The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  He understood what she felt about that cessation of life. It had been the same with him when the separate stream of Sterrin’s life had ceased to flow within him. The little waterfalls bereft of sun had frozen into silence. His fingers caressed the soft cheek.

  ‘No more worries, little one,’ he murmured into her hair. ‘I’ll guide those little footsteps all the rest of the way.’

  49

  Hannah draped the novel Grecian-cum-Renaissance gown over her mistress’s head and after a certain amount of fumbling managed to fasten the new-fangled hooks and eyes. With a sigh of relief she stepped back to review her handiwork.

  Tonight was to be Sterrin’s first performance as hostess in her husband’s Kilkenny mansion. Some of the guests were not much to her taste—officers in charge of the military who were implementing a wholesale eviction that her husband was carrying out. ‘It is not a pleasing beginning to a new life, Hannah,’ she murmured, ‘and then, to expect me to entertain that Keating person!’

  She had protested vehemently to Sir Jocelyn when she discovered that Donal Keating was one of the Assize barristers invited to join the houseparty. He listened unmoved as she gave him details of the feud: the field torn from her father by the Big Wind and dropped on Keating’s land, the Whiteboy raid that had missed killing her mother: ‘At least, consider her feelings.’ At the mention of Lady O’Carroll he seemed to hesitate. He jingled his bracelets up and down on his wrists, toyed with the streamers of the biretta-shaped hat that he wore in the house, then suddenly pointed to one of the dresses that hung arrayed for Sterrin’s choice: ‘Wear that tonight,’ he said, and walked out.

  The gown was a revolution from the swinging crinolines. It was moulded so tightly that Hannah was embarrassed at its revelation of the lines and curves of a woman’s body. Moulded breasts, flat stomach; it was indecent after the outbulging years of horsehair petticoats and the steel cage that had supported the crinolines. And these thighs! Hannah had never before associated thighs with a lady. The prophecies of Saint Columcille were beginning to come true. Women, said that holy prophet, will wear trousers.

  Her eyes fell to the shortened hemline that revealed two inches of ankle. The sight drove her to speech. ‘God never meant them to be seen.’

  Sterrin raised the skirt and revealed a pair of shapely legs. ‘How do you know that God meant them to be hidden, Hannah? I doubt if HE bothers about such things.’ She swung her leg forward. ‘There is nothing to be ashamed of about them.’

  ‘Ah, Miss Sterrin, you are changing. You were often a wild colleen but you never used to make light of holy things.’

  ‘There is nothing holy about these,’ said Sterrin, dropping her skirt. She put a hand on the maid’s shoulder. ‘I shan’t keep you waiting long. There will be no music tonight on account of Lady Murray’s bereavement.’

  Svelte and regal, Sterrin seemed to cleave a path through the crowding crinolines. She gave a cool nod towards Donal Keating and pretended not to notice that officers were raising their monocles.

  One of them took her down to dinner. ‘You have great courage, my Lady,’ he said, ‘to blaze this new trail; or should I say train?’ He indicated the train that flowed out from her as they descended.

  ‘Thank you, Captain,’ she said. ‘Do you find that it takes courage to face all these people whom you have been evicting this week?’ He busied himself with the train over the dining-room threshold. His hostess’s tact, he thought, did not march with her beauty. Evicting her husband’s tenantry was not quite his cup of tea.

  ‘I should have thought,’ she resumed when they were seated, ‘that it would be a soldier’s duty to protect women and children—and their homes.’ Her clear voice fell into the shallows that precede the flowing of dinner talk. So did his answer, though it was almost a whisper. ‘It was not I who ordered the evictions. Lady Devine.’

  With ponderous tact the wife of the Deputy Lieutenant for the county oared in with some questions about the gay doings at the French Court. ‘Your charming wife,’ she said to her host, ‘seems to be a devotee of the French Empress. I believe that it was she who started this new vogue.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Sir Jocelyn. ‘Eugénie’s edict banning the crinoline overshadowed the Emperor’s New Year speech.’

  ‘Humph,’ said the lady. ‘She is not my Empress. She won’t ban my crinoline.’

  Sterrin contemplated the lady’s bulging proportions then leaned forward with great deference and said, ‘That would be most unkind of the Empress, Madam, to ban your crinoline, I mean. It is much more becoming to your—style.’

  Sir Jocelyn looked down in surprise at his wife. Her remark to a lady so much older was not in character with herself. In all fairness he admitted to himself that, while she was mettlesome and hot tempered, he had never heard her make unpleasant remarks to other ladies. Her laughter was brittle and frequent; but tonight too frequent; her dinner partner seemed fascinated. And of course this old haybag had asked for the dig she had been administered. But it was unfortunate that it had been administered by the hostess.

  The Deputy Lieutenant’s lady was waving her fan as though to drive off apoplexy. ‘I’ll wager,’ she said to her other neighbour, ‘that she is a rebel.’ The fan blew the wager down to Sterrin.

  Another lady said that she had happened to be in Austria during Eugénie’s visit. ‘She was wearing a gown that fully disclosed her ankles. In broad daylight. Ankles, did I say? A lot more could be seen. I’m told the Emperor Franz Josef averted his eyes while she was stepping into the carriage and when his own Empress Elizabeth was about to step in after her, he stepped forward and completely screened her and everyone heard him say, “Careful, my dear. Someone might see your feet.” Of course it was obvious that he did not allude to the sweet Empress Sissi, as they call her. Her gown was long and flowing—and completely decorous.’

  Sterrin was outraged and bored. Without waiting until the footmen came in to remove the cloth she gave a quick signal to the ladies and rose to her feet.

  ‘What execrably bad form!’ she said as she rose. ‘The Emperor Franz Josef’s, I mean.’ Sterrin smiled reassuringly at the astounded ladies. It was bad enough being summoned from the table before the cloth was removed; but to be accused of bad form.

  ‘One might forgive bad taste in dress,’ Sterrin said, ‘but in speech! Never!’ Tall, sheath-like, her train establishing a regal distance between her and the others, she swept out.

  Her husband, standing at the head of the table, watched her, gratified in spite of herself, at her curtain speech. The others, he thought, swaying from side to side in the crinolines that he had once thought so graceful looked suddenly, like waddling ducks. She was such a hostess, as he had always envisaged; such a wife?

  That night, when Hannah was still struggling with the hooks and eyes of the dress, he came to Sterrin’s bedroom. ‘Get out!’ he ordered the maid. He groped at the complicated fastenings that strained against her taut muscles.

  Sterrin tensed.

  It had to happen sometime. Marriage is a bargain, and she had collected plenty of the profits; and so had Mamma, Dominic, the servants, the tenants. Marriage holds no romantic moments with romantic bridegrooms. That sort of thing is thought up by writers of yellow-backed trash and by—by deluded fools brought up in convents and castles. This is life; this is—There was no sense seeking words. The surge within her was not a thing of words or defined thought; just a jabber-jabber of sentience to dull the pounding of her heart. A hook tore over her flesh.

  ‘God’ll mighty!’ she exploded. ‘Do you have to tear the flesh off my bones?’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘Ugh!’ The exclamation was not for her scratched flesh; but for the spectacle of his artificial masticators. His gasping breaths had dislocated their gutta-percha gums. They were projecting, all purple and slobbery.

  Her disgust was the last straw. The wave of passion roused by the sight of her beautiful body making its sweeping exit had beaten itself out in the conflict with the h
ooks and eyes. He turned and looked at himself in the long pier glass.

  ‘One would think that I was a monster,’ he muttered to his image. The grotesque gums were in position again.

  ‘You are a monster, no,’ she raised her hand as he turned, ‘not because of this.’ She rubbed her smarting back. ‘I mean that private army out there in the park; your bloodless victory. Six hundred people turned from their homes. To them you are a monster.’

  ‘I am not concerned with how I seem to the canaille.’

  ‘They are not canaille.’ Her low-pitched voice spiralled. She blazed at him. ‘They are human beings with the right to humanity. My father never evicted. He held that to deprive people of their homes was to deprive them slowly of their right to live.’

  He tapped his snuff box. ‘And I don’t have to remind you of how your tenants repaid your father’s humanity. Since you are so concerned with human rights let me remind you that I, too, have my rights.’

  ‘You are free to take your rights,’ she said quietly.

  He looked at her reflection in the mirror; standing so passively, arms at her sides, the palms out; a sort of self-abnegating surrender. To him! There rose before him a vision of two countesses who once almost gouged each other’s eyes out for the favours of his couch.

  In a flash of revelation he saw her as she had been the day she had accepted his proposal of marriage; swinging towards him down the drawing-room of the castle with a sort of desperate courage that had delighted him; the high gallantry of her caste. Sir Jocelyn, why have you come today? Is it for the horse? That heroic gesture; the glove withdrawn, the hand proffered in surrender. By heaven she had sold herself to him for the horse!

  ‘Take off your glove!’ The words ripped out from him.

  She lifted her hands slightly then glanced towards the dressing-table where her long gloves lay. Was this another rush of blood to the head? He had babbled this way after they had bled him on his wedding night.

  ‘Glove?’ she asked.

  He turned from the mirror and seized her dress at the neck. ‘This,’ he cried, ‘this gauntlet.’ With one savage wrench he tore the stately robe à l’Impératrice apart from neck to hem. For a moment he stared at her splendid, youthful body. He felt a sense of renewed potency and vigour as he pulled her towards the bed.

  *

  A wick spurted in the silent blackness. In its sudden light Sterrin saw her reflection in the pier glass; lying in the rags that he had made of the robe à l’Impératrice. And then she became aware of her husband standing by the bed. Looking down at her abasement! The thought gave direction to the spirit that was floundering somewhere in a pit of shame and degradation.

  She raised herself on to her elbow. By twisting her lips tightly into a smile she managed to control their wobbling. They must look like Sister Mary Aliquo’s did that day in the convent garden. And was this what Sister Mary Aliquo-five-yards-of-calico was alluding to when she used to teach us that nice girls had no need to examine their conscience on the Sixth Commandment? Bitterness etched her smile into steadiness; but in the flickering light all that her husband noticed was the elusive, enchanting smile that he remembered from betrothal days. Her composure astounded him. He watched her swing a pair of long legs over the side of the bed, kick back the train that adhered to one half of the robe, slough off the upper portion from her shoulders, stretch luxuriously then rise slowly like a hibernating snake emerging from its winter sleep.

  She crossed the room. Now I’ll never challenge Mademoiselle Hautdoire to walk on her hands; such a silly thought to go forging its way through her shocked senses. But now, of course, there could be no more talk of annulment.

  He watched her cross the room. Not a snake, he thought; a thoroughbred Persian cat daintily picking its way across a crowded street, disdainful of its surroundings; more concerned about wetting her feet than in avoiding the traffic.

  She picked up a peignoir, tied it about her, and order seemed restored. He felt cheated. His act drained of manliness.

  ‘You have evaded your obligation long enough,’ he said.

  Her answer was so low that he had to crane to catch it. ‘One does not rivet on one’s own chains.’ She glanced up and for a fleeting moment, beneath the proudly held poise he glimpsed her sick misery and horror. But her expression changed so quickly that he thought that he must have been thinking wishfully. ‘It was a debt of honour,’ she went on in a clearer tone. ‘One always gets round to meeting that kind of debt.’ It might have been a wager on a horse.

  When Hannah heard him back in his own room she tapped at her mistress’s door, but got no answer. It was dawn before a sound made her tap again. ‘Help me with these boots, Hannah.’ Miss Sterrin’s ladyship was in riding dress! The maid almost tripped over the mound of silken gown that lay inside the door. So obviously flung there. ‘Leave that thing and do as I tell you.’

  When her mistress had gone Hannah picked up the gown again. A great jagged opening parted the front from neck to hem. The back was still held by the new scientific hooks and eyes; except for the top one. Science inagh! She appraised the disorder of the unslept-in bed. By the looks of these andramartins the prophecies might not come true in this generation. ‘A Miller will come without Thumbs—no. A Spaniard will rule and ruin Ireland—’ Musha sure these are the prophecies of Saint Columcille. It’s want of sleep is on me. As if a saint would concern himself with the sinful andramartins of the Quality. Not, of course, that it is sinful when they are married. No, it’s not a prophecy that I am tryin’ to remember. It is a curse. The one that was put on this house when the little children died here; dancing for the Quality on hot gridirons. The curse that no child would be born in this house to inherit it. It would always be passed on sideways, to nephews and cousins and the like. Hannah rearranged the counterpane and freshened the pillows. Well, by the look of things it might be that Miss Sterrin’s Ladyship might be the one to break that same curse.

  Sterrin had forgotten about the soldiers in the park. She wheeled from the sight of each encampment and finally rode towards the distant farmyard. The soldiers watched her set her horse at its high gate. She’d never do it! ’Twas a reckless jump. ‘Ye Gods!’ gasped a young subaltern. ‘She rides like an Arab!’

  The road held no retreat. It was filled with the grim cause of the soldiers’ presence in the park. Even though she had to pull into the grass margin to avoid the endless procession of dispirited men and weary women and children, she was only vaguely aware of them as a roadblock. They trudged past aimlessly; some glanced up at her then turned away from her cold, proud face. ‘Mammy, I want a drink of water—Daddy, carry me. I can’t keep up with you... I’m tired.’

  The plaint recurred like a chorus until its metre beat into her brain. She looked down. Mothers carrying babies; fathers carrying older ones; boys and girls carrying toddlers; others lagging behind, tugging at the grown-ups.

  Sterrin shook her head sadly. She saw clearly that her preoccupation with herself was immature emotionalism; that she was running away from reality. She moved back in the saddle with some idea of making room for an exhausted child. The space she made would scarcely hold one small child. And at her feet a whole tide of humanity crawled past.

  Six hundred families. It was what Papa meant when he used to talk about the Diaspora of the Gaels. The wailing hundreds he had seen when he was dispatching some of the tenants to America had suggested to him the Jewish Diaspora, when the Jews went out from Israel. This scene reminded Sterrin of the famine years when the roads used to be thronged with the starving. But then, there had been men like Papa and like Lord Templetown and other charitable landlords, racking their brains and their fortunes to cope; and there were the quaintly-clad Quakers, tirelessly moving through the countryside, and the parish priest and the Protestant vicar, out by day and night; united in the cause of mercy. But here there was no tempering mercy. The great overlord had the right to rid his land of humans as though they were crop-destroying vermin. And the governm
ent showed its approval by manpower, military and police, to assist in the extermination. The people looked at her, not with hostility, but without friendship. It was a relief to realise, gradually, that at least they did not recognise her. She had arrived too recently. And she had hoped, in time, to get acquainted with them, to establish the same friendly relationship with them as with the tenants at home!

  As she walked her horse in tempo with the march of the outcasts she heard an outcry behind and wheeled. A group of men with crowbars were prodding awake some old people and children who had rested beneath the hedge and had fallen asleep. She spurred her horse towards a man in riding breeches and leggings, who was holding a horsewhip menacingly.

  ‘Stop those men!’ she cried, reigning her mount to its haunches. ‘How dare they touch these people!’

  The man looked at her for a moment before raising his hat. He didn’t recognise her, but she was a very grand lady on a very grand horse, and she spoke with quelling authority.

  ‘It is against the law, ma’am,’ he said, ‘for evicted people to shelter beneath the hedges.’

  ‘What law?’ she demanded.

  He shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ His tone was not over respectful. ‘Anyway, it is against my orders.’ He turned impatiently and raised his whip. ‘Hi, get you up!’ he shouted to an old man deep in sleep.

  Sterrin raised her own whip. ‘Don’t you dare to touch him!’ she cried. ‘I am Lady Devine. You will take your orders from me.’

  A murmur rippled through the crowd. The overseer with the whip went flabby with obsequiousness. Apathy went from the hunted; some showed hostility. Some drew away respectfully. A few came near her, sensing hope. A middle-aged man got stiffly to his feet and rubbed his knees. He moved over to Sterrin. ‘I’m thankful to your Ladyship for the concession of resting beneath my own hedge.’ The overseer made to intervene, but Sterrin raised her whip.