Sub-Inspector Bible examined them and threw them aside. ‘These are muddlers for making punch.’ The constable hadn’t looked too bright not even without all that soot on his face and his shako not askew.
Another constable brought forth an ominous-looking iron pole. ‘Ah!’ the sub-inspector was pleased. ‘A pike!’ The smith lifted a shoe from the furnace. Without looking up he said, ‘Mrs. O’Hanlon doesn’t call it that. It is the stake she has tethered the goat to for the last forty years.’
The officer brought the pole nearer the fire. ‘Of course,’ said the blacksmith, ‘I may be wrong about the goat, sir, it may not always have been the same one, but it is the same stake.’ The officer flung the stake from him and told the smith peremptorily that he was sending his horse, the grey, down immediately for shoeing.
‘Certainly, sir,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary,’ he continued chattily, ‘how fashions change! When my father had the livery stable he used to charge five pounds extra to hire out a grey. Now, greys are quite out of fashion. A body couldn’t hire one out at all if there was any other colour available.’ He tightened his leather apron. ‘It is the same with women’s hair. There was a time when a body would cross the street out of the path of a red-haired woman. Now, red hair is all the fashion.’
A shower of sparks showed Sterrin palely proud, the red lights in her hair intensified by the reddened darkness. The officer had seen the elegant carriage outside. To offset the smith’s overfamiliar remarks he saluted in her direction then withdrew.
Sterrin was puzzled. Denis never made facetious remarks. But she was not surprised that the inspector’s manner had rattled him. It had rattled herself. ‘I want you to get a message to Donal—to Mr. Keating,’ she said.
He looked up quickly. ‘No,’ she reassured him, ‘it is not anything to do with the “circle”. It—it is something—personal. Well, you know the way it is.’
‘Er—yes,’ he said respectfully, ‘I know the way it is.’
‘I have decided—’ she hesitated ‘—to take your advice.’
She was surprised that he had no eager comment. Something was amiss. In the silence her eyes lighted on the little iron kettle. ‘Constable Younghusband hasn’t spilled all the water,’ she said, ‘with those feet of his. Don’t you think there would be sufficient left for tea?’ He looked vaguely round. ‘Here it is!’ She picked up the little rusty caddy that the police had pushed from its usual place.
The great fire had subsided. Only the rattle of bridle and bits and the occasional stamping of hooves showed that a horse stood in the dark shadows behind the glow.
He filled the big mug and extended it towards her.
She looked down at it, startled. No apology for its uncouthness. ‘What has happened to my cup?’ A flame spurted up and played on the mug, on the black fingers, black as soot, down to the last graceful, tapering point! Not the work-hardened, calloused blunt, blistered fingers that Denis had spread out to show their unworthiness of her handshake.
‘Who are you?’ she whispered. She made no effort to take the mug. A flame spurted upwards towards his face and answered her question.
‘You!’ she breathed.
‘Sterrin!’
Often she had wondered what would she do, what would she say, if she were to meet him again; this man who had filled her heart so full that there was no comfortable space left for any other man. She would pass him by! Look through him haughtily. She scraped her throat. ‘Where is—“L”?’ That wasn’t what she meant to say and, Oh, God, she had let slip the initial by which Denis was known in the ‘Circle’.
He gave a startled exclamation. ‘You know that?’
Wheels sounded on the cobbles outside.
‘He is on his keeping.’ It was a whisper. ‘I am covering for him to get away while the search is hot.’
There were other things she wanted to know. ‘Are you in love with that woman? Who is she? How did you come to marry her so quickly.’ But all she said was ‘Are you a Fenian?’
He nodded. ‘I am—“V”. Sterrin, listen.’ He put down the mug. They were alone in the warm, sensuous darkness. Her heart was racing. It was not supposed to incur excitement. Behind her the horse champed, shook its head and set all its bits rattling. Thomas strained through the veil and glimpsed the deep pit of her eye, the poreless pallor of skin. ‘Sterrin!’ Big John blocked the horseshoe opening. ‘Have you finished the shoeing,’ he said meaningly and withdrew.
Thomas stretched forth to take her hand. Involuntarily she took a step back. He mistook her gesture. How could he know that if he threw those blackened arms around her and crushed her against Denis’s grubby leather apron she would have rested there; never to leave. ‘I had forgotten the black,’ he said.
Words came to her. The wrong ones. ‘You forget quickly.’ Her voice was tense and strained with the dint of keeping it low. ‘Your hands reach out too readily to women! That woman you flaunted before me, pawing her, caressing her in public, so soon after—in Paris in—’
‘Sub-Inspector Bible wants this horse shod immediately.’ A policeman entered, followed by a groom leading a horse.
‘Right you are,’ the blacksmith called back. ‘Thank you, your Ladyship,’ he said, ‘I’ll just lead out your horse and give the coachman a hand.’
The policeman saluted Lady Devine as she passed. Outside two policemen guarding the forge saluted. The blacksmith backed the horse into shafts and, as he stooped to fasten the leathers, he murmured just loud enough for Sterrin to hear. ‘The “pawing” was necessary. She is blind!’
*
The doctor had told Sterrin that she needed rest and care. There was nothing that rest and care could not cure. Nothing, Sterrin agreed, as she stared out of the window of the coach. She was cured of the excitements that had disturbed her heart. Heart strain! No sickness of the body would have made her heart plunge as the sight of him had done that day. No sickness could drag it down with such a lurch as had those words ‘she is blind’. All the suppressed, unformulated hopes had died in that moment: the inventive love, half-guilty, half-yearning, prompting her that he would tire of the other. She’s some fast actress who caught him on the rebound; embracing him in public. She might have known that Young Thomas of the gentle smile would never indulge such behaviour. Oh, that smile that had flashed its comfort at her across her father’s grave! But wasn’t he the one who had come well out of the débâcle of their star-crossed love? Hadn’t he got himself a wife who was young and comely, who would hold him for ever with the mystique of her blindness and its pleading pathos that would ensure for ever that pity which is so closely akin to love?
No, no more excitement.
The pace at Kilsheelin slowed perceptively. Sterrin took solitary walks. She brooded in Sir Roderick’s study. She received calls but returned them with cards left by Pakie Scally, pressed into service as a footman, in the livery that had been bought out of her lavish trousseau account. Were it not for Mrs. Kennedy-Sherwin, now living with the Crimea-wrecked Jeremy, nobody at the Castle would have known that Pakie, guarding the immaculacy of his white gloves until almost the very opening of each door, had held the cards grasped in his moist hands.
‘One never has to read the inscription on the cards he leaves,’ shrilled the still irrepressible little lady. ‘One only has to glance down at the salver on the ones that have black smudges.’ Big John had nearly died of shame.
There were few visitors at Kilsheelin. The Delaneys called occasionally. James de Guider dropped in quite frequently. Sometimes to talk, sometimes to ask for help in tracing his family genealogy. Soon after Sterrin’s return from the convent James had married his housekeeper. At the time Sterrin had attached little significance to James’s marriage. To be sure, it was a come-down for a dandified and aristocratic gentleman, but James was impoverished, as well as very lonely. Lady O’Carroll had refused to call on Mrs. de Guider. She felt that James had let Roderick down by this misalliance.
Now, James,
too was seeking the trail of his kind. The spectacle of his two little sons being brought up without the graces and refinements that he had known in his own childhood had spurred him to start another manuscript of his family genealogy. The old one had been destroyed by the Big Wind. The famine had finished the downward trend of their fortunes. Its pestilence had taken fourteen of his married brother’s fifteen sons. The surviving one was an invalid. James felt that since he could not give his sons fortune or a gentleman’s education, it was incumbent upon himself to leave them at least a record of a lineage of which they could be proud.
During his visits to the castle, James pored over the Bard’s records and prowled around the old roofless church in the O’Carroll burying ground, where so many of the de Guiders had been buried. Once, Sterrin went with him to the graveyard and scraped lichen from monuments that proclaimed that The Comerford of the Devil’s Bit had brought two hundred foot soldiers to help The O’Carroll drive from his lands the ‘Four Men of Cheshire’ to whom Queen Elizabeth had given over Tipperary. The daughter of The Comerford, ancestors of James’s mother, had married The O’Carroll and was buried beneath the stone. But what James had hoped to find was some record of one of the Strague O’Carrolls who had been dispossessed by his youngest son. A Timothy de Guider, who had been High Constable for the North Riding of Tipperary at the time, had appointed the elder son O’Carroll to a position as Collector of Hearths and Window taxes, and one of his descendants, Thomas O’Carroll, had married James’s very young Aunt Johanna de Guider—youngest of eighteen children. Her husband, James discovered, had been killed protecting his holding against the Tithe Proctors in 1833. That same week his wife had given birth to a son in a neighbouring house, but there was no trace of the house, mother or child. ‘And this child,’ Sterrin interrupted excitedly, ‘would actually be the lawful heir to Strague Castle?’
James nodded. ‘And my children’s cousin. Yes.’
She wondered did the Stragues know about this Thomas O’Carroll.
Sterrin had an inspiration. She told him about the silver drinking cup that the old hermit of Bannandrum Castle had shown her. His grandfather had got it from the dispossessed O’Carroll. ‘He might be able to trace the boy you are looking for.’
As they wandered back through the tombstones, she came upon the tiny grave of little Theobald Hennessy, Young Thomas’s godchild. She recalled how Mark, the father, and Young Thomas had taken turns carrying the little wooden box and how the tears had flowed down Young Thomas’s face and he couldn’t take his hands from the box to wipe them away. For the first time she realised what it must have meant to him to lose the first, the only, human being to whom he could claim some form of relationship. Was there ever anyone so bereft of family?
A horseman was reined-in on the little road that separated the cemetery from the bog. When James de Guider had driven off in a little new-fangled trap, he dismounted and came towards her. It was Bergin. She hadn’t seen him since that day at the Campion ‘Station’. He told her that Thomas had been arrested. The veil could not hide her quick short breaths. She managed some adequate words; then, with a murmured apology about being in a hurry, left him. He watched her move along the road, slower and slower. Obviously she was in no hurry. And who was he, he asked himself, to be wounding her always? There was a terrible love between those two.
Around the corner she sat on a low wall. She had begun to be happy. She was enjoying the little social whirl that poor Mamma was trying to whip up. The visits of the Delaney girls, the tit-bits of scandal from Mrs. Kennedy-Sherwin. Tracing family with James de Guider had been like the old times with the Bard. And now!
She sprang to her feet. Why should it worry me? Let his blind love do the worrying! She thought of her mad gallop to the convent when she was told of his arrest, away from the world that contained him no longer. But then she had been a child. Now she was a woman. She quickened her step and then she had to stop and grope for a handkerchief. God’ll mighty, is it crying I am! If she hadn’t gone up there to the little church yard with James, she wouldn’t have recalled that gruesome little box and the one who carried it, crying. But someone must shed tears for a lonely soul taken to prison and only an unfortunate blind woman to weep for him. How did he come to marry her? Was it because he had to marry someone and better one who couldn’t see that he loved someone else. Because he does; still. It was in his face in the forge that day, and in his voice.
A few days later Mrs. Kennedy-Sherwin’s bulletin made farce of Sterrin’s drama. ‘My dears!’ the outburst started, as usual, at the drawing-room door, ‘have you heard about that devastating Fenian from America—the one they’ve been looking for for months! He used so many disguises there was no catching him, and do you know why? He is actually the famous actor, Thomas Young. They brought him to the barracks and, my dears, I would have been out much sooner, but I’ve been angling for an opportunity to see him. They say he is positively deevy! And then the very next evening didn’t he go and escape? Wasn’t it infuriating, Sterrin? My dear, I don’t believe you are listening. But wait till you hear—he is really Captain O’Carroll, a Confederate Officer—drove out the barrack gate in a bread van!’
‘Captain O’Carroll,’ exclaimed Lady O’Carroll. She had been singularly quiet during the recital. No fan fluttering to conceal laughter.
When the visitor had gone she came and sat on the ottoman beside Sterrin. ‘I have never referred to your meeting in Kilkenny in Sir Jocelyn’s house with that actor—that mountebank, who used to clean our knives.’
‘Then don’t refer to it now.’
‘Sterreen! How dare you speak to me like that.’
‘I dare because I won’t be taken to task as though I were a child. I am going on twenty-seven, a woman and a widow.’
‘I don’t care what age you are.’ Margaret jumped to her feet, her great brown eyes blazing, the keys and bells on her chatelaine belt jangling. Sterrin remembered that once, in childhood, she had seen her mother like this with Papa.
‘This—this canaille, this servant—to dare to take our family name. Sacré Dieu!’ She was beside herself. ‘He never knew his place and you—you spoilt him instead of keeping him down.’
‘He could not be kept down,’ Sterrin’s voice lifted itself, ‘because he had it in him to rise. You saw his ability. His refinement. You praised his artistry about the big tree seat—you—’ Hegarty, coming to remove the tea things, backed out in horror. Their Ladyships were nearly shouting at each other.
‘I’m not concerned with the talents and refinements of underlings. I believe in keeping them in their place.’
‘Like you did Mrs. Black Pat Ryan.’ The words dropped out of Sterrin’s sudden recollection of the incident when her mother had looked, and behaved, as she did now. There was no getting them back.
Margaret stood very still. She looked down silently at Sterrin and then she whispered, ‘You are right. You are not a child. You are a woman; a wicked woman!’ She put her hand up to the back of her head. Sterrin’s hand shot out too. ‘Control yourself. Mamma!’ Her voice was only a gasp, but strangely authoritative. It brought her mother up short. ‘Because—’
‘Because what?’ asked Sterrin’s brain. Her voice answered, ‘because I’m the one who is going to faint.’ And she did, straight away.
Once Margaret saw that Sterrin was all right, she went to her room. She did not emerge for weeks.
Sterrin knew bitter remorse. It was a terrible gibe to hurl at her mother. She started sending little notes to her mamma’s room. There were no replies.
Sterrin took strolls in the demesne, always ending in the direction of Cuilnafunchion; but never a sight of Donal. If he came to her now and asked her to marry him she would give him the answer he yearned for. He was lying low. She had heard he had come under suspicion. She wished him dear luck, for she knew the fear and loneliness of the hunted.
Sometimes men ‘on their keeping’ would contact her and she would shelter them until it was safe for t
hem to press on on their secret purpose. She put them in the Bard’s room for a few days. Even Americans came. Northerners as well as Confederates. Men seasoned in the smoke of battle. Men convinced of the Fenian cause. They showed her a gentle deference as she arranged for their comfort. Only the hereditary servants might bring food to the guests in the Bard’s room. ‘You can trust them?’ the strangers would ask and watch the tantalising white gleam that was her smile behind the veil. Her cause, she assured them, was her servants’. As her ancestors’ cause had been the cause of their ancestors.
It was strange, Sterrin thought, to see these men who had fought against each other so fiercely in America, now joining together in the common cause of Ireland. She remembered how kindly Mrs. Lonergan had turned against her under the delusion that Tim had been killed by one of her name and kin. One of her name! A shock of enlightenment shot through Sterrin. Mrs. Lonergan’s son had been killed at the hands—or the orders—of Young Thomas, the servant boy she had indulged with the hospitality of her fine home and the friendship of her son. And I, we, to bear the blame of that killing because he had the audacity to take our name. But was it audacity? Couldn’t it have been—sentiment? She turned from the treacherous tenderness.
The landscape seemed bleak wherever she looked, the Movement was faltering; its march stumbling to a slower tempo. Dublin Castle had hunted James Stephens out of Ireland. But even if he had remained, the Brotherhood had lost its faith in him. He had beguiled them over long with high hopes and glowing promises. When he slipped away to Paris no regretful glances turned that way. He was in the right setting for dilettante revolutionaries.
News from Canada brought some short-lived joy. The Fenians had crossed over the borders of Canada. The detachments of Canadian volunteer forces, mustered to meet the invaders, had been overwhelmed. The regiment of the Queen’s Own, rushed from Toronto, had been routed. King James did not run from the Battle of the Boyne as quickly as did Colonel Booker, the Commander of the Queen’s Own, on his charger. But the American government pursued the pursuers and seized the Fenian arms. The Fenians crossed back into America with only the trophies and flags that they had captured.
The Big Wind Page 75