The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  ‘I’ll tear her all to pieces!’ Her groping hands clutched the beautiful gown as though it were an effigy of the woman who had dared to encroach upon her heritage of love.

  ‘Tear your rival to pieces by all means, but kindly refrain from tearing the gowns that I have provided for your adornment.’

  Her eyes ranged over him as though he were some stranger who had wandered into her apartment. She noted the twisted muscle at his temple; the rigid corner of his lips. Her handiwork!

  She looked down at the gown that she held gripped between her hands at tearing point: a masterpiece of Worth’s, the world-famous designer; twenty yards of gauze over twenty yards of silk and from neckline to hemline flowed shimmering rivers of sequins. Its beauty reproached her.

  ‘You know,’ she said in a small voice, ‘you don’t really deserve this.’

  He tried to tilt a cynical eyebrow but it remained rigid and he remembered why. ‘I came to tell you,’ he said, ‘to be prepared to leave for Switzerland at nine o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘But—!’ and then she remembered that it didn’t matter now. The visit to the royal villa, the fresh wardrobe with its four changes of dress that royal protocol demanded for each day. She had no more desire to face Mademoiselle Hautdoire. Suddenly she realised the enormity of what she had contemplated; to have her marriage annulled; to tear down the sacred edifice of church and law so that she could indulge her deluded passion for a servant, a nameless one at that; someone’s byeblow!

  ‘Kindly give heed to what I say. Be ready to leave at nine o’clock.’

  She remained looking at the door through which her husband had left, then suddenly rose up with an air of resolve. One by one she discarded the modish coloured petticoats. White petticoats had become an antiquity in this ancient city that lived youngly. But the nightgown she chose was unrelieved white.

  Silently she appeared before him; a white immolation. She felt as she had felt the morning she had appeared before Reverend Mother with her saddle bag in her hand and her dowry tied to the hitching ring outside; a little, too, like the way she used to feel when Nurse Hogan would grip her nostrils and give her a mixture of salts and senna and tell her to offer it up for the souls in Purgatory.

  Rarely in his long experience, thought her husband, had he glimpsed the quality that was housed in this graceful form that stood before him. It could arouse passion in men, adoration, madness. Often he had likened her to a flame but never before had he been so conscious of her quivering, luminous warmth. Had the fates reserved for his twilight hour the most exquisite experience of his life?

  Almost fearfully he reached out to her, but even as his pulse sent a warning to his heart, he noticed her flicker of revulsion. Pride curdled his desire into venom.

  ‘What apple have you hidden there now?’

  ‘Apple?’ She looked down to where his head had gestured, then remembered her trick with the apple-shaped pincushion. She drew aside the lace that covered her bosom.

  ‘There is nothing there,’ she said reassuringly then recovered the glimpse of tender white curves. ‘You see,’ she went on calmly, ‘you see all this differently.’ She swept her arm towards the window and the world beyond that held tonight’s happenings and all that they signified. Patiently, as to a child, she explained, ‘It was not what ordinary people understand when they speak of love.’

  He had to keep very quiet. The blood was chug-chugging through his forehead. He, Jocelyn Devine of the delicious memories, who from earliest youth had been an epicure in love’s art, who understood women better than any man in London or European society, which meant any man alive, was being told by a country-girl not out of her teens that he was incapable of understanding love—that he was ordinary!

  ‘Ordinary people, like me,’ he said at last, ‘do not regard the furtive, hole-and-corner precociousness between a servant and his employer’s daughter as—love. The fellow should have been dismissed. I am surprised that your father was so hoodwinked.’

  Her patience exploded. Young Thomas was no longer worthy of being defended but she would brook no criticism of her father.

  ‘Papa was not the type to be hoodwinked. Papa knew whom he could trust.’

  ‘It would scarcely appear so.’

  ‘I will not allow you to criticise my father.’ Then, as suddenly as it had blazed, her anger subsided. ‘Why,’ she went on conversationally, ‘when my governess got frightened and lost her head during a bread riot in the famine, Papa said that there were to be no more governesses and sent me bird-nesting with—with Young Thomas.’

  There was something elemental, he thought, about the way she would suddenly lapse back from the dramatic intensity into some simple, direct statement.

  ‘He caught a trout,’ she went on, ‘and cooked it over a picnic fire on the bank of the stream. It was delicious.’ A dreamy smile played over her lips. He could have kissed them but that he wanted to strangle her. The time he had spent conferring with his chef to produce the rarest food and wine for her delectation. And here she was, rhapsodising over a crude fish caught and cooked—probably half raw—by her lover.

  ‘And I have no doubt,’ he said aloud, ‘that he expressed his relish by wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she answered in that practical way that could be so captivating if he didn’t suspect that it was simply contempt for his pettiness.

  ‘He wiped his hands on the grass. You see he had given me his clean linen handkerchief. I suppose,’ she went on, ‘that it was being so hungry always that made it seem so nice.’

  ‘Hungry. So you have been hungry as well as ragged?’

  She ignored the crudity of his reference to the patched-up dress in which she had encompassed his beguilement. She would have worn her hunger as proudly as she had worn her patched-up gown. Not to have been hungry in the famine would have been a shameful thing.

  But she had lashed him too severely with the weapon of her crude youth; letting him glimpse that arcadian idyll of a springtime such as he had never known. A picture was shaping out of her reminiscences. The scullion’s white handkerchief betokened an early fastidiousness; and that regard for his employer. The haughty young Sir Roderick O’Carroll was not one to indulge familiarity with a presuming servant.

  ‘Why,’ continued the voice of his persecutor, ‘Papa had been searching for him night and day when they reported that he had run away—’

  ‘Ah, so the prodigy ran away from his benefactors!’

  ‘Indeed, that was just what he did not do.’ The actor Thomas Young, tonight’s stranger, was not worthy of her steel, but the knife boy, Young Thomas, was unassailable. ‘He collapsed from famine fever. It was I who found his hat.’ She made a gesture that released shafts of blue flame from her diamond rings; as though, he thought, their glory was but to proclaim that this was the hand that had found the scullion’s hat. ‘Papa found him lying amongst the hawthorn blossoms of Lissnastreenagh.’

  This was fantasy; like something glimpsed in a dream, this girl in bridal white, her bronze hair flowing about her shoulder, here in his bedroom, deigning him glimpses of some young and lovely world. He could almost hear the gay pipes of Pan playing to that feast by the river bank; hear the scamper of his goat-like hooves among the blossoms where her lover had lain. She had been wiser than he when she said that what she had known was not what ordinary people understand when they spoke of love. He put his hand to his forehead. It encountered the knotted vein that was a heritage of his wedding night; the moment of beguilement passed. How dare she come here? Offering him what the scullion had rejected!

  He crossed to the bed and pulled the bell-rope for his valet. With his back turned to her he said, ‘Did I say nine o’clock? Pray be ready to leave at eight o’clock in the morning.’

  Back in her room Sterrin released a long breath. She was feeling as she had felt on that last morning in the convent when she had renounced the vows that she had never taken.

  *

&nb
sp; At the Swiss station Sterrin had to pick her way through the prostrate bodies of the wounded who had been transported there from Solferino. The sight of their fly-crusted wounds brought angry protest from Sir Jocelyn. Such repellent sights ought not to be allowed to obtrude upon the sensitivities of travellers; especially travellers coming to seek health. Sterrin was roused to a lively anger. ‘Have these poor things not the right to seek health?’ she flared. The sight of the young, maimed bodies, tunics, hair, faces blood-spattered, banished her preoccupation with her own troubles.

  But two days later, as she drove from the doctor’s with her husband, the fragrance of a thousand roses, the sound of little waterfalls chased out of their white snow caps by the sun, the gurglings of nightingales, filled with her a lonely, undefined longing.

  The mood was still upon her as she started to ascend the hotel staircase. Then suddenly from overhead there came a voice that set her heart racing. A gentleman came in sight around the staircase bend and Sterrin stopped dead. Here was the one who had invoked that undefined longing midst the fragrance and melody of the drive.

  Once again the woman was with him; the same woman, his arm tight around her waist, holding her close to him, guiding her down every step in tenderest concern.

  He looked up. ‘Sterrin!’ His startled gasp made the woman stumble within his embrace. Sterrin was here! But why not; was she not everywhere that he went? So many Sterrins, the laughing girl, the lonely lost girl of the assassination days; the runaway schoolgirl; the girl with the soft kissing lips that had come to life beneath his own. But this Sterrin he did not know. The amethyst eyes that had yearned out at him from the wedding veil were the blue of challenging metal. ‘Sterrin!’ He took a quick step and his companion stumbled again.

  The swift, silent drama was splintered by the sound of Sir Jocelyn’s voice, ‘Don’t dare to address my wife with such familiarity! Come, my Lady.’

  Sterrin allowed herself to be led away. Dimly she heard her husband cancel their arrangements for a six weeks’ stay. ‘You will be recompensed,’ he said to the expostulating landlord.

  From Sterrin there came no expostulation; she had no desire to stay. The perfumes of the roses had gone; the gurglings of the nightingales; the sound of the little waterfalls. Young Thomas had gone from her and all nature had gone with him.

  48

  Thomas stared in amazement at the handsome frame house that stood in place of the log house where he had stayed with Mark and Kitty Hennessey on his previous visit to their Wisconsin farm. The first time he had stayed here they were still in the rough log cabin that they had flung together when they had trekked down from Canada. The first winter, while snow covered the ground, he had helped them as they cleared and dug and planted. By the time spring had banished the white mantle from the earth they had cleared several acres of land. In the autumn Thomas had been touring in the region, and he had shared their pride when they gathered in their first fine harvest of potatoes and oats and buckwheat. More and more acres had been cleared and acquired under the Homestead Law. The cabin had been replaced by a comfortable log house, NOW THIS! A finer house than that of the landlord who had starved them out of Ireland in Black ’47!

  ‘She won’t be happy,’ Mark chuckled, ‘until she has a brick house with pillars and porticoes.’

  ‘And why not?’ demanded Kitty. ‘John Holohan of Upper Kilsheelin has an army of young men on the road, buying. They can’t get enough of our produce.’

  Although John Holohan was now a successful businessman in Chicago, to Kitty he was always John Holohan of Upper Kilsheelin. As she led Thomas from room to room through the house, every now and then she stopped and held him at arms length, ‘to fill her eyes with the sight of him’. He was a pleasure for any woman’s eyes; handsome, tall, and elegant, and beautifully courteous. Where did all those noble qualities come from—in this nameless servant-boy? Well, he’d soon know. Kitty wished now that she had never written to Thomas in Paris.

  Thomas had come almost as quickly as his answering letter. He would have come still more swiftly had he not taken Dorene to an eye specialist in Switzerland where she was now receiving treatment. Thomas had not tarried to hear the doctor’s verdict, but he had been less pessimistic than the others.

  In the evening the Hennesseys’ neighbours came to greet the famous actor who hailed, like all in the settlement, from Tipperary. Thomas marvelled at their ease and independence. Few of them owned less than two hundred acres, yet a decade ago they had been despised tenants, evicted from the few Irish acres that they had held with less right of tenure than the rabbits. On any other occasion he would have enjoyed their quips at each other about having the rent ready for next Gale Day or they’d be evicted; they were all landlords now. But Thomas was afire to talk with Kitty about the reason for his voyage across ocean and continent. He listened with half an ear to the settlers’ reminiscences; about the Temperance meetings and the Monster meetings that had awed the world. Maddeningly they capped each others’ stories of the night of the Big Wind. And inevitably, though they wished to forget it, they touched on the famine.

  ‘I never put a spade in the ground for the first of the potato crop,’ said Mark, ‘but there comes a dread on me that brings back the evening of the Blight. Do you remember it, Thomas?’

  Too well Thomas remembered his master’s discovery of acres of evil-smelling slime that had been firm tubers that very morning; remembered his rush through fields of desolation to warn Mark to get his potatoes out of the ground; Mark, silhouetted against the darkening skyline, head bowed over the spade handle, the open drill at his feet releasing its evil-smelling message. Kitty, kneeling in the kitchen beside the cradle, her face pressed for comfort against the face of the baby that was soon to die in the Great Hunger! No wonder that American prosperity had failed to erase the tragedy from her face.

  When the guests had gone and the children abed she pleaded with Thomas to drop the quest to learn the truth about his ancestry. She wanted to withhold the precious information that she had unexpectedly stumbled across.

  ‘Aren’t you being inconsistent, Kitty? After dragging me across the world?’

  ‘My conscience made me write to you but my heart bids me advise you to leave well enough alone. You might find...’ she stopped herself.

  ‘I might find what you always suspected that I’m somebody’s by-child; a half-caste with the vices of both parents and the virtues of neither.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Thomas,’ said Mark. His voice held a sharpness never before shown to this man who was dearer to Mark than a brother.

  ‘God has balanced things well for you. If you have missed out in the matter of family it has been made up to you in talents—though to your credit you have multiplied them a hundredfold. You’ve carved a name for yourself that is famed and honoured. Why hark backwards? None of us want to look back to the past.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ Thomas smiled. ‘It seems to me you did little else all evening, the lot of you.’

  There was so much he had wanted to talk about. He would like to have talked with the two Ryan girls whom Kitty and Mark had adopted when their mother had died in Quebec. They had grown into poised young ladies. Of course their mother, Miss Oenone Mansfield, had been a born lady; but she had run off with Black Pat Ryan. Suddenly he remembered to tell them about Dorene.

  ‘Well, isn’t it strange now,’ said Kitty when he had told her. ‘When we were on the ocean before the fever took a real grip I used to go over every last minute with you at the dockside. Your eyes were glued upwards at us—you poor friendless boy, and when a little blind girl bumped against you, you just helped her up the gangway without taking your eyes off us. I cared for her when her mother died of ship fever then I lost sight of her; how could you keep track of one little child? Six thousand they buried under that mound in Quebec—eighty fever ships lined along the river. And the water sparkling and dancing under them!’ She gave a little shudder. ‘Bring her here, Thomas, if the treatment she�
��s getting in Switzerland doesn’t work.’

  ‘Kitty, your heart is bigger than your fine new house. Five children of your own and the two Ryan children—By the way, you have done more than well by those two. They are polished young ladies.’

  She explained to him about the money that Sir Roderick O’Carroll had sent ahead for their mother. ‘It was lying in America all the time we were in Canada. John Holohan invested it for them later, and trebled it. The Midas touch, they say he has. We spent it on them, the best schools—everything! Thomas, I’ll never understand that mystery; my unfortunate cousin Black Pat to die of hunger and three of his children and yet Sir Roderick—his own foster-brother—thought nothing of sending a big sum of money like that to provide for his widow when she would reach America—God rest her.’ She sighed. ‘’Twas all a mad folly, running off from her fine home with Black Pat, an’ maybe it’s alive he’d be today if he had married one of his own class. That kind of thing is all right in story books. It doesn’t work out in real life.’ Weariness descended upon Thomas like a pall. ‘Thomas,’ she went on, ‘is it true that Miss Sterrin O’Carroll ran away from the convent and married the richest man in Ireland?’

  He rose abruptly. ‘I believe it is true. Kitty, I am exhausted and I must be away at dawn to find your lady.’

  She chatted him up the stairs; tested the new-fangled stone jar that proudly replaced the old-fashioned hot bricks between the sheets. Then she put her hands on his shoulders. The last time he had been here he had been two days and nights on the road with little sleep after a season of travelling the whole continent, but he hadn’t looked like this—ravaged!

  ‘Thomas, did you go near Kilsheelin? Did you get a glimpse of Miss Sterrin?’

  There was no gossip’s curiosity in the face so close to his; only the concern that he had cherished when he was a friendless servant boy. He drew out a chair. ‘Sit down, Kitty.’