stood beneath the wall gap with the whole world to herself she deliberately re-lived that last parting. In the convent she had crushed down its memory. Now she went over everything that he had said and all the things that she ought to have said to him as a quiet brightness crept over the sky. As on that last morning the birds began their faint cheep-cheep until the first ray of sun beamed over the top of the hill above the castle, then the birds leapt from their nests. The grasshoppers awakened and were busy at a stroke. There was a sudden stir in the air that sent her springing up to stand where she and Thomas had stood in the wall gap.

  In the field across the road she could see the caps of mushrooms thrusting upwards almost before her very eyes. She was startled to see a blaze of light moving over the slope; but it was only the tin can of a mushroom picker reflecting the sunlight. The sight sent a challenge to her blood that routed melancholy. ‘Whoever you are,’ she cried, ‘I was here first.’ She put two fingers beneath the white cap of a mushroom. ‘Pretty,’ she murmured, ‘but you’ll be prettier perched on a nice big slice of bacon.’

  The thought sent the juices coursing through her gums. Her shoes became saturated; but her hair and hands and heart were warming where little floating clouds turned to liquid gold, like fairy ships across the deepening blue. Her lips smiled with the smiling morn. She looked no farther ahead than the breakfast of sizzling bacon with the mushrooms that would taste as no other mushroom because she had found them for herself and plucked them out of the dawn’s magic.

  A whoosh and a bump after the last throb of the breakfast bell proclaimed that Sir Dominic was arriving down the banisters. Then a wafting movement bore the tall slender figure of Lady O’Carroll into the room. Sterrin, rising at her entrance, watched the black swaying that seemed to propel her mother without effort of limbs. Young Thomas had made her aware of the impression; something from a poem by his idol Mr. Davis. ‘Her step would scarcely bruise the flowers.’ Young Thomas! A cloud soughed by.

  ‘Maman!’ called Sir Dominic. ‘May I have breeches?’

  ‘Why, darling, what is the hurry? You are barely past ten.’

  ‘One of the English boys staying at Strague is only nine and a half and he has breeches.’

  ‘In another while, darling.’

  ‘Huh! I suppose when the “Morgidge” is paid.’ He was promised everything that he asked for ‘when the mortgage would be paid off.’

  Sterrin glanced sideways at him. He had played so long with childish things that he was still regarded as a baby. But he was growing tall. ‘Yes, Maman,’ she agreed, ‘he really ought to be breeched.’

  ‘If I’m not breeched I shall not go to Strague any more,’ he announced in a surprisingly firm tone. ‘Those English boys keep pulling up my petticoats to see whether I am a boy or a girl.’

  Lady O’Carroll choked over her café-au-lait. ‘Nevair shall you go there again! You shall have a tutor at once.’

  ‘If we can afford one,’ said Sterrin grimly. ‘Every quarter’s day staff is being paid off. I could take over his lessons and he can go to Master Hennessey for Latin.’

  Her mother frowned, ‘Master Hennessey! He is too—too du peuple to impart a classical education to a gentleman’s son.’

  Sterrin pointed out that he had not been too du peuple to give Papa a grounding in the classics before he went to college in England.

  A long sigh and a faraway look reminded Sterrin that she had said the wrong thing. Her mother had gone off again down the corridor of memories. It was the same always. Sterrin dare not mention her father’s name. She cast about for some safer argument and almost said that Master Hennessey had made a success of teaching the classics to Young Thomas. Young Thomas! Her own sigh mingled with her mother’s.

  ‘Look!’ cried Dominic, ‘it is the fellow with the death message.’ He ran to the window. Behind him Sterrin saw that the woman at the lodge was behaving strangely. She had let a vehicle through the gates and instead of returning to the lodge she had dropped on her knees.

  Hegarty glanced through the window then hurried to open the hall door. ‘The young Sir is right,’ he gasped. ‘’Tis the invention that comes when someone is dead.’

  Sterrin, framed in the dining-room doorway, was like stone. The kitchen staff were already crowding the inner hall and someone was whispering. ‘It is Mr. Maurice.’

  Who else could it be but Cousin Maurice, whom Sterrin had hated because he had dismissed Young Thomas? Cousin Maurice whose anxious, pleading visits to the convent had but strengthened her resolve to stay there. Who would look after things now? The whole structure of the family would collapse. Already the servants showed signs of going to pieces.

  Nurse Hogan hurried forward to take up her place behind her Ladyship. Sterrin joined her. Margaret’s fingers crawled towards the sinister, pinkish slip that Hegarty proffered on a shaky salver. The cook had her mouth open for the keen when Sterrin’s exclamation cut through the tension. ‘May the devil ride buck hunting with Cousin Maurice; arriving by the six o’clock train indeed!’

  The telegram boy deemed it no breach of official trust to divulge the contents of the telegram to the Kilsheelin tenants as he drove home. It was friendly and nice to be able to reassure people that there was no bad news. But maybe the news was bad! There were queer rumours afloat about Kilsheelin Castle. Maybe this little pink letter from the castle’s administrator was the forerunner of the big yellow poster that appeared on the gates of mansions that are forced on to the Encumbered Estates Market! And if the owners were forced out, the tenants were forced out also, and so the telegram might still be a death message.

  Indeed, when Maurice O’Carroll spread out the documents that were the cause of his sudden visit on the table, Sterrin’s heart gave a little queer thump. ‘The Commissioners For the Sale of Encumbered Estates in Ireland,’ she read. ‘Kilsheelin Castle, situate in the Eli-Fogarty and the Eli-O’Carroll... the said castle...’ There was a list of figures and then stipulations of rentals like offerings of cattle and tuns of wine ‘together with one fat beefe and two fat wedders and two pairs of fat capons as ascates... payable to the prince...’ There was a list of tenants’ names that were as familiar to Sterrin as her rosary. Lady O’Carroll kept interrupting her as she read them, to make inconsequential remarks like ‘Isn’t that the mother of the girl who married that good-looking farmer from the Queen’s County? Wasn’t it a “love match”?’

  Sterrin forgot the significance of the document as she noticed a reference to a shooting right granted one hundred and forty years ago to The O’Meara. ‘Oh, listen,’ she cried. ‘It says here that The O’Meara’s daughter, Tibina, was married to the father of Dominic O’Carroll
of Strague. Wasn’t he the father of the one who was cast out of his castle with nothing but the silver drinking cups that he got from the Empress Maria Theresa?’

  Maurice sighed impatiently. ‘You can come out of the past, Sterrin; all of you; of us,’ he corrected. ‘The mortgage company is foreclosing. The castle is about to be placed on the Encumbered Market.’

  Sterrin looked at him, incredulous. This was the kind of thing that happened to others; not to oneself. And then she remembered how she had thought that murder was a faraway unlikely kind of horror, yet it had happened to her—here. But now Papa’s murder had become another piece of the historicity of Kilsheelin. The castle was all the more hallowed because it had happened.

  She sprang up with a cry. ‘Are you mad, Cousin Maurice? Kilsheelin must never be sold.’

  ‘Of course Kilsheelin must never be sold.’ Lady O’Carroll’s voice was brisk and matter-of-fact. ‘You must explain to those persons, Maurice, that Kilsheelin has got to be here for Dominic’s coming-of-age.’

  Maurice looked at her pityingly. A body could not show exasperation to so much gracious beauty; and such undiminishing beauty at that. She was more damned appealing than ever.

  ‘Margaret, my dear,’ he said gently, ‘the Commissioners for the Encumbered Estates will not wait for Dominic. There will be no more comings-of-age at Kilsheelin.’

  The brown eyes looked wildly round the room. ‘Coming-of-age!’ The phrase cut sharp through her vagueness; down to the bone of her memory of the tragic return from that last coming-of-age party. Roderick’s night of triumph; Roderick’s night of death; Roderick’s blood on a white ball-gown!

  ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘No more coming-of-age.’ She put her hand to the back of her head. Sterrin flinched as her father’s name sounded out in that long drawn ‘Roder-eeck!’ And Sterrin knew that she was alone again to face whatever was ahead! As she bade goodbye to her kinsman he held her hand long in his and studied her face. The spittin’ image of her father. A real O’Carroll bred true to the bone. A pity she wasn’t the heir. My sorrow, he reminded himself, heir to what?