Last Port of Call: The Queenstown Series

by Jean Grainger

  Harp watched her mother shake her head, and in a voice Harp didn’t recognise, she replied, ‘Thank you, Mr Quinn, but my daughter and I will walk.’ She took the umbrella down and went to fold it up to return it to him though it was still raining.

  ‘Not at all, not at all. Keep the umbrella. You’ll need it on the way home. I’ll call for it someday – there’s no rush.’ He turned and then paused. ‘Are you sure you won’t take a lift back? You’ll get drowned walking up the hill, and I can go that way as easy as not?’

  Her mother seemed to relent and nodded sadly. ‘Thank you then, Mr Quinn. A lift in your carriage would be most welcome.’ She smiled but it didn’t reach her eyes. She handed him back his umbrella.

  He opened the back door of his carriage, pulled by four black horses with plumes on their heads. His son was on the front seat holding the reins, dressed in long black oilskins for protection against the pouring rain. Harp slid in beside her mother as Mr Quinn closed the door and jumped up beside his son. The carriage was lined in black button-down satin, and the seats were upholstered in dark-grey velvet. She’d hardly ever been in a carriage before and never one as fancy as this.

  A thought popped into her head – Wait until I tell Mr Devereaux about it – and the realisation that she would never tell him anything again felt like acid in her stomach.

  Mr Quinn drove slowly up the winding hill to the Cliff House, pulling up on the gravel outside that was in danger of being taken over by weeds. Harp remembered a time when they had a gardener, a jolly man called Mr Finch, but the money for such luxuries had dried up and her mother ran the house on a shoestring.

  The undertaker got out and came around to open the door to let her mother out. His son did the same on the other side. He smiled and said, ‘I’m really sorry for your troubles, Harp.’

  Nobody else had acknowledged that Mr Devereaux’s passing had any impact on her whatsoever. That small kindness seemed to unblock the tears that had refused to flow earlier. ‘Thank you,’ she managed, blinking them back.

  She walked around the back of the carriage, the house looming over them all, and glanced at her mother. Rose looked just like the alabaster statues in the Catholic cathedral – cold, set in stone. Her face had not one touch of colour; even her lips seemed to blend into the paleness.

  ‘If there’s anything I can do…’ Mr Quinn said quietly, and her mother just nodded.

  They stood on the gravel, looking out to the harbour, as the carriage pulled away.

  ‘Let’s go inside, Mammy.’ Harp tugged on her mother’s sleeve and took the key of the house from her handbag. She opened the front door, and it scraped as it always did across the black and white diagonal tiles. It seemed fitting to go in that way that day for some reason. It all looked and smelled so familiar, the scent of beeswax polish and sunlight soap, the polished hallstand with the umbrellas in the polished shell casing. There was a five-foot-tall china urn that Mrs Devereaux had received from the wife of the British Ambassador to Japan as a parting gift standing beside the hallstand. Harp had always hated its grotesque faces and gaudy design, but Mrs Devereaux loved it. Mr Devereaux suggested to his mother once that it had been such an ugly thing that the ambassador’s wife had only given it away to get rid of it, and Mrs Devereaux was so offended that she didn’t speak to her son for months. Best time of his life, Mr Devereaux had remarked wryly. Harp found herself smiling at the memory.

  The stairs on the left of the hallway curved gracefully up to the first floor where Mr Devereaux lived, and then to the second, and finally to the attic bedrooms where Harp and her mother slept. Straight ahead was the kitchen, pantry and scullery, and to the right the salon and the drawing room, neither used in years and years. Under the stairs on the left were the mahogany double doors to the dining room that spanned the entire east wing, with perfect views over the harbour. Nobody had eaten a dinner in there in Harp’s lifetime.

  She led her mother to the kitchen and stoked the range, setting the kettle on top. On the table were a tray of sandwiches and a cake, cut neatly into slices. Harp felt such a pang of, what was it? She didn’t know. Pity? Maybe. Her mother had prepared the food this morning in case anyone came back after the funeral. Of course nobody did.

  She helped her mother off with her coat and hung it on the nail behind the door, then did the same with her own. Rose then busied herself with preparations to make tea. The only sounds in the room were the clatter of cups and saucers and the kettle coming to boil.

  ‘Go up and change out of that wet dress, Harp. You’ll catch your death,’ Rose instructed.

  Harp did as she was told, and by the time she returned, dressed in her normal day dress over which she’d put on her woollen cardigan, her mother had made the tea and set it on the table.

  Rose took the waxed paper off the sandwiches, saying they might as well eat them. Harp found she was hungry, which surprised her to no end as she was so very sad, but she remembered reading the letters Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra in which she stated, ‘Composition seems to me impossible, with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb.’

  She supposed that bodies needed food to function normally, and therefore it stood to reason that when one was in a time of difficulty, one needed to function to a higher degree and should therefore eat more.

  She noticed her mother was mindlessly stirring her tea but had yet to take a sip or eat anything. Harp placed an egg-and-cress sandwich and another of cheese and tomato on her mother’s plate and put a napkin alongside it. But both the tea and the food remained untouched.

  ‘Mammy, please eat. Mr Devereaux would not want you to go hungry.’

  Her mother looked at her again. This time tears brimmed in her brown eyes. ‘You never got to tell him,’ she said, her voice hoarse with emotion.

  ‘He knew, Mammy. Remember I told you? Just before we left to go and see the ship, when you were gone downstairs, he called me Harp Devereaux again and said he was proud of me and that I was special.’

  ‘Really?’ Her mother gave a sad smile, one that held years of regret.

  Harp nodded.

  Rose placed her hand on Harp’s. ‘I know it is hard, but nobody must ever know who your father is, Harp. It wouldn’t be right. And when they come and put us out of here, we’ll just have to go and not say a word because we have no proof. And anyway, I would just look like a greedy housekeeper making up a story to get something out of it. I won’t have that, do you understand me, Harp?’

  Harp had no idea what her mother was going on about. ‘Who will come to put us out of here? Why would anyone do that, Mammy? Sure this is our home. We live here…’ Harp suddenly felt panic. She would have to learn to live without him. She had no choice but to accept it; she knew he was gone and was in heaven. But why was her mother talking about leaving the Cliff House?

  ‘Harp, my love.’ Her mother turned and took both Harp’s hands in hers; they felt cold as marble. ‘This isn’t our house, you know that. It belonged to Mr Devereaux for the duration of his life, left to him by his mother, but now it will belong to Ralph, I suppose. It will stay in the Devereaux family anyway, like it has done for generations. There will be no more need of us, so we’ll just have to move on, go somewhere else.’

  Harp wanted to withdraw her hands from her mother’s cold ones. That was ridiculous. ‘But where would we go? Would I have to go to a new school?’ Harp hated change; even the slightest décor changes in the house upset her. She liked familiarity – it made her feel safe.

  ‘No, you won’t. You won’t be going back to school.’ Rose could hardly form the words, and Harp could see her sadness as she watched the dawning realisation of what she was saying register with her daughter.

  ‘You mean never go back to school at all?’ Harp was incredulous.

  ‘Well, I suppose I do,’ Rose answered. ‘I don’t know how much longer we’ll be allowed to stay here, so we’ll be moving on somewhere else anyway, and the term is almost over, just another few weeks. Mo
st girls in your position would have left at twelve anyway…’

  ‘But…’ Harp could see the conflict on Rose’s face. ‘But if I leave school, how will I go to university? I need to matriculate, and take my exams and…’

  ‘Harp.’ Rose paused. ‘I don’t know how to say this. Going to university was always just a pipe dream – I should never have allowed the fantasy to go ahead. The belief that you were destined for an education, for travel, for financial and social success was a silly dream that could never come true. It’s my fault, but I never wanted you to have to face the reality of our lives, that you were the illegitimate child of a housekeeper who had no money or name behind her, the things necessary to realise such lofty ambitions.’ Harp heard her mother’s voice crack. ‘I took the easy way out and let you believe that this was a possibility when it just is not. None of that is going to happen.’

  To Harp, the words sounded so hard, so cruel. She had lost Mr Devereaux, was about to lose her home and now was about to have her dreams crushed too. ‘What? Why not? Mr Devereaux told me I could go to Queen’s College in Cork, or Trinity in Dublin, or even to the Sorbonne in Paris, and I would study and –‘

  ‘Harp.’ Rose stopped her. ‘Don’t be silly. You know why not. I can’t afford it. School costs money and I could just about manage the fees for the Star of the Sea here from my wages, but university costs a lot more and we are destitute. Now that he is gone, the trust fund that kept this house and paid me will revert to Ralph, such as it is. I doubt there is much because as you know we were just barely making ends meet, but now that Henry’s gone and we are facing, well, whatever we are facing, it’s time to give up on that fantasy because it just will not happen.’

  ‘But Mr Devereaux said –’

  ‘Harp!’ Rose raised her voice and Harp jumped. ‘You’re not listening. You cannot stay at school because I can’t pay the fees, do you understand? I need to find a job, a live-in position, and so do you. Hopefully we can work in the same house, but I…’

  ‘You…what? I don’t understand. I have to get a job in a house, as what?’ Harp was confused. Other girls her age, and from the social class to which she really belonged, were raised in the knowledge that they would be expected to leave education and work, but not her.

  ‘I don’t know, a scullery maid, a dairy maid, something like that…’ Harp could see that the words hurt her mother to say. ‘Every day since he died, I’ve looked at the situations advertised in the newspapers, but none of them were for a woman and a girl. I hoped that maybe we could get work together, at least we could stay close…’ Her mother’s voice trailed off.

  ‘I don’t know anything about dairy cows or washing clothes. How could I do that?’ Harp was incredulous. ‘You know how I’m no good at that stuff.’

  ‘You’d have to learn, and I’ll teach you, in whatever time we have left here. I should have done this a long time ago.’

  ‘Teach me about housekeeping?’ Harp was horrified.

  ‘Yes, because that is your future. I’m sorry. I should never have allowed you to think it was going to be anything different. That’s just not how the world works. Mr Devereaux and Ralph got an education because the Devereaux family were wealthy. Look at this house! It is magnificent, and back when he was a child and his parents were alive, there were no leaks or cracks or rattling windows. They had money, Harp, and they educated their children with that money. But we don’t have it, and we never will.’

  ‘I always thought this was my home…’ Harp said quietly.

  ‘It was, in the sense that I worked here and you were allowed to stay because of, well, because of the circumstances. But my parents were poor – they had nothing.’

  ‘And now I’m the same,’ Harp said slowly.

  It didn’t require an answer.

  ‘If there was a way, I would take it, Harp, I swear I would, but I’ve been awake every night since he died and I can’t see a way out. I will do my best to find us a position together, in a house where we can both work, but those are few and far between. If we had a house, a room even, I would get a job and at least we could stay together, but most domestic positions are live-in. And besides, we don’t have a place of our own, so…’ Rose swallowed. Harp could see she was barely able to form the words in her mouth. ‘We may have to separate.’

  ‘Separate?’ Harp asked, aghast.

  ‘I hope not. I pray we won’t have to. I’m trying my very best to find something. But any day now they will come and say we need to leave, Harp, and we have nowhere to go.’

  ‘And we have no money at all?’

  Rose shook her head. ‘Very little.’

  ‘So what will happen now?’ Harp asked. ‘I know you think they will send someone to evict us, but if Ralph is in India, then they throw us out and the house just lies empty?’

  Rose shrugged and sighed. ‘I don’t know, Harp. He might sell it, or even come back here, but whatever happens to this old place, it won’t be anything to do with us.’

  The reality slowly dawned on Harp. Of course her mother was right. She’d just assumed they could stay, but of course they couldn’t. Unless… ‘Maybe if we told Ralph the truth, maybe then he wouldn’t make us. Mr Devereaux wouldn’t want us to have nowhere to go,’ Harp suggested.

  Rose shook her head. ‘Ralph was nothing like his brother, Harp. He was…’ She inhaled. ‘He was cruel and greedy and brash. He wouldn’t care that you are his child even if we did tell him, I just know it, and telling him would make everything a hundred times worse.’

  ‘But he won’t even want this house!’ Harp exploded. This really was too much to take. ‘He hasn’t set foot in it for years! He couldn’t even be bothered to come to visit his only brother or his mother even, so he’s hardly going to turn up here and want to live here now, is he?’ Harp knew she shouldn’t shout at her mother, but she was so upset and this was just nonsense.

  ‘It won’t matter, Harp. None of that matters. He would have been Henry’s heir and so his estate would go to him. It’s how things work. I know…’ Her mother’s voice cracked under the strain of it all. ‘I know how much this place means to you, how you thought of it as home all of your life, how he wanted us to feel that way, but it’s over, Harp. He’s gone and we will have to leave.’

  Chapter 5

  ‘Master Tiernan.’ Emmet Kelly raised his hand. ‘Why is the road to the workhouse in Midleton called cosán na marbh?’ He smirked at Harp as he asked the question. The teacher had his back to them while he wrote the homework on the blackboard.

  The master loved Irish; it was his favourite subject. He became so animated when teaching the language of their forefathers that any child who displayed interest in it was immediately in his good graces. It wasn’t officially on the curriculum – being part of the British Empire meant children spoke English only – but the master taught it on the quiet. Harp was already fluent, having read all of the Irish mythology in the original Irish language the summer she was ten, so the master often looked to her for support with his endeavours.

  Harp knew why Emmet was asking, to humiliate her, but she would have to endure it.

  The master turned around, his long face a beam of delight. He was shiny-faced and bald, except for a straggly greasy bit of hair that he combed across his head, and his tweed suit was covered in chalk dust. He had long fingers and a gentle disposition, and Harp liked him. He only slapped them very rarely and even then not too hard, unlike their previous teacher, Sister Regina, who was a savage with the switch.

  ‘What do we think, class, cosán na marbh?’ The master looked around, and Harp deliberately stared at a knot of wood on her desk.

  ‘Cosán?’ He asked. ‘Where does that word come from?’

  ‘Pathway?’ Donal Deasy suggested.

  ‘Maith an feár, good man yourself, Donal. Indeed it is a pathway. And na marbh?’ He waited for a moment before turning to Harp, easily the best in the class at Irish.

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ Harp mumbled.

&n
bsp; ‘Ah, Harp, you do, I’m sure. Na marbh…’ He made a grotesque face and the class giggled.

  ‘The dead, sir.’ Kit Lehane piped up. ‘Cosán na marbh is “pathway of the dead”.’

  ‘Sin é, that’s it.’ The master clapped his hands, delighted with his students.

  ‘So we have cosán na marbh on the way to the workhouse because of all the poor misfortunes that lost their lives inside there, who were evicted with no place else to go. But thanks be to God, that’s not a fate awaiting any of us today.’ He grinned as the bell rang for morning break.

  Harp slowly gathered her books and pen. Two weeks had passed since the death of Mr Devereaux, but she still felt terrible; the pain in her chest and tummy was constant. The tragic news of the sinking of Titanic had barely registered with her, though it had shaken the town to its foundations. Prayers were said, Masses offered up. It was all anyone could think or talk about, and no doubt if the unthinkable had not happened in her own life, she too would have felt the loss of the magnificent ship. But she couldn’t feel anything but heartbreak and fear for the future.

  All of those people, so full of hopes and dreams, sliding to the bottom of the sea – she envied them. At least they felt no more pain. All she felt was empty and alone and worried. She couldn’t go into service. She would be terrible at it, and to be separated from her mother, so soon after losing Mr Devereaux and her home… It was a fate she couldn’t begin to contemplate. The image of her as an inept and hopeless scullery maid crying herself to sleep in a strange house night after night, a cruel housekeeper or cook berating her for her uselessness, went round in her head constantly.