‘I forgot,’ he said, ‘that you had a family bard to keep you posted in lore and legend.’
‘It was not the Bard,’ she said dreamily, ‘it was Young Thomas who told me about Nora and the lake.’
‘Is Young Thomas your young brother?’
Had he said something wrong again? The look of dreaming reminiscence that had made her face look like some soft flower was shuttered inside its everyday mask of cool stillness. She did not reply. Voices sounded on the river behind them. Two men were getting into a boat. A woman with a maid wheeling a bassinet waved to them then turned back up the hill.
Sterrin recognised the scarfaced man. The other was the man who had rested under the hedge earlier in the day. The woman must be the girl who had promised to wait for Bergin the whole seventeen years of his sentence. What must it have felt like, that glorious moment of reunion? And it was the girl who had made that possible; she it was who had gone on waiting. The man had but to return. Dear God, why didn’t I?
The other man was speaking to her. ‘I should like to apologise to your Ladyship for the way that I spoke to you today.’ Before she could answer he went on: ‘That house up there,’ he said, pointing to the remains of the fine stone house that had been his home, ‘is more than a mass of stones and rafters. My father, my grandfather, aye and his grandfather, were born there and died there. My seven children were born there; two of them died there. Something of all our lives went into those stones and rafters. It had a double door.’ He was reminiscing to himself now. ‘The inner one blew away the night of the Big Wind. When we were replacing it my father added an outer one that would stand up to any storm. Mavrone! What chance had it against the crowbar!’ He came back to his surroundings. ‘I beg your Ladyship’s pardon for forcing my troubles on you. I only intended asking if you had any objection to my going on up there to steal a piece of soil to take with me to America. Maybe it will bring luck to whatever land I may be able to come by over there.’
A joyless laugh grated out from Bergin in the stern. ‘Steal a sod of his own soil. The soil that belonged to the Graces—both sides of this river—since the Graces were sovereigns of Kilkenny and Kilkenny was the sovereign city of Ireland.’ A stroke of his oar carried the boat past her without waiting for her permission.
Donal watched her seat herself on the river bank. He couldn’t know that her knees had started to give way. The Bard had told her about a man called Grace who had mustered four hundred men from these parts to fight with King James at the Battle of the Boyne. King William’s great general had been so impressed with him that when the battle was over and Grace heading home with his forty survivors, he sent a message after him offering him high honours if he would join the victorious Orangemen. Grace read the tempting offer, then, on the back of the Six of Diamonds he scribbled his reply. ‘I despise your offer.’
And here was his descendant ousted from his land by the man to whom she was wife; begging her permission to steal a sod. She put her hands to her face and wept as she had not wept since her discovery of Mickey-the-turf stealing the jelly that she had been sacrificing before the shrine of the Child Jesus that the famine might end. The sacrifice of her marriage, though it had saved Kilsheelin and its tenants, seemed almost as futile as that of the jelly. It had not been able to save those six hundred families. The horror of that spectacle of the morning, the horror that she had suppressed last night, came forth now in a bursting dam of tears.
Suddenly her hands were drawn away from her face; a big fragrant handkerchief dried her eyes and face. She was helped to her feet. ‘There is no sense of sitting around on damp grass.’ Donal was coughing as he spoke. ‘That’s what gave me this,’ he tapped his chest with his free hand, ‘the night that you came to our place for that sod. By the way, did you find the one that I tied to your leathers that night?’ She nodded.
They walked in silence for a moment, his hand still holding hers. She glanced sideways at him through the pom-poms that dangled from her sports hat. The fine skin of his face flushes too readily, she thought. It wasn’t just a cough he caught that night when she had gone twice to Poolgower.
‘I thought you, too, wanted to take a sod to America,’ he said. She could never let him know why she had been there. And then with a sudden, angry clarity she realised that it was for the same reason that she was here in this place; to save Kilsheelin from the Keatings; from the threat of that loathsome elder brother. Donal felt his hand vacated as though it were a contamination. She hurried ahead. The triangles of silk peeping through the slits of her sports skirt made a sound like an angry sail flapping against the mast. ‘Bring back the field in an apron inagh!’ She stopped and confronted him. ‘What about those other fields?’
Donal was lighthearted. He couldn’t keep up with her moods; besides he had not had breakfast.
‘My Lady,’ he stammered, ‘they were bought in open market. They were offered for sale—’
‘The castle was not offered for sale. Your brother gloated to me that he was going to get it, that—’
‘My brother did that? Lady Devine, I swear to you—’
‘Oh, don’t tell me that you knew nothing. You are all chickens of the blue hen. Your brother did worse than that, let me tell you.’ Instantly she was sorry; she was taking a mean advantage of a guest; a vulnerable one. He looked white enough to faint. ‘What did James’s James do? What in God’s name could the lout have done? I must know what it was that he did. Lady Devine.’ She shook her head. ‘It is finished. I ought not to have mentioned it. Anyway I’ve halted his march.’ He watched her eyes narrow and the soft mouth crumple into something like bitterness. ‘At least, in our direction.’
He took a step towards her. ‘You are speaking of things that I swear to you I know nothing of. It is hard for you to believe that; but by heavens I shall get to the root of it. Whatever wrong has been done you shall be righted.’
She looked at him for a long moment and when she finally spoke he was shocked at the dull despair in the clear young voice. ‘There is nothing that you can do. What is done can never be undone; never!’
And then Donal knew with a certainty that lashed him, that she was speaking of her marriage. He saw her as he had seen her this morning, confronting those hostile servants; a spray of starry clematis plucked from its protecting wall; a white moth torn by rough hands. Suddenly he saw his brother’s hands, big, unkempt. He saw them impatiently brushing aside flowers because they were a waste of useful ground; saw them knocking to the floor his wife’s exquisite miniatures because they were time-absorbers for the children who ought to have absorbed her leisure. He saw those hands plucking at the clematis; tearing the moth’s white wings; depriving it forever of freedom. He turned from the sight. ‘Where are you going?’ He had not realised that he had turned from her, too. ‘I am going away. It is the only thing that I can do.’ She knew what he meant; then a movement caught her eye. The lodge-keeper was opening the gates for the shooting brake. Panic seized her. They were coming back, her husband and the rest, to enclose her. She was alone as she had been when she sent Thomas from the wall gap. Only then she was confident that some uncharted vista of freedom lay ahead. Today she was trapped.
She knew she must not let this Donal Keating go out of her life. There was an affinity between them that was not with these others. They had mutual acquaintances: like Fairy Nora and her apronful of lake; and wouldn’t the tale of the flying field sound as improbable a piece of magic to these others as that of the disappearing lake? She seized the hand that she had dropped the moment before. ‘Listen, let us end the land dispute; for ever.’ He tried to think of something to say; something high-sounding that would abjure and repudiate all that his family had meant to her; he wanted to drop to his knee and proffer her the sword that he had never possessed. ‘If the damned field,’ she was saying, ‘had to fall upon anyone I’m glad that it fell on you.’
He was moved by her inelegant phrase. He raised her hand to his lips and said, ‘My Lady, you’d
coax a haggert full of sparrows.’
They watched the cart with the ‘bag’ move away from the waggonette towards the back premises. They could see the great pyramid of slaughtered birds. ‘And now,’ murmured Donal, ‘the Lord sent a flight of quails over the sea and down to where the camp was.’
‘What is that about quails?’
‘I was referring to a “shoot” in the desert; a flight of quails that came miraculously to feed the Jews in their wandering after the Diaspora.’
‘Diaspora! Fancy your using that word!’
He had to remind himself of the enormity of his brother’s presuming to prevent himself making a cynical reply. He thought she was being patronising about his learning.
‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘this morning as I watched those homeless people I bethought of how Papa described the famine emigrations as the Diaspora of the Gaels—’ she stopped dead. ‘Quails, did you say? What price pheasants? Come on, Donal.’
The amazement of the kitchen staff at the spectacle of her Ladyship coming to the kitchen was duplicated in the yard men at the spectacle of her sprinting into the yard and breathlessly ordering them to stop unloading the bag. One of them ventured something about Mr. Wilson’s instructions, but Sterrin merely called to Donal to climb up.
‘Cl-climb up! On that? You are not going to—’
‘I am.’ She had the horse started towards the gate as the gamekeeper’s phaeton drove in. There were contented puffs rising from Mr. Wilson’s pipe. It had been a brave day. And a powerful brave bag. Allowing for a couple of dozen for the table and gifts, the rest would be his perquisite. Suddenly his eyes gaped. His mouth opened and out fell his fine pipe and crashed in pieces on the floor-boards.
The gamekeeper was far too prosaic a man to imagine things. Much less to imagine that it was her Ladyship who was sitting up there driving a farm cart. Then he saw a young gentleman clambering all over the precious birds. This was carrying a prank too far. A prank? The young gentleman, as he passed, was protesting to her Ladyship that her gesture would be none the less charitable for having been carried out by a workman.
‘A workman,’ said Sterrin, forcing the gamekeeper’s phaeton out of her path, ‘would have been challenged by him, and by then my hus—by then the others would have been on the scene. Anyway don’t be prissy. My mother carried a six-foot woman for over a mile to a soup kitchen; and didn’t you say that the Lord drove a flight of quails down to where the camp was?’
Donal wondered if the Israelites had looked like these homeless ones; gazing at the beautiful apparition that had come to succour them in their dereliction. ‘Céad míle blessings,’ murmured an old woman. ‘Manna from Heaven!’ Children eating slices of hot bread gathered round the cart.
‘Not manna,’ Sterrin smiled at the woman. ‘Just quails and I’m afraid not from Heaven.’
A man lifted out a brace of birds. ‘Beggin’ your Lady’s pardon, them’s not quails; them’s a sight better; them’s pheasants.’
Sterrin tightened herself against the flutter of fear at the sight of her husband standing grim and ominous in the middle of the stable yard. But her first word scattered the protest that was intended to annihilate her. ‘Jocelyn,’ she called out, dropping—for the first time—his title, ‘it has been marvellous! I haven’t driven in a farm waggon since I was a little girl.’ He resisted a thrill of exultation. She had succumbed like all those who had gone before her; that mnemonic array of beautiful women. The great lover was restored to his prowess. He turned to her and his joy withered to anger. In the amethyst depths of her eyes he saw mockery. ‘The bag,’ he gritted. ‘The birds; what have you done with them?’ He hated the sound imposed upon his voice by his unpolished agitation.
‘The bag?’ She withdrew her hand and waved it towards the gentlemen who were discussing the day’s sport at the hall door. ‘Captain Saint John, my husband and I are discussing the bag. Really I haven’t seen anything like it since—since my father’s time, but,’ she beamed around the circle, ‘I have a confession to make. Already I have taken a liberty with your trophy for some of my less fortunate friends.’ Captain Saint John knew what she meant. He glanced at his host. Could the loss of a few birds cause a man to show such naked venom? And how much longer could this pinioned beauty continue to oppose her husband? The other men gathered around their charming young hostess. To have given her pleasure, they insisted, conferred the accolade upon their day’s achievement. Sir Jocelyn was prevented from commenting by the arrival of an enormous and eccentric-looking carriage drawn by two spanking greys. ‘The Delaneys,’ cried Sterrin delightedly.
Sir Jocelyn raised the mobile eyebrow. ‘I understood that they had written to be excused.’
‘Oh, I suspected that that was just shortage of ball-gowns. I sent a note this morning by the bia driver not to miss the Assizes Ball for the sake of a ball-gown.’
‘Hm, lack of a ball-gown would not deter you from your purpose. Did the demoiselles Delaney not have at least one grandfather?’
Smilingly, she tossed him back his thrust. ‘The Delaney grandfather, Sir Dowling, was only five feet high. My grandfather was six feet four. One can do a lot with a breeches of that size.’
Sterrin and Sir Jocelyn were moving towards the carriage, to all appearances chatting cosily while the ritual of Mrs. Delaney’s arrival was enacted; her babet removed, her bonnet that dangled from a hook in the roof, donned and tied, the little red-carpeted staircase unfolded from somewhere inside the unfashionable high carriage and placed carefully in position by the faithful Ned Rua.
Mrs. Delaney was very much the Grande Dame as she greeted her host. Sterrin was surprised at such unwonted formality from the friendly and uninhibited lady. She learned the reason for it as she led her up the stairs. ‘I had no intention of entering this house ever again,’ said Mrs. Delaney, ‘but I took it kindly your writing today about the ball-gowns. I had not the heart to deprive them of the Ball, but,’ she halted on a step, ‘Sterrin O’Carroll, is it a thing that your father’s daughter could not raise a hand to prevent six hundred people from being turned from their homes?’
‘She could not.’
Mrs. Delaney looked up startled at the abrupt tone. The face in front of her had the same unreadable look that it had on its owner’s wedding day; and the dear knows happiness is easy enough to read.
Mrs. Delaney’s gaze followed the great pillars of black marble that rose up all the way to the roof whose ceiling was of the brothers Adam, then on to the walls whose panels Angelica Hoffman had painted. ‘The waste of it,’ she murmured. And then, surprisingly for her, she quoted, “‘Unless God build the house they labour in vain that dwell there”.’
Sterrin interrupted the meditations to ask why Rory had not come.
‘Rory has gone to America.’
‘You don’t mean that he has—emigrated?’
Mrs. Delaney gave a sad little nod. ‘The sons of the gentry are emigrating, too; but the prosperity is slow catching up on them until they forget their gentility.’
Sterrin, conditioned from childhood to the awareness of suffering, saw that it had taken the parting from Rory, the heir born miraculously after ten daughters, to bring out at last on his mother’s face all the strain of the poverty and debt that dogged the surviving landlords of the famine era. ‘I’ve made my son an exile. I carried my tenants on my back; your father, too; six hundred!’
Sterrin, after a brief vision of Mrs. Delaney carrying her Papa on her back the way Mamma had carried Mrs. Holohan, deciphered the ambiguity. Even her closest friends, kin to her father who had carried his own tenants upon his back, were charging her with a share in the guilt of this fiendish eviction. She would never escape from it. Panic gripped her; she must get out from here; to where? Not another gallop-by-night to the convent.
The girls were giving little ecstatic shrieks. Sterrin had preceded them to their room where gowns, exquisite beyond their wildest dreams, were arrayed for their choosing. Mrs. Delaney, softened by Sterrin
’s thoughtfulness, sought to make amends. She asked about the day’s shoot; when she heard its amount her sporting enthusiasm was stirred. ‘That should be worth seeing. I must go down.’
‘No, no.’ The girls stopped their fitting and preening to look towards their hostess. Sterrin O’Carroll had been held up to them always as an example of poise and ladylike control. There was nothing poised about her expression now; nor about the sound of her voice. It was almost hysterical; over nothing.
Sterrin explained about the bag. And then, childishly needing to be understood, she told about the bread.
Mrs. Delaney looked at her with something like awe. ‘You got bread baked here for six hundred families? That took more than kindness. It took courage; and high courage.’ But Sterrin felt only guilt for their praise.
‘Courage,’ she repeated dully. ‘It feels more like cheek; like offering a poor woman one of her own halfpennies when you have stolen her savings.’
All the county was at the Assizes Ball that night. Sterrin, entering on her husband’s arm caused quite a stir. This was the first public appearance of the bride of the wealthy Sir Jocelyn. Her beauty, they had heard, matched his wealth; and her diablerie, by all accounts, matched that of the Castigliones and Metternichs of the French court. Her gown, people said, must be the dernier cri that had silenced the creak of the crinoline. A deaf dowager raised her lorgnettes. ‘What’s all the fuss about? It is a striking gown, but not revealing.’
The judge’s wife murmured into the dowager’s ear trumpet that while the gown did not reveal it definitely suggested. The dowager had an absent-minded way of putting her ear trumpet to her mouth to reply. ‘Suggestion is the secret of allure.’ The statement came in a trumpet blast and everyone stopped to listen. ‘When I was a girl the ball-gowns held open display and the gentlemen wouldn’t trouble to give a second look. What is concealed yet discreetly suggested is much more provocative.’ Everyone looked towards the target of the trumpet blasts. Sterrin felt naked.
The Big Wind Page 59