The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  ‘This one won’t!’ His voice cut through like a blade. Her revelations made him feel that he had scarcely skimmed the surface of life. ‘Look,’ he pleaded, ‘when I spoke of you—just existing—I meant that it was enough that you should add grace to the lives of others, that—oh hang it, I was alluding to your beauty. It—’

  ‘Beauty!’ He recoiled from the savagery in her voice. He watched her hands tear at the fastenings of her veil, then just as suddenly they fell limply to her knees. Vanity was stronger than bitterness. Anyway, she reflected, it is too dark here to let him have the full blast of what had caused Mrs. Stacey to make a sign of the cross. He watched the deliberate way she unbuttoned her glove. ‘Look,’ she reached him her bare hand. ‘My face is like that mark there.’ Since the morning when she had snubbed him he had caught a wisp of rumour that she avoided people because of some disfigurement incurred through saving her maid from the fire; but all he could see now was a shapely whiteness.

  He held the soft hand in his and felt the quiver of her misery. Suddenly he stooped and she felt his lips on her palm and then on every finger. Nothing Frenchified, a throbbing caress that sent an answering throb through all her being. She wanted to throw herself forward and feel his young arms about her body and his warm questing lips upon her own. Then there was a clink of china.

  The blacksmith moved forward. ‘This is more becoming to you, my Lady,’ he said as though he had never seen her draw her hand from the clasp of Mr. Keating. She gripped the little cup. Its gold rim glinted in the glow. To regain control she focused on its hand-painted flowers. ‘Pansies for remembrance,’ she murmured.

  The words, a stop-gap, drifted into silence then suddenly they rebounded; impelling her to remember. She knew now who Denis, busy at the furnace with kettle and teapot, reminded her of. Not Big John at all! Those wide shoulders, lissom and straight! Poor Big John’s were bunched from that terrible accident on the night of the Big Wind. The blacksmith looked up and took the cup from her to fill it and the sudden blue flash of his eyes recalled eyes that were bluer still. The fantasy persisted in the play of flames upon his crisp dark hair; lending a suggestion of moving curls, shining and jet black! The emotions aroused by Donal’s kiss went surging through her veins, clamouring for someone who was not Donal. She was no longer a sworn soldier of the Irish Republican Sisterhood. She was all woman; craving for the one man in all the world whom she could ever love!

  When the tea was finished Denis put the cup away in the secret place; giving it dark purpose; making her one with it. But all the way home the longing for lost beauty that was ensorcelled to lost love stayed with her; unconscious of the love that rode and flowed beside her.

  The first beam of sun was starting to stretch with a lazy warmth out of the east when Sterrin rapped at Mag Miney’s door. ‘A Maireàd!’ she called out in Gaelic. ‘I have decided to try that messy cure of yours.’

  The old woman opened the door and peered up. ‘I knew you wouldn’t stay sittin’ up behind that black screen much longer; frightenin’ crows and little childer. Come in, my dear!’

  Half an hour later, Sterrin, half fainting from the smell, clamoured for the abomination to be removed. ‘Another quarter of an hour, my dear,’ pleaded Mag.

  ‘Not another minute.’

  She washed her face in a tin basin of rain water into which she flung a half dozen of the scented washballs she had filched from her mother’s bedroom. But she came again the next morning and the next.

  One morning, returning from her treatment and on her way to discharge her first task for the Fenians at the Campions’ farmhouse, she met Donal. They dismounted and strolled along a bridle path that skirted Owen Heffernan’s house. Sterrin thanked heaven for the scented washballs. Mrs. Heffernan came to the back door to drain the three-legged pot of breakfast potatoes. ‘The potatoes are the merest aperitif,’ Donal told Sterrin. ‘When Owen goes to the fields his dainty little wife will cook a breakfast for herself that would choke a horse, and more power to her, he is a dreadful old skinflint.’

  Sterrin laughed at her own recollections of Owen. ‘When I was a child one of the brides picked for him ran away from the altar when she got her first glimpse of him. Another one, a beautiful, but very poor, girl called Kitty Dowling had run away from him before that. While the matchmaker and her parents were disposing of her to old Owen, her own sweetheart, Mark Hennessey, arrived in the orchard and whistled her out to tell her that he was in a position to marry her. He had found some banknotes that day in a hedge while he was ditching. They had been lying there for years since the night that the Big Wind blew thatched roofs with people’s life savings all over the country.’

  ‘And did they live happily ever after?’ He watched the heavily veiled head shake slowly.

  ‘They are now, I hear, and rich. Their first child died of hunger. They nearly died themselves. My father dispatched them to America with the widow and children of his own foster-brother.’

  ‘Black Pat Ryan?’ He cursed the interjection that betrayed raw curiosity. The mystery of the hunger deaths of Sir Roderick O’Carroll’s foster-brother and three of his six children, all in one evening, was still debated locally. It had been hunger—not the famine fever that had killed the fat as well as the starving—and yet they had lived in a good holding and Ryan was said to ride a horse that was as splendid as that of his foster-brother.

  He sensed her angry silence as she walked ahead, leading her mount. He stumbled and gave an angry exclamation. She looked back over her shoulder.

  ‘I walked on an egg-shell,’ he explained. ‘It is a habit I seem to have when I’m with you.’ Her laughter rippled back at him. He was so dear and companionable! And that fierce and secret oath that bound them was so much bigger than their separate entities.

  ‘It was his wife’s pride.’ She vouchsafed him an explanation. ‘She had been a lady of well-to-do family, who ran away with Ryan. Her family cut her off. Calamities suddenly hit them; loss of livestock as well as crops. None of us knew that they were hungry. They never let on.’ A wave of guilt smote her. They had let on. The younger ones had howled with disappointment the day her father had discovered her little drama of putting her own dinner in the trunk of a tree for them.

  ‘If you were to run away with someone—beneath you...’

  This time it was she who stumbled. Dammit, did he know that too?

  ‘...and you were hungry, would you let on? Would you ask for food?’

  ‘I couldn’t see myself begging for food; not if I knew where it was to be had.’

  ‘You mean that you would steal it?’

  She shrugged and halted to mount where the track gave on to a boreen.

  ‘I say,’ cried Donal, ‘let’s ride to Lissnastreenagh. The blossoms are out.’

  Lissnastreenagh, with its fields like some wonderful carpet of pink and white on a green ground from fallen blossoms and its circle of hawthorns in full bloom; a great tent of blossoms over the intertwining branches. Don’t break off a blossom. Young Thomas! It is not lucky! But if the blossoms fall on you themselves, you will marry your true love. And the blossoms fell on his curly black hair; and they fell on his bloated, fever-stricken face when he collapsed there after the famine; and they fell on his hair and shoulders and on hers and on her bridal veil when he crushed her to him and swore he would go on waiting for her. Your true love, inagh!

  Donal’s voice brought her out of her reverie. He was starting to apologise, stiffly. The Fort-of-the-blossoms was on Kilsheelin territory. The whole world might go to view the wonder of it, but not one of the Keatings of Poolgower. She interrupted him.

  ‘I haven’t been there since—’ and then without thinking she said, ‘I’ll face it.’

  Before he could ask her what was there to face, she cried out, ‘I’ll race you!’ and galloped off.

  She was there before him; sitting erect, silent, rigid; every line of her body betraying tenseness. The blossoms were too newly out to have started to drop down their ma
gic carpet but the great circle of hawthorns that bent over the deep hollow was completely roofed and walled with pink and white flowers. Their fragrance filled the air. Waves of memory wafted through her with every wave of perfume. A sadness more desolate than that she had known on her wedding day swept through her. Then, there had been ecstasy, too.

  ‘One should never go back,’ she murmured. He finished the sentence for her ‘—to where one has known happiness that has fled.’

  What could this nice young man know of happiness that has fled? Of the happiness of racing against Young Thomas, he on Rajah, she on her Connemara pony; happiness, after that two days’ search, when the half-conscious Young Thomas had been found lying hidden amongst these blossoms; when she had come to him here, straight from plighting her vows at the altar, there had been happiness in her anguish. How else could it have been and she to have his arms about her. Ah God, to feel them about her now! She turned from the ache of her longing and rode off at a canter.

  When she had ridden a while she glanced back and then wheeled and returned to where Donal still stayed his horse.

  ‘Little Fido didn’t follow,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry for going off like that. This place gives me shivers. It’s haunted.’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘By—by the ghost of a priest who was slain by an ancestor of mine; slain at the altar for daring to start Mass before his Chieftain had arrived. There were vestments found down there in that hollow; chalices too.’

  ‘I wish you would take off that veil so that I might see how you look when you are lying.’

  ‘Are you accusing me of telling lies?’

  ‘Yes. Your castle, they say, swarms with ghosts. I expect that they come haunting every night, with Hippodrome performances on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. I don’t think that ghosts trouble you sufficiently, my Lady, to make you ride away from them. Who did the blossoms fall upon—or fail to fall upon?’

  He could almost see her jawline harden behind the veil. ‘I don’t believe in pishoguerie.’ She made to shake up the reins but he reached out and grabbed the bridle.

  ‘We all believe in pishoguerie, my Lady fair, when it is the pishoguerie of romance. This morning I had the presumption to invoke the fairies to let their blossoms fall upon me.’

  ‘Why should that be presumptuous?’

  Immediately she regretted the query. The last thing that she wanted was a declaration from him, from anyone. She was free as never before. She wanted to stay that way.

  ‘There is no presuming about my loving you. To do that is as natural as to breathe. It was in testing the blossoms to see if my love was returned that I presumed.’

  His grip on her bridle tightened. Presumed indeed, but there had been no presuming when it was a servant boy who had spoken his love here and the blossoms had showered their benison upon him. An arm of sun reached down upon the branches and unstoppered a new fragrance; provocative, inveigling their senses. The bird song resumed with a saucy piping of finches, and then, what must traitorous Clooreen do but reach out and start nuzzling Donal’s mount with velvety kisses!

  Sterrin felt the antennae of her womanhood reach out, like Clooreen’s velvet nuzzle, to absorb this moment that was bathing all her senses in a sweet suffusion. In another moment the human heads must meet in harmony above their mounts. Then a startled exclamation broke from her and brought the horses apart.

  ‘Ye gods! I had forgotten about Campion’s “Station”. You and your blossoms!’

  He watched her ride away. He, too, had completely forgotten that she was on a secret mission of her Fenian oath. Her voice came back to him.

  ‘It is too soon to expect the blossoms to fall upon you.’

  His heart surged. Too soon! Dolt that he was; of course, it had been too soon in her widowhood! He spurred after her. ‘Does that mean—?’

  ‘It means,’ she called back with blithe unconcern, ‘that the blossoms are too new. You must wait till they are full blown if you want them to fall on you. Yup, Clooreen!’ She was over the hedge and away.

  56

  Men in groups outside the Campion farmhouse ceased their chatting as Sterrin rode in. Which one of these is my ‘contact’, she wondered. The clatter of preparation for the Station breakfast muted as women’s faces peered through the windows of the front kitchen.

  ‘It is Lady Devine.’ Mrs. Campion straightened up from the chickens she was basting and came forward. ‘What broke a ribbon of Lady Devine, Miss Sterrin O’Carroll, that was, to come to this Station? None of them had ever come to one before, or to any other Station, and why should they with a chapel in their own house?’

  She greeted Sterrin with a quiet dignity. She was no longer the plump, jolly woman who had enlivened the wedding that had roused such a stir in the castle long ago because Young Thomas had served its Mass. She had the haunted look of the famine’s visitation. Its fever had taken her husband and two of her daughters. She turned to a young girl in the doorway and bade her have someone see to Lady Devine’s horse.

  The girl glanced towards the horse and back to its owner.

  ‘Will Lady Devine be staying for the Station?’

  There was a polite surprise in her tone and in the eyebrows that seemed to ride towards Sterrin’s riding hat and down to her riding boots. Sterrin realised that the girl was wearing a school uniform with the little white veil that boarders wore in convent chapels; that people were alighting from phaetons and jauntings cars and farm carts, all in their Sunday garb. The porch was ablaze with blooms. Every plant had been forced into bloom. The roof had a new thatch; the walls a fresh coat of lime. Suddenly Sterrin understood that quick up-and-down glance. This thuckeen of a girl was no goat’s toe. She had made Lady Devine realise that she had come spanking in to a religious function as if she were entering for a Point-to-point.

  She managed a gracious apology for her attire and then to her dismay, she found herself placed at the head of the penitents who knelt in a line from outside the parlour door across the long kitchen and up every step of the stairs. Confession! Sterrin hadn’t bargained for that.

  Her examination of conscience got a sudden jolt from the penitent whose place in the queue she had supplanted. Old Mrs. Hannigan’s knees were killing her. Her fasting gurglings after her five-mile walk on an empty stomach were killing the meditations of the other penitents. But at last she had reached the head of the line. And then, shutting out the light of heaven from her, Mrs. Campion comes and planks down a young lady that looked as if it ’twas to hunt foxes she was goin’ instead of to confession. The susurrus of Mrs. Hannigan’s ‘Hail Mary’s’ grew louder and angrier. Recognition dawned. She pinned down the seventh ‘Hail Mary’ with her thumb and called to her hostess. ‘Whisper! Is she,’ she nodded towards Sterrin’s head, ‘the one who danced before the King of France in her drawers?’

  ‘...and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive—the blasted old bacach!’ Sterrin swayed on her knees; grappling with her fury and her soul. The spirit triumphed. Those within earshot, not certain if they had heard aright, decided that they had not when they saw Lady Devine rise to her feet and gesture the old woman to resume the place that she had been deprived of. Mrs. Hannigan shuffled gratefully forward on her knees. ‘And anyway,’ she remarked with kindly ambiguity, ‘your Ladyship would have needed more time to count your sins.’

  Sterrin knelt on, in conflict with herself and her surroundings. Was it a thing that the luxury of her married life had left her no longer en rapport with this life and its people? That’s ridiculous. It is because of the people that I am here. But that was the cause of her unease. Using a religious gathering for a political purpose! No, it’s these damned flags. Oh, heavens, such language and I preparing for confession. She buried her face in her hands. Mrs. Hannigan’s gurglings got through their defence. So did the unmistakable consumptive cough of new arrivals, overheated from tramping the long dogged miles on empty stomachs. The smell of roasting chickens and boiling hams sent ou
t their tantalising beguilement.

  Something came to her from her spiritual readings when she had aspired to take the veil. Saint Teresa of Avila had such trouble in concentrating on her prayers that she started counting the nails of the boots of the nun kneeling in front of her and offered each nail as a prayer. Sterrin dropped her hands from her face. The hobnails in Mrs. Hannigan’s boots were arranged in little clusters of three, like shamrocks. Sterrin counted them separately and offered them up in sets of three ‘Hail Marys’. She had reached half way down the sole of the right boot where a piece of dung covered the cluster of nails and shattered her concentration.

  The parlour door opened to discharge a penitent, and boots and nails disappeared as Mrs. Hannigan rose to her feet, but the opening was blocked by the figure of Father Hickey.

  ‘I just thought I’d see what has happened to the men.’ He assessed the few males among the kneeling women; young boys and old men. Mrs. Campion was torn in all directions; basting chickens, cutting bread, supervising the tables spread out in the barn. Father Hickey saw Lorcan Campion talking with a well-dressed stranger—a man with a cruel scar on his cheek—listening with head bent as though he were deeply interested in the pattern that his toes made in the gravel. It seemed it was always strangers, from some distant part, who came to give orders and to impart the Fenian oath. No ‘Circle’ knew from whom its orders came and so no person could betray. All around the yard men were talking, low and stern, instead of gosthering* about cattle and the prospects of the harvests as at previous Stations.

  ‘What brings them here since they will take no part in the ceremonies?’ the priest asked; and he shook his head with infinite sadness as though he knew the answer. They had probably been excommunicated in their own diocese; like in Kerry where a Fenian had shot a member of the Crown forces and the bishop had made that terrible pronouncement that ‘Hell is not hot enough nor eternity long enough for whoever did the deed’.