‘Yes,’ continued the man. ‘I made that dyke. I ditched-in that land, as far as that bend.’ He waved down the road. ‘And I ditched in the fields back there as far as the hill. I was too good a farmer, I made my land too valuable. For every bit of fertilising and every bit of ditching and every bit of building I carried out, my rent went up and up until it was beyond all hope of paying. But if I had done nothing the result would have been the same. I’d still have been thrown out—for being shiftless and lazy. That’s what he was told.’ He indicated the man beside him. ‘And these others. Sir Jocelyn Devine, with respects to you, my Lady, had brought a new breed of cattle from the Continent and the human stock on his land was in the way. Up there,’ he pointed to the hills, ‘the people were turned out because the pheasant hatcheries were trebled this year to make a bigger shoot.’
Sterrin felt a sick heat rising from her stomach to her head. She had known nothing of this. She shifted her whip to the hand that held the reins and put her free hand to her forehead. The man mistook the gesture. ‘I’m sorry, my Lady, to distress you with the tale of our miseries.’
‘No!’ she said dully. ‘It is not your telling me. It is your misery itself, the misery of all of you, that distresses me.’ She drew on the rein and the man put out a restraining hand. For a second she thought he might be seeking to impede. She was uncertain about his attitude. He was well spoken but his voice held cynicism, as well as respect. She noticed another man who had been moving towards the speaker, a well-dressed man with a scarred face, who carried a sports gun. He had been watching her while the other was speaking and at the back of her mind there was a sense of familiarity.
‘John,’ he said to the man who had spoken to Sterrin, ‘I am sorry to see you this way. I have come to offer the shelter of my home to you and yours.’
The overseer moved forward. ‘Are you aware, my man,’ he asked, ‘of the penalty for harbouring an evicted tenant? Every man jack of your family and clan can be fined for it. Aye, and turned out too.’
The scarfaced man’s grip on his gun became less casual. ‘Listen, whipmaster,’ he said slowly. ‘Don’t “my man” me. I’m no chattel of your misbegotten master.’ Sterrin flinched. Did he face towards her at the word ‘chattel’? She remembered him now. It was Bergin, Thomas’s friend who had watched for her here in these grounds over a year ago to help Thomas with his plan for elopement. How much did this man know? Did he know of his friend’s volatile loves? Of her own humiliation? He uncovered sketchily towards her then turned back to the overseer.
‘Nobody questions my right to receive friends under my roof, John,’ he said to the man who still held Sterrin’s bridle. ‘That is my boat down there. When you get across the river you are on my land.’ He looked meaningly at the overseer. ‘Let anyone try molesting you there!’
Sterrin rode back across the park like one possessed. Soldiers scurried from her path, once she rode through a smouldering fire and sent sparks flying in all directions. An army cook stared open-mouthed after her, the contents of his skillet pouring down his apron. A footman appeared before she dismounted. She tossed him the reins and had reached the stairs-foot before she paused to toss a brief apology to the young gentleman whom she had almost upended in the hallway.
‘Pray don’t apologise,’ said Donal Keating coldly. ‘No person has the right to obstruct the path of Lady Devine!’
Sterrin hurried upstairs and didn’t wait for an answer to her tap at her husband’s door. ‘Sir Jocelyn!’ she exploded.
The presence of the valet bending over his master at the dressing-table checked her outburst. She paused, expecting the man to be dismissed. Her husband sent his eyebrows up in what was intended as sardonic surprise. Only one eyebrow responded. The contortion produced in the mirror disgusted his fastidious vanity. He reminded himself that his disfigurement had been caused by the beautiful tyro who was standing there pouring out breathless expostulations about suffering humanity.
‘You must do something, at once!’ She paused for breath. He leaned closer to the mirror.
‘Bring it a little more forward,’ he said to the valet. The man was drawing forth a lock of hair to shape into a curl over the twisted muscle that bulged over his master’s eyebrow. ‘One might, of course, wear a wig,’ he murmured, ‘but then wigs are so démodé—aren’t they, my dear?’
She had the feeling as she looked back at him that the Chinese dragons on his yellow silk robe were crawling over him. ‘Out there,’ she said, low and tense, ‘there is a blemish that is a reproach to humanity. How do you propose to conceal it?’
He drew the curl a little more forward. ‘You mean those demolished houses, don’t you, my dear? They are an eyesore, I must admit, but I hope soon to have all traces of them cleared away.’
She turned away in disgust, but the thought of the homeless spurred her back. ‘Won’t you make arrangements to feed the people, even soup kitchens? They are starving, and they are being forced along in a—a death march. Even the cattle are free to move over the pastures.’
He stood up. ‘They will have much more freedom now,’ he said, ‘and it will be possible to have many more cattle.’ He threw his gown from him. ‘This conversation has gone far enough. I am paying sufficient rates to maintain the poorhouse. Let these people go there. Let them go to America, if it is fool enough to take them in. But don’t bother me about them again. It is time you changed out of those clothes. Your duty at the moment is to your guests.’
50
The chef looked up in amazement at the spectacle of her Ladyship entering the kitchen. When he heard the cause of her presence his eyes and mouth gaped. ‘Milady! C’est impossible. Cook for six hundred people!’ His assistant, a Professed Cook from London, folded her hands and prepared for battle. Her skill was the complement of his artistry. As a team they had worked together for years, dedicated to the holy cause of their Master’s palate and securely entrenched in his appreciation.
Sterrin’s eyes roved over the strange territory of this modern kitchen; the great range burning anthracite coal that cooked and heated without the gaiety of flames; the brownstone trough where a maid was washing vegetables in water that poured effortlessly from a tap in a wall; no Johnny-the-buckets. No human hand to fetch or carry it away. No hand human enough to stretch from such a kitchen to help the hungry. She recalled the Kilsheelin kitchen straining at its seams to cope with the famine; wall ovens steaming all day; never a spare hook in the great crane that swung its full complement of bastibles, bakepots and kettles over the eight fires in the hearth.
She turned away. Kilsheelin kitchen and its occupants were far away in some other civilisation. In the passage outside, hurrying servants flattened themselves against the wall; wide-eyed at the spectacle of her Ladyship coming out from the kitchen.
She found her dinner partner of last night gazing tenderly down the muzzle of a sports rifle. He transferred the look to his hostess. When he heard her request his breath went out in a whistle. ‘Lady Devine, for me to order my men to fix up a field kitchen for your husband’s tenantry would be—mutiny!’
‘Why should it be? As an officer you can surely give orders to your men. You have ordered them to distribute food in the famine regions of India. You told me so yourself.’
Why should a man be compelled to turn from the appeal in these lovely eyes? He laid down the gun and smoothed his moustache as though to clear the path for the words that were about to emerge. ‘Lady Devine, in India I should not dare to countermand the orders of a Maharajah. Your husband’s sway here is just as powerful as a Maharajah’s and he is just as—’ He stopped and went scarlet. He had almost said ‘he is just as cruel’. ‘I mean, er, as a magistrate he has the most amazing powers; far more so than magistrates in England. Over here they are being granted more and more power all the time; even over the ordinary public, much more over their own tenants.’
A servant entered. ‘Sir Jocelyn’s compliments, your Ladyship, and the shooting brake is ready to start.’<
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As she passed through the door that the captain held for her she said, ‘I might have known that you wouldn’t understand.’ She swept out. He hurried after her, protesting. She silenced him with a gesture. ‘I must make certain that adequate hampers have been prepared. The shoot is a long way off. Our guests must not go hungry.’
He caught up with her and barred her way. ‘I’ll broach the matter to Sir Jocelyn,’ and then almost into her ear he murmured, ‘I would put an army into the field for you.’
Sterrin moved on to where the luncheon hampers awaited her inspection before being fastened. ‘Loaves and fishes.’ She thought wistfully of miracles. The butler and housekeeper exchanged looks. ‘No, your Ladyship,’ the butler corrected her respectfully but firmly. ‘These leaves are packed around ice for the champagne; not for fish. These here contain truffled partridges and—’
‘What’s over there?’ Without waiting for an answer she crossed a passage to where a servant was emerging with a great scoop of flour. The captain, followed by Donal Keating, came seeking her down the passage. She went on assessing the bins of flour and meal that lined the long room. ‘There is sufficient here to feed six hundred people. Isn’t there?’
Mrs. Ledwidge explained that supplies had been increased to supplement the soldiers’ rations. ‘Soldiers?’ Sterrin turned angrily, then saw the officer. He sketched a rueful gesture. His mission had failed. His host had told him courteously to mind his own business. She turned back to the housekeeper. ‘How many cakes of soda bread can you produce from that bin?’ The housekeeper looked as delicately pained as though she had been asked how many yards of buttermilk would make a breeches for a bull. Impossible woman. ‘Have you not coped with the famine?’ Sterrin’s voice was sharp with contempt.
The housekeeper looked worse than pained. She looked positively wounded. What could one expect, she thought, from a ladyship who would walk down to her own kitchen? What could one expect from a ladyship who saw fit to walk in her underwear before the Emperor of France? She folded her hands together over her black sateen apron. Sterrin assessed the gesture and waited. Here was another pair teamed against her. These two had been running this household before she was born.
‘Your Ladyship,’ the housekeeper took an impressively deep breath. ‘I have been accustomed to cope only with the needs of the nobility and I have always given satisfaction. If I may say so, your Ladyship, I have always been where there was full and plenty.’
‘You have been most fortunate,’ was all that she said; and she said it gently. ‘And now,’ she turned to a bin, ‘since you appear to have no idea of how many cakes of soda bread this can produce, let me enlighten you. It can produce fifty; bastible size, each one adequate for six persons.’
‘Indeed, your Ladyship?’
‘Yes!’ Now the butler as well as the housekeeper recoiled. Her Ladyship’s voice had become a crack of a whip. ‘Fifty cakes of soda bread,’ she repeated, ‘and that is what I want from every one of these bins. See to it immediately.’
‘B-but, your Ladyship—’ The woman’s smugness had crumpled before the force of authority in Sterrin’s voice. ‘The ovens of a coal range could never cope with such numbers—the chef—’
‘Waste no further time in questioning my orders.’ Sterrin’s features could have been fashioned from ice. ‘Set your maids to scouring these disused bastibles. Have them slung over the fires in the boiling houses. I shall return in something over an hour. Have the bread ready for me. Yes,’ she turned to where the footman had reappeared at the door, ‘tell your master that I am coming.’
Sterrin paused at the door to tell the butler that he might close down the hampers. ‘They are most satisfactory,’ she smiled.
The smell of baking bread reached down the avenue to greet her when she returned—on pretext of a headache—exactly an hour and a half later. The staff, subdued and perspiring, awaited her instructions about the mounds of soda cakes that steamed from shelves and tables. When she had seen them dispatched to where the homeless were camping on a common beyond the estate boundary she wandered, deflated, down the little path that led to the river.
Her brief sense of victory was over. Victory inagh! A bit of bread for those who had been deprived of their right to grow and make their own bread; and she would not have gained that victory, she would have been humiliated again before her menials had she given them time to contact their master. Their veiled hostility had never troubled her before. She had been aware of it, but in some nebulous way—connected with the little French comtesse who had won the victory of her freedom from her unconsummated marriage—she had regarded her presence here as a transient thing. Somehow, some way, down some vista of time she would be Sterrin O’Carroll again. But after last night, that hope was erased. She felt chilled and solitary. As she approached the river, she saw Donal Keating pacing its bank. ‘Why are you not with the shoot?’ The sharpness in her voice startled her own hearing as well as his. It had erupted from her self-loathing; and from the loathing in which she held every male human being.
‘I told your husband that I did not feel like slaughter today, and—’ his voice went a shade colder.
She came through the little wicket gate and walked beside him. She said slowly, ‘Don’t antagonise my husband.’ He stopped and demanded impatiently. ‘What can he do to me?’ She found herself envying him his independence of her husband. He can turn you away from here, too, she thought. And suddenly she knew that she did not want that to happen. He was her own particular enemy; part of all those feudal enmities of Kilsheelin that time or distance had neutralised. ‘And anyway,’ continued Donal, ‘why does he have me here? I have no claim to the distinction of his kind of guest.’
She could not tell him now that it gave her husband a twisted satisfaction to foist what he considered ‘the young upstart’s obnoxious presence’ upon his wife. Instead she said, ‘By all accounts you have attained distinction in your profession and, for myself, well I am glad that you are here.’ She was surprised by what she had said. Yet it was true.
He flushed with pleasure. ‘I never thought to hear that from you; the business of the field went deep with you; with your father.’
‘It was that “Whiteboy” raid on my first birthday that implanted the bitterness about the field. A moment earlier and I would have been in the spot where the bullet hit. My mother never fully recovered, she—’
His startled exclamation halted her. She noted the way the colour ebbed from his face as he groped for speech. ‘Lady Devine, you horrify me. I had never heard of any raid until that night when you came for a sod of the field to take, as I thought, to America. You spoke contemptuously of a “call” that my family had made upon yours, of shirts worn over their clothes. Next day my mother explained. She didn’t approve of the raid. But I swear to you, Lady Devine, that neither she nor my father dreamed that there was anything but a warning shot fired into the air outside. Your mother wounded! My God! I would never have—never have—’ he recalled his bumptious badinage that night when he first laid eyes upon her, kneeling on the skeough field in the moonlight; and again, as she walked with her dogs up Cuilnafunchion. ‘I would never have faced you, much less flaunt myself here as your guest.’
A pulse beat in his check. His boyish distress clouded up the recollections of all that he stood for in her life. She found herself reassuring him.
‘My mother was not wounded. Her—illness—had started on the night of the Big Wind when I was born.’
‘You were born the night that the field fell upon us? You see,’ he went on rapidly, ‘I was cut off early from close touch with my family. I was sent away to school at a much earlier age than other boys; again something to do with your family. My eldest brother resented the patronage of having my brother John’s Wedding Mass served by some young servant lad in your household who knew Latin; a picturesque-looking chap. I thought he was some college boy home for the holidays.’
But my Lady was not listening. Another flush tinted
his pale cheeks. Servants as a topic of conversation, as in all things else, were beneath the interest of such as she. He apologised for his bad form. ‘I merely mentioned him, my Lady, because his presence there sparked off something that cut me off too soon from early association with home and its happenings. In a way, he had an influence upon my life.’
Influence upon your life, she was thinking. If he only knew the influence that that picturesque-looking servant has had upon my life.
‘You see,’ he went on, aghast at her disclosures about the raid on her home, ‘the rest of my family do not see eye to eye with my eldest brother. He goes his own way, broods over ancient wrongs, keeps reading the old family manuscript.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Have you one of those?’
He raised his. ‘We did not sprout out of your sky-borne field—as your family seems to think. We have been in abeyance for a couple of generations, but those records have helped us to hang on—oh,’ he exploded. ‘I wish that I could give you back your field. I wish that I could carry it back to you, all wrapped up in an apron. There is a legend about a lake in Kilsheelin that was supposed to have been brought there wrapped up in a fairy woman’s apron. You wouldn’t know about that kind of rustic lore.’
‘Wouldn’t I?’ She proceeded to give him chapter and verse of the tale of the disappearing lake; how Nora, a fairy woman from Killarney, had carried one of the lakes of Killarney in her apron to oblige another fairy woman in Upper Kilsheelin when there was a drought there. ‘It was on the strict understanding that it was to be returned, but when years passed Nora had to come and fetch it away in her apron. Scientists give all kinds of highfalutin explanations for its strange behaviour, but,’ she paused to blow a curl up from her forehead, ‘that is the true explanation.’
She really believes it, he thought, as he watched her eyes turn dark purple and wistful. He felt that he was being privileged to glimpse that remote and lovely world she had known in childhood.
The Big Wind Page 58