‘You don’t have to tell me. I might have known. They are all coming to me; young relatives I haven’t seen since they were in smocks and pinafores; ones I’ve never seen. You’ve come to join in my regiment.’
Thomas had forgotten all about the war.
Long into the night the two men sat traversing the centuries that had diffused the blood stream stemming from their joint ancestor; the one who had been informed against and disinherited by his youngest son.
‘And now,’ smiled Marcus O’Carroll, ‘it is my turn to be disinherited. I mean from my place on the tree. You see, we had taken it for granted that it was the eldest son, the disinherited heir, who had come over here and started this branch.’
Thomas’s documents had revealed that there were four sons. The two middle ones had gone to the American colonies.
‘Where did the eldest go?’ asked Marcus.
‘Nowhere. He became a rapparee.’
‘A what?’
Thomas explained that the rapparees were bands of young men belonging to dispossessed families. They clung doggedly to the vicinity of their old homes; hid in bogs and mountains and made plundering raids on the usurpers. They were the forerunners of the tories and the Whiteboys.
‘Later,’ resumed Thomas, ‘he settled in to the humble home where his father had ended his days. He married the beautiful daughter of his father’s foster-brother but could not adapt himself to the crude life of a farmer. He would drink from nothing but the silver cups given to his father by the Empress Maria Theresa, but was incapable of earning anything to maintain their standards. Eventually he was given a position as Collector of Hearths and Window Tax and lived the life of Reilly, dining at all the big mansions where there were plenty of windows and hearths and often scorning to collect the tax because the hosts were so hospitable. But his grandson, Thomas O’Carroll—that Thomas O’Carroll,’ Thomas nodded towards the document, ‘wasn’t content to live on the filmy claims of past grandeur. He worked his farm industriously until two days before I was born. But it was the time of the Tithe War, when the Catholics started to resist paying Tithes and Cess for the support of the Protestant clergy and the maintenance of their churches. My father was shot at his door for his refusal to pay. My mother died while journeying to Kilsheelin Castle with the papers of my identity and ancestry.’ He went on to explain how the papers came to be destroyed the night of the Big Wind.
Suddenly, Young Thomas was Cousin Thomas. Marcus O’Carroll introduced him to friends and neighbours all over the county as our ‘cousin’. When gracious ladies floated across their drawing-rooms to greet him as Cousin Thomas, he experienced a feeling of unreality. Any moment he would wake up and someone would order Thomas to replenish the turf chests by the drawing-room fireside. ‘Cousin Thomas, I want you to meet—’ ‘Young Thomas, I want you to empty the ashes. Hurry up with them knives. Young Thomas, or I’ll leather your backside!’
But Thomas didn’t wake up. The wonderful reality of his visit stretched from days to weeks and from weeks to months. It was more than three months after he had started out on the visit when he called on his way back to the firm of solicitors where Kitty’s brother, Fintan, was a junior partner. Fintan, he was told, was at the harbour, meeting an immigrant boat. He was representing one of the committees that looked after the welfare of disembarking emigrants. Thomas himself, under the direction of John Holohan, had often helped at Castle Garden when his engagements permitted. But today he had no time for benevolence. He was impatient at having to trail like this after his solicitor. He watched the white-faced passengers disembarking. And the efforts of zealous social workers to obstruct the actions of unscrupulous employment agents and white slave emissaries. But there was no one to obstruct the Recruiting Officer. He was there, resplendent in his best uniform, to dazzle the hunted outcasts of Irish evictions. A fine life awaited them in the American Army! Grand uniform, good food. As soon as this war was over, the American Army would be coming over to fight for Ireland’s freedom! Then no more evictions. How old are you? Most of them didn’t know. Some had been born in the famine. No one had thought to register their births. How old were you the night of the Big Wind. Oh, hazily, I was breeched that year! I was born in Black ’47! I believe I was born the day-twelve-months after the Big Wind. The Big Wind was a date on history’s calendar. The satisfactory thing, thought Thomas, was that they had been born, born to flee across the ocean from the landlord’s bailiff, straight into the arms of the Recruiting Officer!
He finally sighted Fintan, resplendent in a blue officer’s uniform. Now Thomas knew why there had been such a delay with his citizenship papers. Fintan had been too busy getting an officer’s commission to attend to Thomas’s naturalisation. To add insult to injury, he seemed to think it unreasonable of Thomas to be so annoyed about it.
‘Can’t you get it rushed through for me now?’
But Fintan would be with the 69th. One of the older men at the office would see to the matter. ‘All the younger ones have joined up.’
Thomas thought he detected in the statement a hint of reproach to himself. Over his shoulder Fintan called, ‘I may see you at the wedding if I can wangle leave.’
‘Whose wedding?’
‘Norisheen’s. She made a sudden decision when her beau joined up.’
*
Thomas was amazed to find Hennessey’s big parlour filled with military men. All the young men he had met here, when he had come in response to Kitty’s news about his foster-mother, were in blue uniform. There had been a Station planned for the next day and Norisheen had decided to avail of the presence of a priest in the house to rush forward a marriage that she had previously tended to postpone. Other young couples in the room had, likewise, decided to avail of the Station function.
Towering above the wedding guests was Private John Holohan. The millionaire who could procure commissions for others would not hear of one for himself. Thomas made his way towards Kitty, Dorene clinging to his arm. Kitty seemed preoccupied and not inclined to indulge him in his annoyance with her brother, Fintan, over the papers. John Holohan, glass in hand, broke into ‘The Wedding at Ballyporeen’—the song he had sung at the platform dance the afternoon of the blight. Then, in a voice as booming as his singing, he asked Thomas why had he not joined up under the command of Thomas Francis Meagher, the idol of his youth. Meagher of the Sword.
Thomas explained that he was to play in New York in two nights. ‘Anyway, I haven’t got my citizenship, thanks to Fintan.’
‘You don’t need citizenship,’ said Mark Hennessey.
‘I know,’ said Thomas crisply. ‘I’ve seen Ireland’s evicted citizens, her surplus stock, being picked off the ships like so much fodder.’
‘What’s come over you, Thomas?’ said Mark. Kitty hurried over and handed Thomas a letter.
‘It came this morning,’ she said.
It was from his new-found kinsman, Marcus O’Carroll. ‘...I am here at the head of my regiment,’ he wrote. ‘We are all in fine fettle and spirit with no doubt whatever about the outcome of this conflict. The spirit of our ancestor—yours and mine—who fought with Washington will not be found lacking—’
‘I met Tim Lonergan at the barracks,’ said John. ‘You remember Tim Lonergan of Golden Meadows?’
Thomas nodded and tried to resume the letter.
‘I thought he’d be an officer an’ he college bred,’ John went on. ‘But, of course, Thomas, if you decide to fight you’d get a commission in the 69th.’
Thomas looked up from the letter and around at the watching and listening faces. He felt strangely rasped. What right had they to take him for granted? As one of themselves. He wasn’t one of them. His oneness was with the writer of this letter. ‘If I decide to fight,’ he said, ‘I shall not fight with the 69th.’
‘You’d renege on Meagher of the Sword?’ exclaimed Mark.
‘And what regiment have you got in mind?’ asked John.
Thomas looked down at the letter. ‘I am he
re at the head of my regiment...’ The words stared up at him. He looked back at John Holohan.
‘If I decide to fight,’ he repeated slowly, ‘I shall fight with the South.’
The room went silent. Small sounds took over; Dorene’s little intake of breath, the crackling of the fire logs. Then the crash of a giant fist on the table and a bellow from the millionaire private. He accused Thomas of treachery to the country of his adoption.
‘It hasn’t adopted me yet.’
‘It gave you success—wealth.’
‘My talent gave me success. My fortune was struck in Australia.’
‘It multiplied it. You ingrate!’
Thomas was tossing back frivolous arguments because John wanted arguments, explanations. Mark, too. All of them. And he couldn’t give them the true reason, that was based on the simplest most elemental emotion. That he was following the trail of his kind. He could not explain to them that as a child, aye and as a growing gossoon, he could not pass a cabin where children sat with parents around a hearth or table without wanting to crawl in amongst them on his belly like a little stray terrier, and plead to be let stay with them. He could not explain to these angry, smug men, who were assured in the consciousness of an identity set in ancestry, what the bleak outsideness of his nameless existence had been. What it meant to him now to find people who had the same blood as his in their veins; who had taken him to themselves and called him kin. Their cause was his cause.
Soon after dawn, Thomas, from his window, saw the priest arrive; and then the blue-bonneted brides, for all the world like the Shrovetide brides whose Masses he used to serve long ago. On a sudden, he strode across the corridor to Mark and Kitty’s bedroom door.
‘Mark!’ he called.
There was silence. ‘Mark,’ he repeated.
Kitty opened the door slightly. ‘I’m not quite dressed, Thomas. I’ve been up half the night.’
‘It is Mark I want.’
‘He’s asleep Thomas.’
‘He is not. I heard him moving. Mark!’ he called over her head. ‘I want you to do me a slight favour, act as my Best Man, then Dorene and I will go away—’
Mark came and stood behind Kitty. ‘There can be nothing between us.’ He made to close the door. Thomas pushed it back. ‘There need be nothing more after this.’
A girl came up the stairs towards the door, calling Kitty. Thomas murmured something quickly. Mark shook his head and closed the door in his face. Thomas heard the key turn.
He stood there for a stunned moment, then turned and went slowly down the stairs. Young men were queuing on one knee outside a room for Confession. They looked up then resumed their preparations.
Kitty caught up on him outside the hall door. ‘Where are you going, Thomas?’
He looked at her without replying, his face livid, nostrils flaring. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. And then collecting himself, ‘I’m going to make arrangements to take Dorene away—I can’t leave her here.’
‘You can, Thomas. You can! Where would you take her to now?’
‘Kitty, my plans are all upset. I can’t come back here again. I’ll send you an address in a couple of days. Could you let one of the girls take Dorene to me?’
‘I’ll take her to you myself, Thomas.’ She threw her arms about him, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘Oh, Thomas, I’ve read that there is no war so bitter as the war of brothers. I never thought such a state should come to pass between us!’ She watched him go and remembered watching him another time as he walked away from their cottage after bringing them food and cheer in the famine desolation. He had looked back and called something to them in Latin from the Mass. And he had called it to them again when he had watched the emigrant ship taking them to America; taking them away from him. She said the words after him now. ‘Sursum corda.’ Thomas stopped. She saw the tenseness of his face soften into the old smile. He raised his soft hat and the heart inside him responded to the words she had given him back.
‘Sursum corda!’ Lift up your hearts!
53
People in the street were pointing in the direction of the Templetown Assembly Rooms. A flag was being slowly hoisted over its roof. Soon a furious pair of elbows was flaying through the gathering crowd and the Scout was demanding newses right and left.
‘Who won?’ he clamoured, as the Stars and Stripes ballooned out to their fullest to proclaim the first great battle of the American Civil War.
It was with grief that he heard that the Confederates had won at Bull Run, because his son was with the 69th, under Captain Thomas Francis Meagher. ‘Why wasn’t I told?’ he demanded fiercely. But soon he was told without seeking. A Canadian ship arrived at an Irish port three days later with details of the battle of Fredericksburg where more than 1,200 of Meagher’s Irish Brigade had perished. The Scout’s son was among them. He groped in his tails for his handkerchief to mop his streaming eyes. ‘He has paid his debt to America,’ he said.
Lady O’Carroll and Sterrin came to call on him. There was an air of comfort in the little house, due to the money that had been sent so regularly by the lad whose body lay buried so far away. Sterrin was startled to glimpse in the room beyond the kitchen the symbols of a wake. A bed was covered with the finest white linen and draped with black crepe. A candle burned at its four corners and women keened and prayed about it though it held only a soldier’s badge and rosary beads.
‘These are his earthly remains,’ said the Scout, indicating the beads and badge. ‘It was a kind thought on the part of young Mark Hennessey, to send them to me. Your Ladyship will remember young Mark?’ Sterrin nodded. Big John, another relative, had told her that Mark had won his officer’s sword and shoulder badges on the battlefield.
‘It is a most compressive day, your Ladyship,’ said the Scout and Sterrin was glad that the presence of a body was not added to the ‘compressiveness’ of the wake.
‘It was such a day as this that the Reverend Mr. Sealy Debenham, the Protestant minister, God rest him, carried me all the way from here to the hospital in his arms, as though I were a baby and he a lad of sixteen years. The poor Vicar was dead in a week with the famine fever he caught from me and I walked out of the quarry where I had been left to die, cured.’
He bowed them to the door of their carriage like a grandee. ‘It was gracious of you, Lady Sterrin, to step out of your own sorrow to visit me in mine. Have they apprehended the pulpit yet?’
‘Pulpit?’ Sterrin had almost forgotten the Scout’s misplaced pedantry. Before she solved his question he looked up at the sky.
‘Oh, the culprit.’ She shook her head.
‘Why, I wonder, was my boy spared that untimely death under his native sky only to meet one as untimely beneath a foreign sky? Why? But there’s no use in askin’ life a question beforehand. A body has to live it first and find the answer later; too late, maybe.’
The Scout’s profundities found an echo in Sterrin’s mind as she drove out of the lane. Too frequently did she ask herself why, when she reflected upon the useless sacrifice of her marriage. She had benefited no one. She felt like telling the Scout that you don’t find the answer even after you have lived your inexplicable experiences.
Two dashing-looking officers walked past while the carriage was halted outside a shop. She heard one of them say. ‘Which of them is the young widow?’ She was dressed in the same black drapes as her mother. She was the identical height. Even the distinction of being a trifle slimmer was denied her by all the cloustering drapes and weeds.
‘I might as well be forty instead of twenty-two,’ she thought and, forgetting her scars, flung the veils right back over her crepe bonnet. They slowed almost to a standstill. It had been intriguing to speculate upon what lay behind the dark screen of dual widowhood; their first impression was of vivid beauty and then they stared—crudely. Gradually, through her remoteness and her weeds, Lady O’Carroll became aware of the scrutiny of two strange military gentlemen on the sidewalk. Behind her crepe barriers she frown
ed with the effort of trying to recall if they were old acquaintances. But instinct rushed over the bogging fences of memory and reassured her that no gentleman of her acquaintance would think of staring at her that way. A sound beside her drew her eyes to the spectacle of her daughter’s unveiled face. ‘Sterrin!’ she gasped. ‘Cover your face immediately!’
Sterrin drew down the veil and turned her head towards the window beside her. They drove out of the town in silence. About two miles outside, Lady O’Carroll turned suddenly at the sound of a sob.
‘Why, Sterrin, darling!’
Sterrin was quivering from head to foot. She pulled angrily away from her mother.
‘How could you be so cruel,’ she sobbed, ‘to order me like that to cover my face. I—I had forgotten when I raised my veil that I look like a monster.’
Her mother was astonished. ‘Sterrin, I never dreamed of your poor face. I was thinking of the impropriety of a widow unveiling in public before she is at least two years bereaved—’
‘I’ve never been even two minutes bereaved,’ Sterrin said.
Cousin Maurice was waiting for them at the castle. Sterrin had come to associate the visits of her cousin with the mortgage or the probable sale of Kilsheelin. With funerals too. Papa’s, and Jocelyn’s and, as far as she was concerned, her own wedding had been a funeral to justify a visit. She was sure that this time it must be the mortgage.
Dominic thought the same when he returned home after dinner with Lord Cullen and Captain Fitzharding-Smith. Dominic shouldered off the suggestion that he should join Cousin Maurice in the library to discuss business.
‘I mustn’t neglect my guests. Forget business, Cousin Maurice, and join us in a rubber.’
‘Well, read that first,’ said his cousin, handing him an official-looking document.
Dominic whistled. ‘As bad as that! It’s all Sterrin’s fault,’ he said childishly.
‘Your sentiments do you no credit, Dominic. Your sister has done her part. God! When I think of that child’s face when she returned here.’
The Big Wind Page 65