The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  The cry screamed through her heart. Dear God, why did I not go with him today? Nothing else mattered; home nor family nor servants, nor marriage vows! My one love, my only love! Where are you?

  He stood upwards on the stirrups straining towards the lighted window until the iron cut into his insteps. From the grass came a long sigh. He peered and saw a man and woman lying asleep; tinker man and tinker woman; cleaving to each other and to hell with the world and wealth and rank! The moonlight sparkled on something on the man’s collar. A Repeal button! They were not tinkers, then, but the new beggars who had lost the right to their cabin’s roof because in the abandonment of their hunger they had sought the workhouse bread. What do you care whether the government sits in Westminster or in Dublin? Governments fall. Dynasties fall. Only men and women matter. The man stirred and flung his arm across the woman. They had each other.

  The shrill cry of a moorhen broke the stillness. From the window the white-robed girl recognised the little mincing gait, the tail flirting with every step. It turned back to the water and made a v-shaped ripple as it swam out to wider freedom. Only the human watchers knew bondage.

  A thrush disturbed by the moorhen’s cry flew past with a sleepy trill. Its note brought from nowhere the sinister shadow of a kestrel. Panic rose in Sterrin. She tapped the glass and moved her hands as though to wave off this menace to the thrush’s freedom.

  Suddenly her waving hand was caught in a vice. She was swung around to face her husband. ‘Is this another signal? Is your scullion out there?’ Her arm hurt where his nails pierced. He had discarded all the crisp trappings that had concealed age; the elaborate stock, the collar, the artificial masticators. She gazed at him horrified. ‘I—I didn’t know,’ she said and stopped; because she almost said that she didn’t know that he was so old. ‘Answer me! Is he out there?’

  Still holding her arm he dragged the heavy curtain across the window. The sight of the great folds shutting out the lovely world of nature and freedom brought back the panic she had felt for the thrush. But now it was for the menace that was closing in about herself.

  He mistook the look of dismay that she threw towards the curtain. ‘So, he is out there. By heavens, if he is trespassing again on my property I’ll have him flogged first and then transported!’

  ‘Your property.’ Her lips disdained his right to query Young Thomas’s presence upon Kilsheelin property today.

  ‘Yes, mine. You were already my property when you signalled your kitchen paramour on the way from the altar today.’ His voice thinned upwards. ‘Where did you meet him? Where? My charming bride returning to me with her wedding gown smirched from her scullion’s abominable trespass.’

  She stared at her husband as her thoughts blurred. She saw the green slime from the subterranean walls. It seemed to be coming from the toothless mouthing of those horrible words. Faces floated before her.

  Pallid faces strained with the green of rejected grass. But that was Billy Din; whose face had been gentle. The green slime had drooled from his meek hunger. Another face with lips that smiled slowly upwards from perfect teeth. Mo bheal asthore; ‘You won’t signal through this veil.’

  A hand was lifting her bronze hair that veiled her shoulders. She steeled herself. No one had ever made her faint! ‘You are an excellent business woman, my dear. Now you must keep your bargain.’

  Her eyes focused upon the arm that stretched from a brocade sleeve; a sinewy arm, veinous with age, that sought to clutch her. She felt her own arm pinioned. She raised her other, slender, soft, but powerful: with youth, with love denied, but even as she raised it she saw her husband lurch then fall unconscious at her feet.

  Sterrin looked down at the figure that lay at her feet. Guilt clamped down on her, not for what she had done, but for the sense of gladness that had started up inside her. She ran for help. Silently, she watched the servants raise him on to the bridal bed; watched them carry in the bleeding bowls; watched them carry them out, dripping red.

  45

  Sterrin found herself responding to the tonic of Paris. Sir Jocelyn, none the worse for his stroke except for a marked rigidity of one side of his face, had decided to come to Paris for the Fêtes Napoleon. The city was in the midst of a joyous celebration in honour of the victories of Solferino and Magenta. Sterrin was delighted by the colour and warmth of the beautiful city. Every day was a holiday and the excitement of it blunted the horror of her marriage to the bitter, cynical man who was her husband. He blamed her for his illness and was determined to punish her for it. He never left her side, unless in the charge of Margaret’s sister, Sterrin’s Aunt Yvette, who was married to a French Count, near Paris. She was a pleasant companion who made Sterrin laugh as she told romantic tales about her childhood. She even made Sir Jocelyn smile.

  Parisian society took the young Irish beauty to its heart. Invitations arrived every day.

  Aunt Yvette urged Sterrin to an orgy of buying. Milliners with gay bonnet boxes and dressmakers with long boxes beat a path to Sir Jocelyn’s château with bolts of silk and satin. They compared colours with the bronze of her hair. Sterrin endured hours of fittings with grace and good humour—a welcome change for the seamstresses who were accustomed to the elegant ennui of the court ladies. Madame de Castiglione, deemed the most beautiful woman in the world, sometimes walked in a trance from their measuring tape and roamed the streets burdened with the overpowering consciousness of her own beauty.

  There was talk that la belle Lady Devine’s preoccupation was not with her own looks. Hints of some young amoureux whom she had been forced to forsake for the fabulously rich Milord Devine. The empress favoured skirts that displayed the ankle. The dressmakers drew up Sterrin’s hem and nodded vigorously. Of a certainty, Milady’s ankles could emerge from the shadows.

  Out of the bonnet boxes came, not bonnets, but hats. Sterrin fitted on a little Eugénie model; a saucy little tricorne affair trimmed with pom-poms. The midinettes threw up ecstatic hands. The new millinery made a perfect foil for milady’s hair.

  The effect of the hat was too much for Sterrin’s vanity. She turned and twisted before the mirror. Suddenly she laughed. Her husband, entering silently, marvelled at what a hat could do for a woman. She had scarcely smiled since her marriage.

  He had come to escort her to one of the Empress Eugénie’s famous ‘Mondays’. It was a purely feminine affair but he was not content with the chaperonage of Sterrin’s Aunt Yvette. Impeccably dressed, a taffeta stock wound twice around his neck, a monocle masking the rigidity of his damaged eye and cheek muscles, he escorted her to every function. It was only because gentlemen were not admitted to the Empress’s parlours that he left her at the door.

  The Empress took stock of Sterrin as she swept down for the triple curtsey. When Sterrin’s eyes came level with the high Andalusian arches and slim ankles of the Empress, she lingered in the obeisance and missed the timing of the third curtsey. It was the first time that she had seen so much limb displayed below a lady’s skirt. ‘Miséricorde!’ breathed Eugénie.

  She was gazing over Sterrin’s head to where a dainty pair of red shoes and stockings rose in the air above a tall screen. ‘Quelle frivolité outrée,’ gasped Aunt Yvette.

  The feet disappeared and a sleek brown head took their place. The Empress broke into a peal of laughter. ‘Ah, it is the mignonne Comtesse Gabrielle. She too, like Italy, had been liberated. Today her annulment came from Rome and, Hop! she go head over heels like La Liberté.’

  Sterrin listened avidly to what a lady was telling her Aunt behind a fan. ‘She has been seeking for years for this divorce...’ she heard. ‘Her marriage was never... you understand? It was un manage du nom seulement...’

  ‘A marriage in name only,’ burst out Sterrin. ‘Then she is free to marry again. No wonder she turns head over heels!’

  ‘Stereen!’ Aunt Yvette was scandalised. The other lady lowered her fan and stared openly at the young bride who had made such an extraordinary statement.

  Sterri
n’s body felt suddenly, strangely, light enough to do cart-wheels. Was it possible that a marriage could be annulled by Rome for being—for being such a marriage as her own? A glimmer of light gleamed down the vista of her hopelessness. She manoeuvred an introduction and congratulated the liberated Countess.

  ‘I take it that you mean to felicitate me upon mà culbute, not my matrimonial somersault?’

  ‘I—both!’ There was no time to be lost in beating around the bush. She might never again get such an opportunity. ‘Look, how is it possible to—to—’ Sterrin could not put it into words. ‘What was your first step?’

  ‘Ah that!’ The Countess misunderstood her. ‘Simple, voilà comment!’ She threw out her arms and proceeded to walk on her hands. Sterrin grew desperate.

  ‘It is about your annulment I wish to know. I must know.’ But she was addressing a pair of legs that waved on a level with her head. Dear God! I must find out! She glanced over the screen. No one was looking this way. Her husband would be waiting the moment the ‘salon’ finished; waiting to guard her like a dragon; forever! She threw her hands down to the floor. The next moment a pair of green shoes walked in the air above the screen beside the red ones. The other girl gave a squeal of delight. ‘Hush,’ whispered Sterrin, ‘I must speak to you, get up.’

  ‘Come, I’ll race you first,’ the girl insisted. With her head down over the white marble floor, Sterrin whispered things to a stranger that she would not whisper to her own mirror. ‘Will you help me?’

  It was desperate, but the stakes were high. The head beside her nodded emphatically; unmistakably. Then her hands fell behind. Sterrin was well ahead. No one could beat her at hand walking. Not even Young Thomas. Suddenly she felt gay and reckless. Somewhere in her upended head was the tiny seed of hope that this piece of exhilarating madness might lead hand over hand to—she was gasping—to Young Thomas! Then, hand in hand with Young Thomas! For ever and ever and ever!

  ‘This is carrying frivolity too far!’ Sterrin could not hear the stern voice that addressed the Empress. Inside her head there was a storm of silken rustlings from the petticoats that flowed over her ears. She didn’t notice the dead silence. There is a lot to be said for these shortened skirts, she was thinking. But the loops that held them draped up from the hem were made of heavy twisted silken cords that banged against her ears. The amethyst drop from one of her earrings had drooped into her earhole. It tickled. She was tempted to flick it out. Then she saw the boots, small, elegant—but gentlemen’s boots!

  Up went her hands and down came her feet. Petticoat after petticoat dropped mercifully over her pantalettes; too late; She was standing before Napoleon the Third, Emperor of France. Dear God, let me die now. Let me never walk another step on hand or foot again!

  The Emperor watched the glowing face from which the colour was ebbing. Tiny ringlets escaped from her chignon and fell below her earrings. Tendrils, moist from her exertion, clung to her forehead. Her hands pressed straight and hard by her sides as though to hold down the terrible revealing petticoats. She stood like a statue; humiliation made her face more coldly proud. Then she remembered to curtsey. As she rose a voice thin with rage said, ‘Sire. I trust I have your permission to present my wife?’ She looked beyond the Emperor to the man who stood behind him. She saw the compressed lips, the swelling veins in her husband’s temples. It was the first time that Sir Jocelyn Devine had known the satisfaction of seeing fear in her eyes. The Emperor noticed the flickering.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I recognise you now. It was difficult when you were upside down. It is perhaps one of your quaint Irish customs to promenade on the hands?’

  His anger had not been directed towards the owner of the pair of seductive pantalettes that had walked towards him in mid-air as he had entered the room. It had been for his Empress who had doubtless incited and encouraged her. It looked as if the beautiful acrobat would receive ample punishment from her husband. A twinkle appeared in his eye and an answering one danced in Sterrin’s. ‘I believe, Sir,’ she answered him, ‘that my ancestors, a long way back, walked on all fours!’

  ‘So I believe did mine, a long way back.’

  His glance fell on Mademoiselle Gabrielle and tightened. He had admonished the Empress more than once about her indulgence towards the unorthodox little Countess. She dropped a curtsey. ‘Sire,’ she murmured sweetly, ‘the regrettable performance was entirely my idea.’

  The Emperor inclined his head. ‘I do not for a moment doubt that, Countess.’

  ‘I challenged Lady Devine.’ The Emperor looked keenly at Sterrin.

  ‘And I can see,’ he answered, ‘that Lady Devine is not one to refuse a challenge.’

  When Sterrin, close to tears, took her leave, the ci-devant countess came flying after her.

  ‘Dear divine Lady Devine,’ she gasped. ‘Don’t take it to heart so. The Emperor has ticked off Eugénie, but la! she does not mind. She had won a pair of earrings from Countess Metternich on your win.’ She stopped surprised. ‘Chérie, you are crying! Whatever can I do to make it up to you?’ She had seen the look that had passed between the high-spirited Irish belle and the dandified old satyr to whom she was married.

  Sterrin waved off the lackey who was assisting her into her peterine. She clutched Gabrielle’s hand. ‘You can help me! You must help me! Where can I see you? I shall not be permitted to visit you or have you at the château.’

  Gabrielle frowned. ‘Let me see! There will be no more “Lundis”. They go to Sainte Sauvère next Monday. A pity you are not going too.’

  ‘But we are going. We have been bidden to join the seaside party, unless,’ she said ruefully, ‘the invitation is cancelled over this débâcle.’

  ‘Pouf!’ Gabrielle dismissed the idea with an airy wave. ‘You will be the rage. Eugénie will want you to teach her to walk on her hands. Tomorrow,’ she continued, ‘I go to the theatre to see Mr. Merry, the English actor. I must see his Romeo. I am told it is distractingly romantic. Can you be there?’

  Sterrin was dubious. Her husband favoured the opera. Because of his depleted vision, the theatre held little attraction for him. Still, she might be able to arrange it. Sterrin looked to where an elderly dowager was commiserating with Aunt Yvette. ‘My Aunt also wishes to see Mr. Merry’s Romeo.’

  ‘Good,’ said Gabrielle with finality. ‘Get her to take you tomorrow. You’ll manage it all right. I shall come to your box.’

  *

  ‘But Mr. Young,’ protested Dorene. ‘Why ever did you agree to Mr. Merry’s playing Romeo? Back home in America the critics say you are the best Romeo on the modem stage. Your...’ she stopped, embarrassed. She had been going to say your Romeo is the perfection of love-making.

  They were driving to the specialist. Thomas was so deeply preoccupied with the problem of what to do about her should this Paris doctor offer no help for her sight that at first he did not catch what she was saying. Play Romeo! He shuddered. He would never play that part again.

  Romeo had scored Thomas his greatest success. Its setting was so familiar that it was as though he had but to relive his own memories; Capulet’s orchard was the little ‘Sir’s Road’ where the gap had been made in the wall by the Big Wind. When fourteen-year-old Juliet warned Romeo ‘...the orchard walls are high and hard to climb and the place death considering who thou art’, she was really fourteen-year-old Sterrin, standing on her castle’s boundary wall taking a fearful farewell of the presuming knife boy. And Dorene wanted to know why he had agreed to let Mr. Merry play tonight’s Romeo excerpt!

  Thomas thought back to that dreadful day in London after his return from Ireland still numb and bemused, when Alphabet had told him that the little actress, Dorene du Clos, had not yet recovered her sight and he had gone to her lodgings. As he sat by her bedside his mind still lay in that incorporeal space between mind and body. When Dorene apologised to him for ruining his scene the night she lost her sight, the significance of her situation struck home.

  Those lovely brown eyes ha
d been strained, the doctor said, beyond recall. By him, Thomas thought; by his relentless slave-driving. What was she saying? She was still apologising; weaving her hands aimlessly. She was helpless. Thomas realised that he must find out about her family and get in touch with them.

  But Dorene had no family to be notified. The aunt who had reared her had died. She was alone and, suddenly, she was Thomas’s responsibility. He took her to a famous eye doctor. When the specialist, at the end of his examination, shook his head from side to side Thomas began to come back to life. He must help this girl. The doctor had mentioned a specialist in Paris who had done wonders with cases other doctors had given up. Paris! He had been invited to play there for the victory celebrations. The invitation had come while he was in Ireland. He would take this little broken blossom with him. He would leave nothing undone that might restore to her what he had caused her to lose. It might not be too late to accept. They left for Paris the next day.

  The carriage was slowing into the kerb. He reached for her hand. ‘Come,’ he had started to say! ‘Cheer up; don’t look so sad.’ The crassness of it. Must he learn some new phraseology for conversing with the blind? And had not she a right to look sad? Did he suddenly possess the monopoly of all the grief in the world? He stepped out and lifted her bodily from the carriage. ‘You are going to be all right,’ he murmured and his lips blew the words across her face that was so near to his own.

  You are going to be all right. It beat a refrain to the roll of the carriage wheels on the homeward journey. Yes, she was going to be all right. Everyone, the French specialist included, seemed to be in agreement on how All Right poor blind Dorene was going to be. When she had accustomed herself to her incurable blindness! He tried to think of something to say to her. Words were his business; soul-stirring, grandiose words, composed by others to be relayed by him; and here, now, in the need of this girl’s stricken soul all he could contrive was some stammering half-articulate grunt.