The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  He leaned out and kissed her again. ‘God bless you, child! You are having a hard passage. You were born in storm and named for storm. ’Twas the Liberator’s idea, that name of yours, I wonder was it wise? I always hold that a name influences a person’s life and the dear knows your life seems cast in a stormy mould.’

  Without thinking why, she jerked up her chin. ‘I’ll weather the storm,’ she said.

  He looked at the determined young face and sighed. ‘If you had half as much money as you have spirit you’d weather anything. I must hurry now,’ he said, ‘or I won’t catch this train. A pity they did not bring the iron road along past this way to Templetown. It would have brought some prosperity. Any more word about it?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard.’

  ‘Well, goodbye again, girl. I’ll do my best with this damned Commission tomorrow.’

  That night, as Hannah gave Miss Sterrin’s hair its hundred strokes, she kept losing count with the dint of trying to sound out about Mister Maurice’s visit. ‘Eighty-four, eighty-six, wasn’t it a profane sort of thing to send that death telegram into a peaceful house and it only to say he was comin’ on a visit? Bad scran’ to that telegram boy! A gentleman’s life he has. Three shillings and six pence a week and the use of a pony; just to bring bad news! He’d have earned his money in the famine. The Banshee needs no wages. Ninety-ninety-one—’

  ‘You are cheating, Hannah. It is eighty-seven and I’ve a crick in my neck.’ Sterrin was seated at the open window with her hair flowing over her face. Hannah slowed the strokes. ‘Miss Sterrin grá. It’s not—’ she faltered. ‘It’s not lookin’ for newses that I am, but—’ she scraped her throat, ‘is there any truth in the rumour that Kilsheelin is for the Encumbrancy auctions?’

  Sterrin remained silent.

  ‘Kilsheelin is hearth and home to all of us,’ Hannah said. ‘We’d die for it. If this terrible thing is true we’ll start prayin’ downstairs and we won’t stop until our prayers have pierced the clouds.’

  ‘Then start praying.’

  Hannah, watching the enmarbled tensity of the features and the long hair flowing over the white wrapper, was minded of a statue in a church; except that Miss Sterrin wasn’t looking exactly like a saint.

  ‘Start praying, Hannah,’ she repeated. ‘But God likes a little help; so while you are piercing the clouds I’ll pierce the soil.’

  ‘The soil, Miss Sterrin?’

  ‘Aye, the soil, Hannah. The soil that was taken from us the night that I was born. I’ll get it back sod by sod. And once it is back, Kilsheelin will never be taken from me or mine.’ She threw her wrapper across the room. ‘Get me my riding things.’

  ‘Miss Sterrin, where are you thinkin’ of goin’ this hour of the night?’

  ‘To Poolgower.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Don’t argue with me.’

  A few minutes later she went flying down the backstairs. Big John, from his room over the coach-house, saw her and hurried down. Had she decided to go back to the convent?

  When she told him her mission he ventured no remonstrance. Maybe there was madness in the escapade, but there was no denying, he reflected as he watched her go, savouring the flying harmony of horse and rider, that there was some connection between the ups and downs of Poolgower and Kilsheelin. Poolgower was prospering and expanding while Kilsheelin Castle... He turned away. There were things in the world beyond the wit of man. Mag Miney had been sleek and fed throughout the famine. Her handful of potatoes had never blackened when regiments of potatoes belonging to respectable men had turned to evil-smelling slime.

  Yes, he wished Miss Sterrin good luck on her strange errand. One big sod to divide into four to bind the corners of the field the Big Wind had lifted away, that could do it. Big John thought. Perhaps that sod could change the luck of the O’Carrolls, could keep Kilsheelin free for the young Sir and for the gallant girl galloping off into the night.

  38

  The watcher in the shadows of the trees relaxed. The marauder was a girl! There was no need to pounce or summon aid. A whinny from the pastures behind him brought forth a strange whinny from the weather-belt of trees where the girl moved stealthily. It was then he discerned the horse. Its docile pacing acknowledged its owner rather than the rein that hung loosely over her elbow.

  It was the horse he recognised first. Who didn’t know that horse? A bit long in the tooth but still the finest looking animal in the North Riding. So that’s who the girl is! But what is she doing at Poolgower at this hour of the night?

  She came out into the full moonlight. With a quick sweep of her arm she drew the reins in a double loop round it, then dropped to her knees. For a moment he did not heed her strange behaviour because her hood had fallen back and a shaft of moonlight made little sparkles through the waving tendrils and curls of her hair. The horse moved nearer and dropped his muzzle into the silky coil on the nape of her neck.

  ‘Thuckeen! you greedy girl, my hair is not hay.’ She wriggled her head and when she turned with a laugh to push away the questing head she saw the young man.

  ‘It is indeed an unexpected honour to have Miss Sterrin O’Carroll trespass upon our lands,’ Donal Keating said coldly.

  If he expected her to jump confusedly to her feet he was mistaken. She continued to kneel for a few seconds and the gaze that met his was as cold as his own. He could not see the flush that was warming through the magnolia-tinted cheeks because her face was masked with moonlight.

  So this was the youngest Keating, she thought as she rose; the one studying law at Trinity! A pity he is not there studying it now instead of trying to impress his knowledge of it on me! With a faint but perceptible movement she avoided the hand that shot out involuntarily to assist her to her feet. ‘I am glad that you appreciate the honour,’ she said haughtily.

  The moon was behind him so his flush also remained unrevealed. ‘It would have been still more appreciated,’ he replied, ‘had you paid your call at a more conventional hour.’

  The moonlight did not mask the raised eyebrows and the curled lip as she swept a quick glance towards the house that was steadily expanding into a small mansion. The glance despised his home, and her tone, when she replied, dismissed the suggestion that it could ever aspire for a place on her list of social calls. ‘When I pay calls,’ she said icily, ‘I observe the customary conventions.’

  Anger spurred him a step nearer. ‘Perhaps Miss O’Carroll can afford to break this convention; but she must not assume that she can afford to break the law with equal impunity. Not only have you trespassed here, you have been guilty also of an act of malicious damage.’ He pointed to the square of lea sod she had cut from the ground. For a moment he looked at it with naive curiosity. What on earth was the girl up to? More of her high-spirited whims! ‘Do you realise,’ he demanded, ‘that it is a serious breach of the law to... to...’ he floundered, ‘to mutilate my father’s land like that?’

  ‘Your father’s?’ Her scorn lashed. ‘Do you think I recognise his ownership? As for mutilation; that is a subject in which I am not so well versed as you and your family.’ She pushed something like a trowel into a saddlebag and gave a fastidious flick with both wrists to shake the soil from her gloved fingers.

  Before he could answer she had her foot in the stirrup and the impulse to offer assistance left him at a loss for words. But she had swung on to the saddle and jerked the horse’s head away from him, so that all that was left for him to do was to stoop for the discarded sod of earth.

  ‘Hadn’t you better take your plunder?’ he asked.

  She looked down at him. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I think, after all, that you had better regard my call as a belated return for the one your family paid ours some years ago. By all accounts it was rather unconventional. Particularly the style of visiting dress. The shirts, strange to say, were worn on the outside of the coats. Come on, Thuckeen!’

  She set the horse at a gallop for the gate and the breath went out from young Keating
in a long, low whistle. No horse had ever jumped that gate before and no rider had ever made the venture. Ye gods! What a jump! What a nerve!

  He stood bemused until the horse beats had receded, then slowly moved towards the house. As he passed the drawing-room windows he could see his sister-in-law working over her ivory miniature painting. Poor Denise! Life would be deucedly dull for her if it were not for her lovely miniatures. He decided to go in and afford her some sociability. She no longer got any from James since there was no sign of her producing the blue-tinted stock he had hoped for when he sacrificed a rich match to marry a penniless aristocrat.

  Donal’s father was sitting beyond the fireplace reading the Tipperary Champion; and on a low, armless chair in front of the blaze his mother turned now and again to fish out embroidery threads from the well of a mother-of-pearl work table.

  Hmph! thought the young man, taking in the scene. And this is beneath the recognition of a social call from her! The arrogant marauder! The tasteful drawing-room of his ladylike mother and his aristocratic sister-in-law! That one wants cooling!

  A cloud of smoke puffed out from the big armchair that faced his father and Donal changed his mind about going in to cheer his sister-in-law. Cheer did not thrive in the atmosphere of smug, purse-proud brother James.

  A maid was drawing in the French windows in the dining-room. He beckoned to her and made a sign towards the hall door. She nodded and let him in soundlessly. His foot was on the second step of the stairs when the high, thin voice of James called out, ‘Is that you, Donal?’

  Donal threw a ‘yes’ over his shoulder and continued up the stairs. The high, thin voice called again, ‘Would it be too much trouble to you to come into the room and answer?’

  The grace went out of the night as Donal stood in the doorway and faced his brother. The room was filled with the smell of the strong tobacco that belched unchecked from the pipe and clouded the bowed head of the artist.

  ‘Was that someone I heard riding in the skeough field?’ The small field that had been surfaced by a windfall on the night of the Big Wind seventeen years before was now distinguished from the many fields that had since been acquired by the deprecatory term ‘skeough’, used to describe the hairy grass that grows upon the light soil of boggy land.

  Donal did not feel like discussing with his brother the dazzling vision he had just seen disappearing in mid-air over the gate. ‘From where I was,’ he answered noncommittally, ‘I could not hear whatever you heard from here.’

  His father pushed his glasses down his nose. ‘Can’t you answer your brother naturally, Donal?’ James spat across his mother’s skirt folds into the flowered spittoon.

  ‘The trouble with him is that he can’t answer anyone naturally. That’s what comes of colleges and professors at his elbow.’

  Their mother’s small, shapely hand that had acquired softness too late to uncoil the work-gnarled veins, halted over the worktable in the pointing gesture of enlightenment. ‘I’ll tell you who it was,’ she cried. ‘When Bridget was lighting the candles she told me she saw Miss O’Carroll of Kilsheelin pulling in her horse and looking over the hedge at our land. Would it be a thing that she rode in?’

  Her husband put down the newspaper. ‘Many’s the time I saw her father doin’ the same thing when he thought no one was looking. Maybe you’re right Ma’am. I’ll hold a crown ’twas she was in it. They say she has all his ideas. If it were not for her red hair a body would think ’twas himself riding past.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said James, ‘’twas throwin’ one of his begrudging looks at the skeough she was, too. A small man he was to begrudge a handful of hairy grass and soil that happened to blow down on a gale of wind...’

  ‘James, don’t talk like that,’ his mother interrupted. ‘’Twas no stray but God’s Own Hand that dropped good soil on a poor field. It is the best one that we have.’

  ‘Well,’ he answered with slow portent, ‘we’ll soon have more where that came from.’ His father lowered the newspaper and the ladies stopped working. ‘Another windfall from Kilsheelin to Poolgower. The castle is coming on to the Encumbered Estates Market.’ James drew loudly on his pipe and let out a great blast of smoke. It fell over his wife like a pall.

  She put up her hand to move it aside. Would she ever get used to this horrid smoke? Papa had never smoked in the drawingroom; and never a pipe. His cigars were specially imported, even after the Temperance movement had ruined him and caused him to attempt suicide in one of the beer vats in his own brewery. Kilsheelin to come under the Encumbered Estates Act! That proud, ancient citadel! What would become of the lovely Lady O’Carroll and her lovely daughter? She looked through the smoke at her husband. So he was planning to buy their estate! For half nothing as he had bought her own father’s land; as he had bought herself.

  Through the smoke her eyes caught her husband’s. She sensed his thoughts. He is wishing that he had waited. The look of pride in the possession of a well-bred wife no longer glowed in those cold, pale eyes.

  Denise was right. James was thinking about Sterrin O’Carroll. If only he had waited, he might have bought in the daughter of the castle as a job lot with her family’s acres. A mettlesome purchase! But what a possession for a man forbye this colourless sample of gentility who produced bits of painted ivory instead of children.

  Donal went from the room, sickened. He, too, had observed the baleful brooding in his brother’s eyes. Would the man never be sated? And greater than his passion to possess was his passion to dispossess.

  Donal struck the tinder box and carried his candle upstairs, musing on every step over the strange visitor; the strangely lovely visitor and her strange behaviour. The peasants, he reflected, were not the only ones who cut a sod of their native heath to bring with them into exile. If it was true that the estate was really coming on to the Encumbrancy market, it might just be likely that she might wish to take a piece of that famous field as a souvenir. He had known sentimental young ladies who had taken a memento of their dispossessed land to cherish in their trinket boxes. But there was nothing mawkish about that flaming divinity; nor about that whacking great dollop of soil she had dug up.

  *

  Pakie Scally and Big John watched Sterrin gallop towards the gate. A pity, Pakie thought, as he watched the shadow of horse and rider looming over the moonlit grass, that Miss Sterrin’s ringlets had to be put up. It used to stir him strangely to see them flying in the wind as she rode. The long black tail and the mane of the horse and the rider’s flaming ringlets used to make a great, stormy outflinging.

  He opened the gate for manner’s sake. Miss Sterrin would not take time to ride through a gate.

  ‘The young Sir wouldn’t do it better,’ Big John murmured as Thuckeen came over the bay hedge without touching a leaf.

  ‘He’ll never do it as good,’ said Pakie.

  Big John looked back at him over his twisted shoulder. ‘It wasn’t Sir Dominic I was thinkin’ of.’

  Sterrin tossed him the rein and slid down. ‘I had my journey for nothing. Big John.’ She felt foolish. Her marvellous scheme to save them all was a child’s fantasy. She felt like crying on Big John’s shoulder as she had done as a child. But the poor hunched-up shoulder seemed to look to her for support. Everyone looked to her. Dominic, sweet and over-childish. Mamma; she looked towards her mother’s window. In the moonlight the broken turret seemed to lean towards her, too.

  ‘He caught me, Keating’s son; down on my knees.’

  ‘James’s James?’

  ‘No, the other one.’

  ‘Master Donal?’

  ‘Master!’ Her scorn lashed him.

  ‘It is just that he is college-bred. Miss Sterrin, and... God forgive me, he looks so like a gentleman that...’

  ‘That you give him a gentleman’s title. And to have that parvenu catch me; me! on my knees, on his land! And the worst of it is that I didn’t get my big sod, just a little bit of clay with shamrocks.’

  ‘But, Miss Sterrin, ’tw
as the Sir’s own land. ’Twas our land that you were kneeling on. All the same,’ he added to himself, ‘I’d rather ’twas standing you were.’

  ‘I know what I’ll do,’ Sterrin was remounting Thuckeen. ‘I’ll go back. He’ll be inside now telling James’s James how he spied on me. I’ll go back and collect our sod.’

  ‘Ah, wait until tomorrow,’ Big John urged. ‘It’s tired you are and time for bed.’

  Sterrin laughed and patted the hand that lay on her shoulder. ‘Go off to your “horsery”. Big John. Do you remember when we used to say that?’

  The big man looked down at her tenderly. He was seeing the little girl pressed against the window bars of the nursery that was on a level with his own apartment over the coach house. She used to believe that coachmen slept in ‘horseries’ just as little girls slept in nurseries. ‘Amn’t I always remembering that. Miss Sterrin, blait?’*

  Donal at his window slowly unbuttoned the ruffled shirt and gazed across the field. Maybe she would return! The leaves and branches of a silver birch were wrought into filigree by the moon’s silvering. In an oval space framed by the tracery he visioned her face, lovelier than any he had ever seen in his life. But, oh, its scorn! She had looked at him as if he were one of the hordes of the new beggars that had emerged from the famine with all self-respect gone.

  His indignation at her contempt had cooled under James’s earth-binding methods. James always spat more fulsomely and spoke more flatly in the presence of his younger brother’s gentility. When Donal had reascended the stairs after the drawing-room interview he was no longer the fashionable young legal blade resenting the scorn of a spoilt beauty. He had become the brother of a land-bloated farmer, presuming to his betters.

  The sound of horse beats came into the silence. They were coming this way. He craned through the window. It was only Dr. Mitchell’s grey horse cantering past. Donal turned away. ‘Visions,’ he said to his dog, Bran, ‘are not vouchsafed like Hippodrome performances, twice nightly.’