The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  Horsey, am I? I’d take my oath he never said it. Yup, Clooreen. Dark hair! It wasn’t even dark red that time when he returned before the wedding. You put your foot in it there, my lassie! Divil a fear of you putting your foot in the bog!

  *

  Dowling’s dog barked as Thomas came down their boreen that night. Dowling’s dog had barked the first night he went there, in Repeal year, with dripping from Mrs. Stacey as an excuse to get her the ‘newses’ of a match-making between Kitty and Owen Heffernan. A different dog. The roof of the two-storey farmhouse was different from the thatched one of 1843. It was slated; with American money. Prosperous looking, but less picturesque.

  Kitty opened the door. She drew him hurriedly inside. ‘You took a risk to come. They tell me that even the rabbits are looking out for you.’

  ‘I’d take a bigger risk to see you.’ He swung her off the ground and kissed her. ‘You could have knocked me down when I met Norisheen and heard you were on a visit.’ He put her down and looked at the black dress the bunch of crepe tied at the neck with the widow’s brooch. ‘Poor Mark! I felt as if I had lost my right hand when she told me that he had been killed. I had no inkling. I knew from John Holohan that he had come through the slaughter of Fredericksburg.’

  She nodded sadly. ‘He came through everything and then, when all was over—nothing would do him but to join the Fenian attack on Canada. The irony of it! If he had been killed in the war they’d have said he died gloriously. “Never were men so brave” and all that, but because he died in the Canadian affair he died—needlessly.’

  ‘Aye,’ murmured Thomas, ‘and irony, too, in the bitterness that came between us. No brother could have been dearer to me than Mark. We are all united now in the cause for which he died. I couldn’t believe that any cause would make him turn from me in hostility as he did that morning—because our loyalties differed!’

  ‘It was not at all like what it looked. It had to do with Dorene, Thomas.’ Kitty took his hand and led him to the sitting-room and set him by the fire. He glanced around. ‘Dorene is not here? And Norisheen?’

  ‘She is staying with Mark’s people, but Dorene has gone to a hotel in the town.’

  ‘You heard what happened today?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It should have happened long ago. No,’ she put up her hand, ‘I don’t mean about being pushed in—and I doubt that—’

  ‘I saw it happen.’

  ‘Well, maybe Lady Devine had her doubts too, like the rest of us.’

  ‘But Kitty, she—Dorene—explained to me that sight came to her in desperation; some “blind” instinct that forced her to see. She said she has had such temporary flashes before—when she sensed danger. You know it is quite feasible, Kitty. The instinct of self-preservation is very powerful.’

  Kitty was silent for a moment. She took Thomas’s hand again. ‘Thomas. I don’t know where to begin. Many a time I tried to put things into letters, but gave up; and since you came to Ireland you were harder to find even than the others. They had their assigned areas. You were everywhere, on account of being able to disguise yourself. Dorene was on for coming here more than a year ago. Once she did leave and we thought that she had come here, but it turned out that she had gone back to the stage for a while—a blind girl’s part she was playing. So she said, anyway.’

  Thomas leaned forward. ‘Kitty, are you trying to tell me that Dorene has been deceiving me about her blindness? It is absurd. I brought her to eminent specialists. She could not deceive them. The one in Switzerland was recommended to me as the world’s greatest.’

  ‘Did he say that she was incurable?’

  Thomas paused to recollect. The Swiss doctor had held out some hope at the first examination. He undertook to treat her. Then, when Thomas returned from America, Dorene said it was hopeless. He gave an exclamation. It was not the doctor who had told him. It was Dorene. He suddenly recalled the rollicking music he had interrupted when he returned to her Swiss lodgings. He had taken it to mean that she had recovered. A girl who had received the final pronouncement of her doom would not—could not have played like that. He recalled too, how vehemently, fiercely she had opposed his going to the doctor, ‘And,’ he exploded into speech, ‘I didn’t even pay him. I went away without seeing him.’

  Kitty watched the dawning recollection on the tired face. It was going to be a bitter disillusionment. ‘Thomas,’ she said on a sudden, ‘wouldn’t you give up the Fenian work? There is little prospect of success now. You look worn out. You have been too long “on your keeping” sleeping in caves and the like.’

  ‘I’m sleeping at de Guider’s house tonight but I use the cave by day. There’s a big price on my head, I could not risk staying openly with the de Guiders—even though they are my cousins. Did you know that, Kitty? My full first cousins.’

  ‘No! They couldn’t be. They are too old.’

  ‘My mother was the youngest of eighteen children. Those two are her eldest brother’s, Stephen Achilles de Guider’s, children; born before my mother.’

  ‘It is a wonder that you talk to us at all with all the grand relatives you are acquiring.’

  ‘Hmph! I wonder would they have found me so acceptable if I had turned up to them as the bedraggled servant boy with no one but you and Mark to befriend me. However,’ he turned from the reflection, ‘I should have been gone after the débâcle of our ill-fated rebellion but I waited for General Burke’s trial and now I am waiting to see if the death penalty will be repealed. I doubt if the Government will go that far. There is too much indignation in America. He is an American citizen which, by the way, is more than I am. Thanks to Fintan. But Kitty, we are talking in circles. Let us get back to this matter of Dorene. This is—unspeakable; if it is true.’

  ‘It is true, Thomas. It is a long story. It goes back very far—and that matter of your naturalisation papers is part of it. ’Twas I who got them held up.’ She put her hand up as he started to exclaim. ‘One day, when Dorene was with us about a week and you were off some place tying up the last loose threads about your people, Mark began to get suspicious. He thought he saw her reading a book one day. He began probing; setting little traps for her; drawing her out about her past. One afternoon the post car driver, when he handed me the newspaper, mentioned—casual like—that some very big landlord had been assassinated in Ireland. I repeated the story to Dorene—not thinking who it might be—and told her to give you the paper. That evening, after you had gone to visit your people in the South, I found the paper behind the cushion where Dorene had been sitting. It was opened and folded back at the page that had the account of the assassination—a big headline that you couldn’t miss. His name staring out at you, so—’

  ‘I never saw it. My God!’

  ‘I guessed as much. So that night I wrote to Fintan and gave him an inkling of our suspicions and I asked him to hold up the naturalisation papers. I suppose it was wrong of me but I knew you were bent on not taking out those papers till you had your own name established. You always said you wouldn’t become an American citizen under a nickname—even if it was a stage name—and famous—and the same went for getting married. So we thought we’d postpone the marriage till we made enquiries. And we knew you were marrying out of pity and a sense of obligation.’

  Kitty paused. She felt a longing to take Thomas in her arms and comfort him. For all the little silver lights that dappled the black curls on his temples he had a look of young hurt upon his face. Oh Muire Dia, but the world and life and the elements had made a plaything out of him. You’d wonder why his mother was allowed to deposit him in this world before her arms were taken from about him. Tossed by the wind, cheated of his name, tricked by women!

  He lifted his head. ‘What had Dorene to do with Mark’s behaviour that last morning?’

  ‘When you told him, through the bedroom door, that you had decided to marry Dorene straight away that morning with the other couples, and wanted Mark for Best Man, we knew it was the only way you co
uld take her away with you from a house that had rejected you. And remembering about that first night when you took my message from this house to tell him I had decided to elope with him, and how he promised to be your friend for ever—and of how you served our Wedding Mass—it near broke his heart. But hell roast it, Thomas! He couldn’t let you walk into it. You were more to him than any brother. You’d never have taken his word against Dorene’s if he told you that he just suspected you were not the cause of her blindness, when he couldn’t give the proof; not just then, anyway. His anger over your betrayal of Meagher made it easy for him to refuse you.’

  ‘Betrayal! That’s hard hitting.’

  ‘Be fair, Thomas. Mark never heard of Thomas Francis Meagher until you quoted his speeches to him. Meagher himself could not rouse men’s blood more than you did when you recited his big speech. Mark couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t want to fight for the North with Meagher.’ She noticed how his nostrils quivered in the still whiteness of his face. She had gone too far. She reached across and put her hand on his knees.

  ‘Thomas, avourneen, put the past behind you. You still have a prospect of happiness—’

  ‘Happiness?’ His mouth twisted in bitterness. ‘That may be added to the past that I am to put behind me.’

  She stood up. ‘Let’s stop mincing and pretending. Miss Sterrin—Lady Devine is free—’

  He was gazing into the turf flames, the same bitter twist on his lips. Without altering his gaze he said. ‘Miss Sterrin’s romantic attachment for her servant-companion finished years ago. The deep and mature love of Lady Devine was for someone else. He died in my arms. It was my dubious privilege to convey a last message to her. The nature of it was too sacred to allow of my obtruding my earth-bound sentiments.’ He shook his head at the pictures in the flames. ‘It would be unthinkable.’

  Kitty gave a sigh of impatience. ‘She’s alive, isn’t she? The pair of you are on this earth. Believe me, it’s the only damn thing that matters after you’ve come up against the blank wall of eternity...’

  ‘She despises me.’

  ‘If she does, why did she take the trouble to push Dorene into the bog?’

  His gaze came up at last from the flame tableau. ‘That now, Kitty, is something I should like to find out.’

  ‘Then ask herself.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  *

  Thomas did ask Sterrin about her strange behaviour at the bog, but not until after he had sent his profound apologies to the Swiss doctor about his account and had received the doctor’s assurance that the debt had been discharged by the patient, and the doctor’s sincere hope that she continued to maintain the splendid recovery that she had made during her stay in Switzerland.

  Sterrin, when next he saw her, was walking up the hilly field that skirted the bog road. From behind the ditch he watched her pause and lean against an upstanding rock.

  She had walked further than she intended and what, she asked herself, brought her this way again? Evening was coming and the call of the pee-wits sounded sad and weird across the distant bog. To drown the sadness she whistled out the long, low warble of a thrush, flutelike, melodious.

  From behind her came an answering trill. So vibrant, that a male thrush went hurrying to see if its affianced bride was philandering. Sterrin glanced back. The sound came from where two rocks leaning together formed a shelter known as the Witches’ Rock. It wasn’t a thrush who had answered her warble. It was a man. And once upon a time he had taught her how to imitate a thrush. She should move away.

  There was a weariness, Thomas thought about the way she was leaning against the rock. She must be grieving for Keating. He could not charge in straight away now to challenge her about Dorene. He approached her quietly, almost casually. He spoke about Donal. She listened, looking straight ahead.

  After a pause he said, ‘Were you married to him?’

  Still looking ahead, she answered, ‘We were about to be married.’

  In the distance he could see the Devil’s Bit withdrawing beneath the shadows. The whole world was withdrawing itself quietly so as to leave them alone. Musingly, almost to himself he murmured, ‘It is hardly credible.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said at last.

  ‘I mean—a Keating of Poolgower. Over there,’ he said indicating the distant turret, ‘there was a time when a servant would be dismissed for having anything to do with a Keating marriage.’

  She also had a faint recollection of the time she had implored her papa not to dismiss the knife boy for serving a Keating’s Wedding Mass.

  ‘Any woman,’ she said coldly, ‘would have been proud to marry Mr. Keating. I don’t consider myself as having been worthy of him.’

  ‘I quite agree.’

  She rounded on him. ‘How dare you?’

  ‘There is nothing worthy about making murderous attempts upon the lives of others. Pushing people down bog holes!’

  ‘I didn’t push her down a bog. She asked me to direct her to you and I did. Your wife is not blind.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Then why did you tell me that she was blind?’

  ‘Because I thought so. All along, until you gave me your convincing demonstration to the contrary.’

  ‘You mean—’ Amazement had routed all her dignified reserve. ‘You mean that she deceived you? That she pretended to be blind?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Is that—’ her voice scraped, ‘is that why you married her?’

  ‘I did not marry her.’

  In the silence a drop of rain fell upon her face. She had a sudden sense of refreshment. And then the real significance of the words struck her. ‘You mean she is your—tu-tu? How revolting! Allow me to pass.’

  He grasped her arm firmly. ‘The time has come Sterrin, Daughter of Roderick O’Carroll, as the Bard used to say, for you and I to get things straight between us. There have been too many misunderstandings, too many omissions and obligations. Now you listen...’

  He talked and he talked and at first she would interrupt with questions. And he would put his hand over her mouth. And finally she gave up, content to listen. For his voice had become like a violin bow across her heart strings.

  The rain fell. They shifted to the shelter of the Witches’ Rock; her head shifted to his shoulder. Where else could she put it? There wasn’t room for two heads where the rocks met in a point. And it was easier that way when it came to recount her version of the years and events that had parted them. She told him everything. As he listened, he felt as if his bones had turned to water. The strength she had shown! ’Twas her blood. The blood of her people! His heart exulted for inside him, strong and sure, flowed a tributary of that same blood.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said on a changing note, ‘what was it made you suspect Dorene?’

  Her brows pondered the reason. ‘She didn’t act blind; I know so many blind people in Templetown; those who were blinded when the orphanage went on fire, the night of the Big Wind, and those blinded in the famine.’ Then she remembered the fingers accurately outlining the white diamond on the horse’s forehead and other things. ‘Now you tell me something. Did you tell her that I went striding about slapping my hips with a riding crop and talking about drenches, fetlocks and brood mares?’

  ‘Good heavens! Did she say I did?’

  ‘She said you said I was “horsey”. It’s the same.’

  ‘That is one thing you are not. Superb horsewoman though you are.’

  She gave a little sigh. ‘I knew you didn’t say it. What will happen about her now?’ She could feel pity for the girl now. The conniving years, the waste of living.

  ‘She has told Kitty that in a strange way she is relieved we know the truth, that she will be glad to get back to the stage. I can help her there.’ His voice went grim. ‘But she will scarcely need my help. She has played an exacting role with superlative skill.’

  Her head got a little jolt where he had shrugged away the memory. He put up his hand a
nd gently fixed her head more comfortably into his shoulder.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, and the old deludhering raillery was back in his voice, ‘did you hear who Young Thomas, the knife boy, turned out to be?’

  Her head shot up, charged with all the excitement and wonder that had failed her previously. ‘It is now that I am realising it. Now that you are not turning out to be someone else’s fairy prince. Young Thomas! To think that you might have been the owner of Strague.’

  He pressed her head back again. ‘I will be the owner of Strague Castle, Sterrin, my weary little blossom of the storm.’

  ‘But hasn’t it gone? It was on the Encumbrance Market—Lubey had his eye on it.’

  ‘It has not gone and Lubey will never warm his backside in Strague Castle—pardon the language, my lady fair. It is the knife boy breaking out in me.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right—I heard Papa saying the same when Lubey had his eye on Kilsheelin. Only Papa used a briefer term.’

  ‘He was more privileged. Tomorrow morning I shall see Patrick John-the-Baptist Hoey, the solicitor. Tomorrow evening I shall present you with the Deeds, or the equivalent thereto, of Strague Castle. I regret, though, that I shall not be able to have them suitably accompanied by a pair of musical shoes.’

  They were walking now towards the castle, for the soft April evening was tending towards a chill night. She turned to face him.

  ‘And what,’ she asked softly, ‘would I be doing with the deeds of Strague Castle?’

  The birds had ceased their singing for the day and the daisies had closed their faces to the night and the love between Sterrin and Thomas was as natural as all this; but never a word of it had they spoken. They had come too far along a trail of disappointment and heartbreak and frustration for sudden flights of rapture. It was like long ago when they spoke by silence, each aware of the other, in harmony, thinking their dreaming thoughts.

  ‘You would be guarding them for me against the day when you would cross its threshold, chatelaine of the castle. Woman of my house. Your own home; that we will share in peace. Och! What happens to one’s words when one wants the use of them at a time like this.’