‘You remind me,’ he said, ‘of Queen Elizabeth of Hungary with her basket of food that turned into roses when her tyrannical husband overtook her on her errand of mercy. Allow me.’ He reached for the basket, then dropped his arm abruptly. She had pulled the basket in close to herself. He misinterpreted the gesture. ‘Forgive me my familiarity,’ he said, ‘the remark about Queen Elizabeth’s husband was not intended to be personal.’
The basket started to cut through the folds of her cloak and dress with the dint of her clutching; for, suddenly, it was holding again the food that she was sneaking off to the young Ryan Duvs, the children of her father’s foster-brother and someone had made a grab at it; someone with black curls and curvy lips that were demanding: ‘Who do you think you are? Queen Elizabeth of Hungary? I’ve a good mind to tell your Papa.’ A dire threat. Papa would have been fit to spank her if he were to discover that she had exposed herself to the risk of famine fever by stinting her own nourishment.
‘I must leave tomorrow.’
She came back to her surroundings. Oh dear, he’s getting huffy again. And small blame to him. How could he be expected to keep up with her moods when she could not keep track with them herself. She had come out tonight resolved to stop playing at life. The plight of that woman parting from her children had finally jolted Sterrin into reality.
‘Oh, please don’t go on taking offence. Don’t go. You’ve got to help me with those children.’ She told him about the way they had been severed from each other. ‘How could their uncle do such a thing to them? Their mother left money with him for their keep.’
‘He daren’t risk eviction for himself and his own children. The terror of eviction chills natural humanity.’
At the corner of the house they parted; for all the world like sweethearts, thought Hannah, as she waited for Sterrin at the conservatory door.
Captain Saint John, returning from the camp, felt much as Hannah did. He felt disappointed too. Somehow, it dimmed his image of her that she should be conducting an illicit intrigue. She had looked so gallant this morning fighting her lone battle for those unfortunate wretches. Who could have drawn her heart? The hall light flashed on the face of the young barrister chap who had been with her among the flour bins.
In the drawing-room Sterrin came straight to the captain. ‘I have been looking for you, Captain Saint John. I hear that you sing beautifully.’ And you, he thought, lie as beautifully as you do everything else.
‘You can’t have looked too far,’ he murmured. ‘I too, was outside.’ His glance flickered towards Donal. Before she could answer. Sir Jocelyn came up and led her towards the harp. The title of the piece that he had chosen for her to play was Moore’s ‘Love Thee Dearest’.
The jewels on her fingers flashed as she plucked a defiant ripple from the strings. ‘I’ll play one of the songs that our old Bard taught me.’ The opening line was a mother’s reproach to her daughter. ‘Is there ne’er a man in Ireland to please your discontent?’ Sterrin looked straight at the captain as she sang the reply. ‘There are men enough in Ireland but none at all for me. For I never loved but one young man and he’s beyond the sea.’
Was she trying to convey to him, the captain wondered, that he had misjudged what he had just seen outside? That the young man who parted with her so stealthily and who was looking at her now with such adoration meant nothing to her? He glanced at his host to see how he was taking the song; but there was nothing to be gleaned there. Sir Jocelyn was gazing down at his young wife, his courtesy a walled city about him. The captain felt a thrust of distaste, and then, a sense of relief at the realisation that his duty here would end tomorrow. Evicting women and children, battering down their homes, was not his idea of martial glory. But his gaze returned to the gold-clad figure at the harp, this lovely enigma was perilously near his idea of feminine glory.
On the morrow others were finding excuses for abrupt departures. The atmosphere of the evictions was beginning to pall; the presence of the military; the reproachful eyes of the homeless. Landlords, themselves not over-lenient, sent their servants with messages of polite regret. Unforeseen circumstances, they were all pleading, forced them to cancel their acceptances for the functions, the concerts and plays in the private theatre, the banquets, the balls that had been planned for this elaborate house party. The Times setting the final seal on the general disapproval, ‘Sir Jocelyn Devine,’ it said, ‘has always done things on a massive scale. He maintained his standards in these recent evictions... the affair at Kilkenny,’ it concluded, ‘was not fragrant.’
Sterrin’s heart sank into utter misery when a letter came from Kilsheelin cancelling Lady O’Carroll’s visit. She had been counting the hours until she would meet her mother again.
When the last guest had departed Sterrin was summoned to the silver aviary. Her husband was holding the bird she had damaged. ‘Isn’t it time,’ he said, without looking up from his scrutiny of the bird, ‘that Clooreen was brought here from Kilsheelin?’
‘Naturally, she will come here when she has foaled,’ she replied. ‘That was understood.’
‘In that case there is no further need for her to remain there. I desire you to go to Kilsheelin and see to her transfer yourself.’ He went on stroking the bird as though he were soothing the wound of a living creature. She restrained an urge to knock it out of his hand. It looked so lumpish compared to a live bird captured in one’s grasp. No substance; but warm; and soft with the frantic beat of life. So Clooreen had foaled. She suppressed another impulse. She must not ask him what it was, a filly? a colt? She must show no enthusiasm for anything; for anyone. And what the devil’s father was he up to? He had but to dispatch grooms for the mare. Was it thinking of selling Clooreen that he was? At last he looked up at her. ‘I leave for Dublin next week.’
She made no sign. Her face was masked over with that stillness that had once captured him. No eager questions about the horse. Where was the girl who had chased his carriage down Kilsheelin avenue to thank him for the gift of Clooreen; the beautiful lips panting out words and breaths that blew warmly against his face? ‘On urgent business,’ he added. No question of her accompanying him, though she was free now of her hostess duties. But still she made no comment. He was up to something; something of more significance than the repairing of that shapeless lump of silver in his hand. What matter! She was going to Kilsheelin; and on her own! An unhoped-for joy. She would bring her grandest gowns to divert Mamma. Poor Mamma, who had had to experience the ignominy of having rude comments about Evictions shouted after her carriage.
A week later, on the eve of his departure, Sir Jocelyn suffered another rush of blood to his head. Sterrin, counting the hours till her first meeting with her mamma since her wedding, had to cancel her visit to Kilsheelin. She was compelled to spend long hours in the sick room reading wearisome newspaper reports that he could have got his secretary to read. He kept making her go back over big words that she had mispronounced. One day, when he had been ill a month, she skipped the word ‘unpredictability’.
‘Kindly spell out the word that you have omitted,’ he demanded.
With a tearing rattle she threw the newspaper to the ground. ‘Damn the soul of it!’ she shouted. ‘A body would need to have been sleeping with a school teacher!’ Her head felt strangely light. It seemed to have lost contact with her tongue. ‘Unpre-whatever-the-devil you call it. No lady has any call to use such words. I...’
‘Exactly. I beg you to refrain from such uncouth utterances.’
‘I never read a newspaper,’ she went on, ‘much less a thing called a—a Leading Article.’
‘Surely you read—and hoard—the Theatrical News?’
Had he seen the clippings she had cut out about Young Thomas? She rose abruptly. Once and for all she was going to put an end to the gibing on that subject. Just then the doctor’s voice sounded outside. As he came towards her she dropped a slight curtsey that included the bed and the doctor. ‘If you will excuse me, I am feeling tired.’<
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The doctor peered at her professionally. ‘You have been overtaxing yourself, my Lady, cooped up here in the sickroom for a month.’ He darted a closer look. ‘Or would it be anything else. Hey, my Lady?’
‘Yes, it would.’ In the expectant silence a displaced pillow made a slithering sound as it fell. Sir Jocelyn was working himself upwards. ‘You mean...?’ he began.
‘I mean that I am sickening for small-pox.’ She closed the door on a panic-stricken outcry from the bed. Sir Jocelyn had been above the recent vaccination law. No official or doctor would presume to enforce the filthy, protective virus of small-pox into his sacred, scented body.
As she left the house it still clamoured with his bedside bell; demanding the doctor, protection, immunisation. ‘That will learn them,’ she fumed as she sped through the maze. This twelve months past one dare not show a hint of tiredness, not even after two successive nights’ dancing, without becoming the bridal target for coy innuendo.
The children were not waiting at the usual rendezvous. She continued to walk in the direction that they usually came from until she spied them sitting listlessly outside a cottage. When they saw her, instead of running towards her, as usual, they actually made to move inwards. Sterrin, who had not bargained for walking two Irish miles of rough road in her velvet and satin bootees, was in no mood for wilfulness. She rapped out a summons that brought them wheeling back on the double. The younger one looked at the foot from which her Ladyship had removed the shoe. ‘It’s a foot,’ she gasped, ‘like anyone else’s.’ Sterrin picked two pebbles from the lacy stocking. ‘What did you expect?’ she snapped, rubbing her sore instep.
‘She means, your Nobility,’ said the other, ‘that she thought something grander would come out of boots like them.’ Sterrin had the stocking off now and the speck of blood from thorns and pebbles was not blue, but red like the blood that so frequently coloured their own clayey feet.
‘It would have felt grander, anyway,’ grumbled Sterrin, ‘if you had been where you ought to have been. Why weren’t you?’
They looked at each other then hung their heads. At last she dragged it from them. Their uncle had warned them against her. She was the landlord’s wife. They were not to trust her and her for-God’s-sake-la-de-da charity. There was nothing la-de-da, Sterrin thought angrily, about this long walk that had exhausted her so strangely; and all those baskets of food! The idea!
Their little sister, the sad little voice was saying, had been dispatched to other relatives. They didn’t know where their brother was. Sterrin’s eyes closed wearily as the recital went on. He had been put away from the relatives to whom their uncle had transferred him. ‘...and next week the two of us are going to the workhouse.’ Sterrin sat upright and pulled on her bootee. ‘By the livin’ God you won’t!’ She didn’t know how she was going to stop it, but stop it she would.
She rushed from them after a hug and the contents of her reticule; a few chocolates and little tea biscuits. La-de-da charity was right. Preening herself over an odd basket of food! A sop from the woman whose husband had torn their mother and home from them.
As she emerged from the maze through the little wicket gate, she glimpsed her husband reclining on a long cane chair, all cushioned and rugged, basking in the late autumn sunshine in the fountain court. The small-pox scare apparently had not induced another rush of blood to the head. Still—she wasn’t ready for battle.
She limped wearily around by the kitchen premises. She ignored the curious glances of servants as she walked along the back passage. The store-room door was open. Without thinking she entered. She leaned an arm on a bin either side of her and surveyed the rows that lined the walls. The sight of them gave her a sense of her own futility. Never before, in her rather exalted existence, had life revealed herself as superfluous ‘What good am I? I can strum the harp, sing in Italian—badly, in French a bit better.’ She looked up at a dangling spider. ‘I can’t embroider as finely as you, and mind you,’ she addressed the spider seriously, ‘I embroider better than most, except perhaps Mamma but she...’ a sound at the door stopped her.
Mrs. Ledwidge, the housekeeper, was gaping—there was no other word, her mask of superior servility had slipped—at the spectacle of her haughty Ladyship leaning nonchalantly against a bin of oaten meal; chewing the stuff and talking—right out loud to a big black spider. ‘His Honour, Sir Jocelyn, would like to see you in the fountain court.’ Her gaze fixed itself on Sterrin’s mouth.
To Sterrin’s amazement Sir Jocelyn informed her that he had decided to travel to Dublin that very day, without waiting for lunch. ‘I find,’ he said, ‘that the business that takes me there has been too long postponed.’ There was a measured significance about his words that Sterrin was to recall later. A footman came and gathered the rugs and, instead of taking them to the house, went on through a grille doorway that gave on to the front of the house where a carriage awaited. She realised then that her husband was dressed for travelling. He must have been merely awaiting in the fountain court the preparations for his departure. It was a very sudden decision. She said so aloud.
‘Are you sure that you feel up to the journey?’
‘It is too late now for you to show concern for my health.’ He paused as though to let the statement sink in. ‘Your conduct this morning showed poor consideration for it. I prefer not to discuss it. I have sent for you to impress on you to go immediately to Kilsheelin, not later than tomorrow, and bring Clooreen here. I have arranged for grooms to go and travel back with her.’ A little cloud shadowed the court. Sterrin longed to see Clooreen but somehow the lovely mare belonged in Kilsheelin; as Thuckeen had belonged there. Why this urgency? There were hundreds of horses here.
‘Our own grooms can accompany her from Kilsheelin,’ she replied. ‘She is more accustomed to them.’
‘She must accustom herself to my grooms. Good day, my Lady.’
Somehow, it suddenly seemed utterly unnatural to part from someone going on a journey, someone part of one’s family, without a gesture of farewell. She would have flung her arms around Papa; she always embraced Cousin Maurice; she even kissed Big John whenever she went away from Kilsheelin. In fact, she recalled, she used to kiss Sir Jocelyn when he would drive off from Kilsheelin in their bethrothal days. She was clearing her throat to get out ‘God-carry-you-safely’ when he turned again.
‘You don’t seem to be aware that your face needs washing.There is meal on your mouth.’
She reached down to her little handkerchief pocket then stopped. She’d be damned if she was going to obey orders to wipe her mouth as though she were a grubby child. She shot out her under lip and blew upwards in the old careless way. He remembered how she had done that when she came panting and blowing after his carriage to thank him for Clooreen, blowing the moist curls from the lovely white forehead. The sight of the meal irritated him. It outlined the lovely pouting curve of her upper lip. He was ashamed of the urge, raw as the meal itself, to kiss away the clinging particles. She turned from him with her kissing mouth that still quivered in debate over a last-minute farewell salute and then his final words hardened its indecision.
‘You will refrain from tampering with the domestic stores for your misplaced acts of charity. My staff has its orders.’ He went through to the waiting carriage.
Sterrin strode determinedly down through the green baize door to the bin room. It was locked.
‘Does your Ladyship desire anything?’ It was Mrs. Ledwidge.
Sterrin repressed a desire to smack this smug face that seemed to materialise out of a void so often of late; then her mind recoiled from the unseemliness of such intensity towards a servant. What is coming over me? Quietly, she requested the housekeeper to unlock the door.
The housekeeper reared like a viper then as suddenly wilted. Without altering its expression the face in front of her seemed suddenly to have unsheathed the authority of centuries. She took the key from her belt and opened the door for her mistress.
I’m b
ehaving like a child, Sterrin thought, when she was alone among the bins; coming here for defiance! I want nothing. Or did she? She put a handful of meal in her mouth and felt better. It seemed to satisfy some moist gnawing within her. How pimply those children had become! She took another handful and chewed and ruminated like a young heifer; and out of her rumination she reached a decision about the children. Tomorrow she was going to Kilsheelin. She would take them with her. It was as simple as that. Why hadn’t she thought of it before. Kilsheelin solved all her problems. Had she not taken a father and his five children into the castle when their potatoes had blackened at the start of the famine? And there was more room there now; no teeming servants, Johnny-the-buckets was a field worker, Mickey-the-turf had gone to America. The knife boy was gone. She sped up the stairs on the heels of her resolution. For the first time in her remembered life she had listed Young Thomas with the other garçonnerie of the kitchen; without a distinguishing thought; without his name that had been engraved on every ridge of her mind.
She went from room to room, taking a child’s delight in having all their wonders to herself; thrilled for the first time at the realisation that she was mistress of all this. The cavernous wardrobes in her husband’s dressing-room were like Aladdin’s cave. Blue shafts of light blazed from the jewels that formed the buttons on his waistcoats. In his bedroom she spied a pair of gold heels peeping out from the satin fold of the bed where they touched the floor.
As she picked them up a musical sound throbbed through her body like a smitten harp. Hannah came running at the strange sound.
‘They are musical shoes,’ Sterrin told her. ‘We saw a dancer in Paris performing in a pair.’ As she tried them on, it occurred to her that the valet must have received very sudden orders for packing to have left them lying about so carelessly.
Hannah watched entranced as her young mistress, her skirts held high over her long slim legs, beat out a jig to the music of the shoes. It was like the grand days long ago when Miss Sterrin and Young Thomas used to dance jigs in the kitchen to the music of Paddy-the-rat’s fiddle. Poor Paddy-the-rat. God rest his soul. He’d drop dead in his grave if he were to see music coming out of a pair of feet!
The Big Wind Page 61