The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  But there was no summons. Through the window she saw the visitor depart. A moment later she saw her mother enter her own carriage. ‘Mamma.’ Sterrin was breathless from her rush downstairs. ‘Don’t you wish me to accompany you?’

  Her mother looked at her as though she were seeing her for the first time. ‘No, Sterrin,’ she said, ‘I do not wish you to accompany me.’ Her tone dispensed with Sterrin’s company for ever more. Her daughter’s outrageous behaviour in public was scarcely as shocking to Lady O’Carroll as her deceit and callousness in taking such advantage of her mother’s illness.

  In Templetown Margaret received a less biased account of the incident. Mrs. Wright was warm in praise of the way Sterrin had taken her mother’s place. Margaret relented. Too often in the past had Sterrin to cover up for her mother!

  But her compunction was short-lived. A drove of cattle blocked the carriage as it passed Lubey’s. Margaret glanced idly towards the window then sat upright. The big window was bare of its usual merchandise. Instead, down the centre hung a scarlet cloak. In front of it a placard with letters a foot high stated ‘As Publicly Displayed by Miss Sterrin O’Carroll of Kilsheelin Castle’.

  The auction story blew like chaff at a threshing. The prices Miss O’Carroll seduced for the cloaks mounted higher. The price Darcey Lubey offered for herself grew higher still. When Lady Biddy Cullen gave a carpet dance for her sisters, Sterrin was not bidden. Lady O’Carroll was cut to tears. No function had ever been held at Crannagh without the O’Carrolls.

  She called Sterrin to her boudoir. ‘I am writing to Sir Jocelyn to ask him to take away his horse.’

  ‘You mean—’ Sterrin had to scrape out the words from a choked throat. ‘You mean you are not going to let me accept Cloora?’

  ‘So costly a gift to a young lady was mauvais ton. After the slight you brought upon yourself from the Lubey person, it is unthinkable.’

  Sterrin went towards the stables feeling like a battered four-penny bit. Mike O’Driscoll was pacing Cloora. Tears pricked at Sterrin as she watched the horse’s beautifully held head, its fine action. She felt an affinity with the animal; a creature of the elements; of storm and thunder and rushing winds. There came into her head a text her father used to quote about a fine horse. ‘He sniffeth the battle from afar, the thunder of the captains and the shouting.’ Clooreen was that sort of horse. ‘Unharness her, Mike, I’m not riding her today.’ She told him of her mother’s decision. Mike lost the straw he was chewing. He had almost lived in Clooreen’s stable. He comforted himself with another straw and then he comforted Sterrin.

  ‘Don’t be foolish, Miss Sterrin. Get up and ride her while you still have her. There is no use in having a gap between your two front teeth if you can’t whistle.’ Sterrin’s rueful smile brought out her teeth in defence of their perfection.

  But the sanction that Sir Jocelyn Devine sought when he called had nothing to do with the horse. He sought the sanction of Lady O’Carroll for permission to propose marriage to her daughter. He would return next week for her answer.

  Sterrin was dumbfounded. ‘But Mamma,’ she exclaimed, as matter of fact as Mike O’Driscoll, ‘why trouble him to make the journey again. Couldn’t you have given him his answer?’

  ‘What answer—’ Something in her mother’s tone made Sterrin’s heart give a little quick beat of dread. Surely there was but one answer that her mother could expect her to give to such a proposal!

  Her mother did think that there was but one answer. She steeled herself for the conflict.

  Day after day it waged. An honourable proposal from a distinguished gentleman of great wealth. On the heels of a public bid that was a degradation!

  ‘Do you realise the significance of that terrible bid?’ Sterrin had a shrewd idea. She preferred not to think of the way Lubey had looked at her that night.

  Sterrin leaned against the mantelpiece in her mother’s bedroom and looked down into the turquoise flame of the black turf. Her mother was repeating the arguments that had been arrayed every day. No chance of Sterrin meeting an eligible party, their plight, the mansions occupied by peasants and shopkeepers, no hope of being presented, refused credit by shopkeepers, ostracised by the Cullens, the only people of one’s class who maintained even a skeleton of social life. In the flames Sterrin saw a dark face, the one that used to waft in the suffusion of clouds and lace when she used to daydream of her wedding, ‘...and the unmarried officers are all away at the Crimea. I’ve lost touch with the garrison. Before the famine young officers used to come here...’

  Sterrin turned from the picture in the flames. There was one young officer who used to come here. Lieutenant Fitzharding-Smith was always hovering around Mamma. And now he was back, a captain. He had been at the dance. Sterrin had met him for a brief moment in all the furore after the auction. How young her mother looked, sitting there on the low prie-dieu seat, plaiting her hair! There was a kind of—of unused look about her mother’s smooth forehead.

  ‘Mamma, why don’t you marry?’ The words slipped from her. ‘You are still very young and very pretty.’

  Her mother dropped her plait as though she had been stung. ‘Sterrin! What an unseemly suggestion. Me, to marry! After—after—Papa. Why, it would be—sacrilege.’

  Sterrin looked across the flickering shadows at the young face and the slim figure. The romance that her mamma had known! The love! ‘Sacrilege for you to marry,’ she said and her voice was angry. She walked to the door then stopped. ‘But for me to make this marriage is merely—sacrifice.’ Her mother stayed looking at the door that had closed so urgently. She hadn’t dreamed that Sterrin was capable of such bitterness. She caught up on Sterrin and threw her arms about her.

  ‘You shall not be sacrificed. Mon Dieu! My ewe lamb shall not be sacrificed.’

  Reprieved, Sterrin proceeded to read the Manual For Young Ladies that Bunzy De Lacey had sent her from America. In the chapter headed ‘First Replies to First Proposals’, the answer that Bunzy had given to her first beau was heavily underlined. ‘I-cannot-love-you-but-I-shall-never-forget-you.’ So was ‘I-cannot-be-your-wife-but-I-shall-be-a-sister-to-you.’ Sterrin tried to see herself going through life being a sister to the elderly and urbane Sir Jocelyn.

  She threw the book aside. The writer had no formula for a girl who had a dozen lives depending upon her answer. The work-house was facing Big John and Mrs. Stacey and the others. What would happen to Mamma? What would become of little, helpless Dominic? She knew now that the compensation for the iron road coming through the property could not begin to clear all Kilsheelin’s debts.

  Sterrin crossed to the window. In the shadowy light the big yard looked like a city square; fine buildings built in symmetry by ancient craftsmen. In the sentient night air the history of each house breathed out in reproach to her. From the gamekeeper’s house, O’Driscoll’s ancestor had been beaten to death because a Catholic might not carry a walking stick; and in the steward’s house there had been a forefather of Hegarty’s who had died screening her own forefather. And what has all that to do with me? Am I to become a living mortgage to screen their descendants? And what do I get out of it? Suddenly the full significance of things assailed her. Saving Kilsheelin for the others meant going away from it herself!

  Deliberately she unlocked the secret place of her mind that held the hopeless comfort that somewhere, always, there was a heart in which she dwelt; a lover who dare not speak of love; who would go to the end of the earth for her. The end of the earth! ‘Oh, Young Thomas, Young Thomas, why had you to be—Young Thomas, the knife boy?’

  Sir Jocelyn accepted her rejection courteously. His proposal was, perhaps a little premature?

  ‘You will be taking Clooreen today?’

  ‘Not today,’ he told her, noting the relief in her face. The transfer of the horse must await his return from London. ‘And when I return, perhaps I may venture to put the same question to you. Meantime, think kindly of me, my dear.’

  As she sped towards Clooree
n she was already feeling kindly towards him. So generous! And he made her feel like a duchess.

  She roamed the country on the magnificent horse, lingering with her in the stable at night, dreading that each goodnight might be the last. Strange men came to inspect the castle and grounds. The gloom their visit cast over Christmas was not dispelled by the scruffy band of Wren Boys who came next day for their share of the feast. Like so many of those who had grown up since the famine, they were poorer in physique, less proud in bearing than their predecessors. The famine, people said, had been the end of an era. A race of fine, manly people had died or had gone over the sea before they became accustomed to eating the bread of charity. There was none amongst these Wren Boys, Lady O’Carroll thought, like the handsome giant who had danced with her that Saint Stephen’s Day before the famine. Where was he? And where was the girl who had danced with Roderick; the girl with the wonderful hair that had suggested the kneeling Magdalen.

  On Epiphany Day, Margaret watched the sky, as always, for the storm clouds of the Big Wind. Sterrin did not dare to remind her that today was her birthday. Instead, she set out for her last ride on Clooreen. Sir Jocelyn was coming today. As she approached the gap at Cuilnafunchion where she had had the encounter with Donal Keating, she slowed and frowned. Someone had piled up branches over the gap. She dismounted and started removing them, when a man appeared from the other side. ‘What do you mean by smashing down that fence?’ he said.

  Sterrin looked through James Keating as though he were not here. The man, she reflected, must have some post-famine hallucination. She decided to have him warned off the property. But his figure still blocked the gap.

  ‘Please stand aside,’ she said coldly.

  ‘You appear to be unaware that it was I who bought this lot of land. I was prepared to buy the whole estate, castle and all, before it was withdrawn from the Encumbrancy auction.’ His lips gave a twist that was meant for a smile. ‘Withdrawn for a while.’

  A lonely silence fell across the landscape. Sterrin felt a chill tremor. It was as though an unspent breath of the storm that had precipitated her birth, that had scooped her father’s acres into the sky to fall at this man’s feet, had sighed past her. In a drowning flash she saw the castle as the Bard had seen it; vanishing fortress with rush-strewn floors and great wolfhounds and the ‘yellow-ringleted O’Carroll’ holding sway. Near this spot in Queen Elizabeth’s day, the O’Carroll had halted his horse and his gallow-glasses† to ‘bid the English quit his land’. The thought roused her back to life. She raised her whip high over the bacach’s head but before it fell he had seized her wrist. He forced it behind her, holding her against him. Her left hand held the horse’s bridle. As he bent over her, he saw her suck in her jaws and her lips formed the kiss he had not hoped to get so readily; they opened and shot into his eyes the spit she had gathered.

  Big John heard the thunder of hooves before he saw her. He wondered if she had lost control. The black horse moved as a boat moves before a powerful wind, but instead of spray it cast up sods and stones that fell unheeded on its rider. Men in strange livery looked up and stared as she jumped the bay hedge. In the artificial pond a splendid carriage was discarding the muddy cloggings from its wheels.

  Sir Jocelyn Devine thought there was a boyish gallantry about her as she walked down the length of the drawing-room to where he stood. Her riding clothes were mud-spattered. Her hair had escaped from its black snood. It fell like a bewitched barley stack but he saw only the sheening aureole. Had there been no snood but ringlets falling to the shoulder, had there been a moustache instead of the high curved red lip, she might be one of the cavaliers who looked out of their frames, the gentlemen of Kilsheelin who had gone as the Wild Geese to stand by the Old Pretender; who had fought with Prince Charlie. But she was all woman and there was no warm whiteness like the whiteness of her skin.

  ‘Sir Jocelyn! Why have you come today? Is it for your horse?’

  He looked into the direct eyes that would brook no skirmishing by-play. ‘I have come to ask again for the honour of your hand in marriage.’

  She had no time now for the counsels of the Manual For Young Ladies but there was a dignity of ritual about the resolute way she removed her glove and extended her hand to him.

  * On foot.

  † Ancient term for ‘soldier’.

  42

  The train clove through the meadows of his native land. How small they looked after the great tracts of America! And had they been as green as this always? He lowered the window and leaned out. The streamlet that ran cheekily with the train was so close that he could see the darting minnow.

  An insect with gauzy wings flew past and his heart sank a little. The mayfly would be rising in the castle river. He thought of the excitement when he brought her the word ‘the fly is risen’. Up half the night she’d be, tying Green or Grey Drake, and off with her at dawn to follow the river’s windings until dark!

  More insects swarmed up, dizzy with the ecstasy of their first flight; their first contact with the air and sun that is the wedding ceremony of the mayfly. The ethereal culmination of its two drab years beneath the water. Was it an omen? For he, too, after his own drab years of toil and hardship was returning on the gauzy wings of his success to perform at the wedding of an Irish nabob.

  Despondency clouded him. Gone was that bright moment when he had been certain that he could build the bridge to Sterrin’s world, when he had bought his land in New Orleans and pictured the elegant white house that he would build for her, and for their children. He had engaged the best architect in the city to design it. That lovely dream was shattered when John Holohan brought him the letter from Nurse Hogan. Thomas still had that letter. He remembered the excitement with which he had torn open the envelope. And the horror with which he had read that Sterrin had returned to the convent. This time to take her vows. What convent had she entered? Surely not the one she had run from that day long ago?

  He wished suddenly that he had not accepted the unexpected invitation to break his journey to London and play for Sir Jocelyn Devine’s wedding guests at his private theatre. He had sworn never to return; he hated Sir Jocelyn for the cruel wound he had inflicted on Bergin. But the temptation to perform near Kilsheelin had proved too strong; it was a chance to see Bergin again, to find out how he had fared upon his return from Australia. Thomas looked forward, too, to spending a few moments with the kitchen group that had once been family; to the pleasure of bringing lavish gifts to Mrs. Hogan; to all of them; to glimpse the gracious being who was the mother of his lost dream; and to look once again at the setting of a life that was past and a dream that was ended.

  Suddenly the train stopped. The guard was arguing with a blue-hooded woman that this was a private train bringing play-actors to the mansion of Sir Jocelyn Devine for the wedding festivities. Out in the middle of the sleepers she stood and pointed to the big growth that hung from her chin and said that if she didn’t get to the fair to meet the man with the cure she would be dead before the next fair day. ‘We’ll all be dead before the next fair day if we take you up,’ said the guard. But she was of the generation that could not understand the unnaturalness of a vehicle—steam or horse—that would pass a foot passenger on any road, whether it were clay or iron.

  ‘And it isn’t,’ she pointed out, ‘as though the gentleman that owns it or any of the gentry, except the play-actors, were on the train.’

  The engine driver looked at the guard. ‘What about the gentleman in the first-class?’

  ‘The one that’s over the play-actors?’

  ‘Aye, but isn’t he a gentleman, too?’

  ‘He is,’ said the guard, ‘and for all we know may be a friend or relation of the Big Man.’ He turned to the woman. ‘Would you mind lettin’ the train get past, ma’am. We’re off schedule.’

  ‘Indeed, you’re not off anything,’ she assured him. ‘Keep goin’ straight ahead.’ She waved towards the shining tracks. ‘Ye can’t miss the road. Let ye not tu
rn right or left an’ ye’ll be in Kilkenny in a shout. An’ sure it isn’t leavin’ me behind you would?’ She coaxed up to the driver. ‘Sure, I can see the kind heart of you on your face.’

  The guard grew exasperated and waved his flag in front of her. ‘Will you get off the line over that, yerself an’ yer plamas.* There’s nothing to be seen on that man’s face from one Sunday to the next but soot.’

  The gentleman in the first-class put an end to the discussion. ‘Get in here,’ he called, standing by the open door. The woman nearly fell out of her standing but she grabbed her basket and rushed.

  ‘Sure, a third-class will do me with the play-actors. Your Honour,’ she protested.

  ‘In with you,’ commanded his Honour, but at the door she hesitated and looked anxiously in the direction of a stile in the hedge where two, fair, curly heads peeped.

  Too late the guard rushed forward to prevent the defilement by their muddy little hooves on the red carpet. The gentleman proved his undoubted gentility by the tone with which he ordered the guard to proceed. ‘We’ve wasted sufficient time, sez he,’ repeated the guard to the driver who agreed that it was hard to understand the gentry.

  In the first-class, the gentleman swung the large basket on to the rack. ‘And if I may say so, madam,’ he remarked, ‘it is truly a heavy load for a lady who stands in danger of death within the month.’

  The lady was all apologies. ‘Your Honour shouldn’t be dirtying his gloves with the likes of that. There’s sixteen an’ a half pound of butter there, eight pounds three ounces in one, and eight pounds five ounces in the other.’

  His heart gladdened at the sight of the gleaming rolls of golden butter all diamond-patted and decorated with rose and shamrock-shaped designs. He put back the cabbage leaves and replaced the lid and reminded himself to get wooden, fancy shapes to take back to Kitty on her Wisconsin farm.