The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  Donal Keating, following in the phaeton, called out something about bail and rode out ahead. Later, in the blockage of a drove of cattle, the strange procession caught up on him; scarlet soldiers with sabres; bottle-green police with carbines; in the midst the veiled horsewoman, proud, straight-backed. The profile beneath the veil made him think of a young eagle in a close-meshed cage. He could have touched her, they were so close in the little rough road but he called out again about getting bail. She nodded silently. He could see a swallowing in her throat that made him lash the horse and blink the sudden moisture from his eyes.

  Ryan Ha-Lad rode a naked donkey, no saddle or reins, across field and dyke to Kilsheelin Castle. When he gave the news it was like the night of the Sir’s assassination. The household was stunned with horror. Then the sound of wailing, Hannah’s and Mrs. Stacey’s, reached Lady O’Carroll before the news itself; and like on that terrible night it was Margaret who took control. She calmed the others and went with Dominic to the gun room.

  ‘Go instead to Mr. Hoey,’ she urged. ‘It is a solicitor she needs, not a gun.’

  But Dominic, white-faced and grim as never before, went undeterred.

  It was Mike O’Driscoll who rode like the heels of hell for Patrick Hoey, the family solicitor. Big John had gone quietly to his room, lifted a loose floorboard, taken out a brass-bound box, then ridden off in the wake of Ryan Ha-Lad’s little donkey.

  People said that it was like a horse fair or—God between us and all harm—a sudden illness and the friends and relatives dashing to the bedside. There seemed to be a continuous thunder of hooves up the avenue of the house of the magistrate who was holding the Summary Court. News of the arrest had flown like chaff in a high wind. Ryan Ha-Lad, short-cutting through Major Darby’s former estate, gasped it out to a workman. On the fastest horse in his stable Dominic Landy, the ex-convict owner, came galloping to the rescue of the woman who had succoured his mother. He tossed gold in front of the magistrate. ‘Is that enough?’ Dominic Landy demanded and without waiting for an answer tossed down more. On his heels came dapper little James de Guider, looking, at close quarters, not so dapper, and holding a little red money bag, not quarter full, in front of him like a child holding a bag of sweets. Pathetically aware of its inadequacy he did not say, ‘Is this enough?’ he merely said, ‘Will this help?’ Sterrin was touched to the heart.

  And then Big John. The towering coachman looked with stern disapproval at the sacrilegious policeman, ignored the magistrate and laid his offering before his mistress.

  ‘Your Ladyship, I have brought the bail money. There is thirty-eight pounds and eighteen shillings here.’ Poor Big John. His savings since the famine!

  Sir Dominic strode into the makeshift courtroom like an avenging, mudspattered god. Hand over holster, he demanded his sister’s liberty; he demanded satisfaction. He threatened the law on them; the Crown. He was Sir Dominic of the O’Carrolls. Release my Lady, his sister! The sub-inspector stepped forward ominously. It was looking as if there was going to be another arrest when Dr. Greyson-Quigley arrived in the midst of the outburst. He described and ridiculed the police officer’s obstruction charge. Far from Lady Devine obstructing the law, she herself was obstructed in an act of humanity.

  The magistrate had been feeling mildly piqued at not being able to get a squint behind that thick veil she was wearing, a fact which Sterrin had not failed to observe, and his gout was giving him hell. When, during the doctor’s recital, his glances in the prisoner’s direction altered, Sterrin availed of the change to raise her veil sufficiently to allow of a delicate dab at her nostril and to cause the magistrate to reflect that if the rest of her face matched up to that mouth it must be a very beautiful one indeed.

  He rounded on the officer who had brought him on gouty foot from his bed of pain and icily informed him that it was the primary duty of the police to protect life, and that instead of assisting this charitable lady in her great act of mercy he had actually obstructed; therefore, and in view of all the facts he would now, with deep apologies for the distress and humiliation inflicted upon Lady Devine, dismiss the case and rule that the bail money of one hundred pounds be returned. He lifted a cheque in the direction of a young gentleman, who stepped from the shadow of a tall policeman and, for the first time, the runners in the ransom race became aware of Donal Keating.

  Outside, afterwards, Sir Dominic’s tone was cool and distant as he offered his thanks to Donal.

  ‘Of course, we couldn’t have accepted...’

  ‘We could and we did,’ said Sterrin crisply. ‘What did you expect me to do? Go to prison comforted by the fact that you had got yourself arrested, too? Charging in with a gun. You might at least have brought along a batch of bullocks and some sheep. Do you not think me worth as much as a few rubbers of whist?’

  She could afford to rag him now that he was safe but her heart had contracted with dread at the sight of him coming in all doughty and feudal. She kissed him.

  ‘Thank you, you darling, gallant thing.’ Her voice felt a bit gravelly with tears. ‘What would I have done if they had arrested you? What would Mamma have? I’m not worth risking your safety.’ Before he could say anything she turned to Donal. ‘And thank you, Donal,’ she said, offering her hand. ‘I can never thank you enough.’

  Lady O’Carroll stood at the oratory window like one of its statues. Dread had turned her heart to stone. Every few minutes she would go and kneel at the altar but she could not keep up any sustained prayer. What were they doing to Sterrin—a delicately nurtured lady in the hands of rough police and military? And what would they do to Dominic? Dominic, her darling. Would they execute him if he used that gun?

  The rain had stopped and the fragrance of the flowers blew towards her with kindness and a bird murmured sympathetically in the trees. Was that a hoof beat? No, ’twas her imagination. Her children would never come back here again; back to the castle for which Sterrin had risked her beauty and her life. What would Roderick say? His daughter—proud, lovely—arrested like a thief. Was that a hoof beat? There was no doubt about it this time; a great, urgent clattering of many hooves. Ah, Sacrée Vierge, give me strength for what I must hear.

  In through the gate rode Sterrin; beside her rode a strange young gentleman and behind—Oh, God be praised! Dominic. A whole cavalcade followed and then something like a dray with someone lying on it and children’s heads bobbing, and alongside the man riding the donkey again, the man who had brought the news of Sterrin’s arrest.

  Margaret, skimming down the stairs, absorbing things in that sentient way of hers, without concrete thought, sensed that the callers in the dray cart and its outrider, had come to stay. Another family to take up residence in the fever hut like the one that Sterrin had installed there in the famine.

  In the blessed relief of reunion, Lady O’Carroll did not realise till later that the farmerish-looking man she had received in her drawing-room and fed in her dining-room, one of her daughter’s would-be saviours, was the convict she had seen arrested for raiding the grain carts and whose mother she had fed in the stirabout line in the stable yard. The world was upside down indeed! The genteel daughters of the former owner of this man’s mansion were doing discreet home laundry in England. Genteel washerwomen! But did Sterrin really need to have him here as a guest? After all, he was only repaying a debt. Roderick had gone to great extremes to save him from prison and deportation. But Sterrin was a law unto herself. And then Margaret stiffened to cold anger when she realised the identity of the handsome young gentleman she had been chatting to so graciously and thanking so warmly for having put up the bail money, was none other than one of those crude, criminal Keatings, who had once fired into the castle and just missed killing her.

  Under cover she scrutinised him. Frank, open. Nothing murderous there; nothing crude; gentle eyes; but they were devouring Sterrin. The presumption! But it was blood treachery to have brought him here. What was she thinking now, in face of that ardent gaze? There was no knowi
ng behind that dreadful veil. And then Lady O’Carroll realised that it was not a dreadful veil. It was beautiful. Sterrin might protest that she was no longer interested in her appearance, but there was interest indicated in the choosing of that veil and, hein, it was intriguing. It was drawing all the men’s eyes to the mystery that lay behind.

  When her excited guests had departed, Margaret went out to where the fever hut lay in the lee of a low hill out of sight of the castle. Windows had been added to the once miniature fortress designed to lock contagion away from the healthy. Mrs. Ryan Ha-Lad lay in the bed near a bright fire and the children played happily in and out between the two apartments, thrilled to be within the safety of not just four sturdy walls, but eight—for the hut, as big as their own house, was octagonal.

  Mrs. Ryan Ha-Lad’s outpourings of gratitude and praise for Lady Devine were so fervent that, Margaret reflected, anyone might think that Sterrin had delivered the child. Mrs. Ryan Ha-Lad, like most women basking in the aftermath of a satisfactorily concluded labour, went on to dwell on the details. Lady O’Carroll felt one of her swayings coming on. She reeled. Sterrin had delivered the child.

  She hurried to Sterrin’s room. As Sterrin listened to her mother she felt a growing... growing sensation of the one she had felt on the morning that she had witnessed Eileen Morton’s abasement. ‘I thought,’ concluded her mamma, ‘you had merely helped them to shelter, and secured a doctor, but—to take part—to witness. You! A young lady of your background! You poor child, it must have been hideous for you.’

  ‘It was a privilege.’ Sterrin was sitting in a low chair near the fire, her back to the dressing-table mirror. A small ornamental mirror that used to stand on the mantelpiece had been removed. Anything that could reflect her face had been removed. Her hair was down and she was holding a strip of linen to either side of her face. It irritated Margaret mildly the way Sterrin shook the hair down over her face whenever she entered her bedroom. She, her mamma, who had tended to all her childhood’s ailments, all the tenants’ too, for that matter. Including skin ailments!

  ‘The only “hideous” thing about the experience was that I made a silly fool of myself. I expressed something like disgust to the doctor because Mrs. Ha-Lad mentioned something about a cord. I thought it was some crudeness of dress.’

  ‘What else could you be expected to think? Girls like you—’

  ‘Girls like me, I suppose, don’t come into the world attached to cord; or are they attached to something silken? Like this?’ She flicked the braid on the satin cushion. ‘Girls like me,’ she went on, ‘are only fit to be pushed blindfolded into marriage and find out all the natural things, or should I say the “hideous” things—in a hideous way—’ Her mother’s quick intake of breath halted her for a moment.

  What awful experiences must this child have gone through to make her speak with such bitterness. It was not today’s terrible ordeal; nor her maiming, nor her being disinherited.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mamma,’ Sterrin went on. ‘But my values have changed. I’ve been through more in the past two years than any nice girl would have to endure in ten long lifetimes. I’ve no more time for sham dressed up as gentility. The real things in life, the raw things, have been covered in stupid mystery. Mrs. Ha-Lad has known more happiness than ever I have. You should have seen Ryan Ha-Lad crying when she moaned in her labour. He was more concerned about his wife than about the loss of his house. He cried again when he took the new baby in his arms, cried for joy.’

  ‘But, darling, Hannah told me that Sir Jocelyn was frantic with concern when—when you had the mishap.’

  ‘He was frantic for the fate of the inheritance—savagely so.’

  Lady O’Carroll wondered was she going to hear the true facts at last. She could readily credit the savagery part. She would never forget the cold thin anger he had displayed the time that actor, who had been in service here, had presumed into Sterrin’s bedroom. Vraiment! The anger, partly justified, had been terrifying to regard.

  But Sterrin sat silent, her elbows on her knees, her hands holding the pieces of linen to her cheeks. Margaret tiptoed to her and kissed the top of her head. ‘Would you let me see your poor face?’ Sterrin twisted her head further away.

  ‘When you saw it that first time I saw your face, and I saw Cousin Maurice’s and I saw Mrs. Stacey making the sign of the cross.’ There was no reaching this Sterrin. Her mother left another kiss on the bent head.

  ‘You have had a dreadful experience today. Dieu, when I think of it!’

  ‘Did you—did you collapse, Mamma?’

  It was Margaret’s turn for hurt. ‘There are times, Sterrin, when I, too, manage to face up to things.’

  Sterrin dropped the ointment-smeared linen. ‘Oh, Mamma, I did not mean it like that. Too well I know how you can stand up to things. It was the memory of the way you held Papa in your arms when he was shot and—and did whatever had to be done; no hysteria; no panic; and all those other times. The horrible sights out there in the stirabout line and the way you carried that giant’s mother all the way to the soup kitchen. It was your example, I say, that kept me from running away or doing something dreadful when—when.’ She broke off, fearful of having said too much. She had never touched so close to the actual moment of her mother’s tragedy. But this moment that was between them was sane and close as never before. ‘It was a grim coincidence,’ she spoke into the flames, her face in her hands again, her hair hanging forward, ‘both of us, mother and daughter, both to know our husbands assassinated; but you, of course, lost more.’ Margaret was touched to a yearning pity. But you, of course lost more. The naive little sentence dismissed wealth, power and glamour compared to the loss of love. She stooped low and kissed a little white patch of forehead that showed between the drapes of hair. ‘Drink your tilleul, my darling. It will make you sleep.’

  She paused in the opening of the door. ‘Darling, you spoke of being “pushed blindfolded into marriage”. Have you forgotten that I had completely withdrawn from the notion of your marriage. There was no one more surprised than I when you told me that you had given Sir Jocelyn your consent.’

  ‘The Keatings were on the point of buying the castle. That justified anything; marriage or murder.’

  ‘And yet you could bring one of them here today? Under this roof? Sterrin, my dear, you never cease to amaze me.’

  *

  Lady O’Carroll would have been further amazed late next night had she seen Sterrin waiting in the Sir’s Road for the horse that Big John was leading with cloth-muffled hooves across the cobbled yard.

  ‘You know what you are doing, your Ladyship?’ His voice was an anxious whisper. Her voice whispered back.

  ‘This is something that has been laid upon me by my conscience.’

  More than an hour and a half later she stood in the blacksmith’s forge and gave the same answer to the same question. The blacksmith then turned to a man standing in the shadow. ‘It’s only for a minute that we’ll be turning you out, Mr. Keating. Sure you know that yourself.’ Donal, in the knowledge that no third person must be present, moved out without a word.

  Sterrin, standing in the dark red gloam of the forge, her right hand upraised, felt a momentary dread. It was like being part of some cabalistic rite held in some sinister, underground cave. Fortunately for her purpose, the dimness cloaked her wavering and Denis marvelled to himself at the resolute quality in her low-pitched voice as she repeated after him—‘In the presence of God, I, Sterrin Mary O’Carroll...’ To the last unrelenting word of the Fenian oath, she never faltered, as some that he would have thought more intrepid might have done. ‘You are the fifty-first this night that I have given the oath to. The other fifty were of the Highland regiment widin’ in the town. There’s more than half the regiment with us. Aye,’ he said at her exclamation, ‘ten minutes ago I couldn’t have told you that.’

  Donal had come back. ‘Was there any great need to bind Lady Devine to an oath? O’Donovan Rossa, our greatest leader in the
movement, has no oath.’

  Denis bent over the furnace to put a kettle on for tea. He put Sterrin in mind of Big John; so utterly dependable, and that same unpretentious dignity that commanded one’s respect. He looked up with a smile, ‘I suppose they think the ladies are so tender that their hearts would need to be spancelled to their heads by an oath or they might let it run away with them.’

  A teapot stood on a stone shelf and beside it a white mug; ostensibly his own, for Sterrin noticed, when he moved a slab in the wall, that there were other white mugs there. In readiness for grim tea parties? For grim men coming by night across Ireland; across the Atlantic? Denis started to pour then suddenly stopped and with a ‘where’s my manners’ hurried out.

  Donal moved over to Sterrin. ‘Do you have to do this?’ he whispered. ‘Isn’t it sufficient for someone like you to—well, exist?’ It was something, he realised, to be said looking into a woman’s eyes. In this red darkness that was like the blood-tinted darkness behind closed eyelids, it sounded banal. Even that damned veil couldn’t conceal her impatience. It came seeping through the mesh.

  She turned towards his whisper. ‘Is that a gibe or a compliment? No, forgive me. I shouldn’t say such a thing to you after what you did for me when they arrested me. But no one knows better than you why I must do this.’

  He knew that she was alluding to the six hundred evicted from her husband’s land and to the fate of the little hunted boy. As she gazed into the glowing furnace she spoke of the famine horrors and he saw through her eyes the macabre scenes that had shadowed her childhood.

  ‘All these things have happened because people like me—our class—have been content just to exist. Most of them have been living on their tenants like warm, well-fed fleas in a skinny dog’s coat. Papa used to say that in other countries it was the aristocrats who used to lead their people against oppression. Here the aristocrats hold aloof. That’s why all our rebellions have failed and—’