The front door was five feet wide – with stained glass filling the remainder of the eight-foot aperture – and made of solid teak. It had brass door furniture, an extraordinary extravagance, but it lent the house a sense of importance.
The grounds were small for a house so imposing, but that was due to its location, perched on the cliff overlooking the bay. It was a long site, with a carriage gate at one end to the right of the house, stretching some one hundred yards, and a single gate at the other, providing access from the house to the set of pedestrian steps that went all the way down to the town square. There was a lawn to the front, no more than thirty feet deep, and it fell away to sheer cliff face and the lower road below. Behind the house had been dug out from the rockface, the space behind being just wide enough for a large carriage to come through but no more, rendering the back of the house rather dark, and the cliff was steeply stacked, composed of shale and limestone. The view of the entire harbour from the front was spectacular. Harp went to school every day via the steep steps that ran outside the southern gable of the Cliff House. The locals called the steps the Smuggler’s Stairs, as they linked the port with the top road out of town.
‘It’s lovely,’ Rose agreed, taking in the house as if for the first time. ‘And Henry Devereaux wanted us to have it.’
A small smile formed on Rose’s lips, and Harp was struck by how pretty her mammy was. She had been so sad and worried about their future since Mr Devereaux died, the emotions etched deep on her face, her eyes losing all their sparkle, but today, as the sun shone on the sailboats bobbing about on the harbour and the diamond glints on the sea illuminated the scene before them, the world seemed like somewhere they could go on living.
In those weeks since Mr Devereaux had died, Titanic had sunk, with all those lives lost, and the future seemed dark and terrifying. At night Harp would lie awake, wondering how she could live in a world where such awful things happened to people who had done no harm. But today she felt the beginnings of green shoots. Her heart was still broken and she had regular nightmares, imagining Mr Devereaux on Titanic, him locked in a cage beneath the sea, calling to her, begging her to let him out, to help him to swim home, but she couldn’t. She woke in tears most nights with her mother’s arms around her as she cried for him, for all of the people who were going to America full of excitement, for herself.
‘So now we don’t have to leave? We have somewhere to live forever? We don’t have to separate?’ Harp needed to hear her mother say the words, to take back the horrific prospect of them going to work in different houses.
‘That’s true, Harp, we don’t. We have a home of our very own.’
Rose went in and made them some more tea and brought it out to the wrought-iron table and chairs against the western gable, the warmest part of the house in the afternoon as the sun tracked around. Together they sat and leaned their heads back against the wall, allowing the sun to warm their faces.
‘Am I dreaming this, Harp?’ her mother asked without opening her eyes.
‘No, Mammy, I don’t think so,’ Harp replied, enjoying the sound of a seagull cawing loudly overhead. ‘Did you read your letter?’ she asked, feeling her letter in the pocket of her dress. She longed to take it out and read it again but somehow felt it wasn’t right.
Rose sighed. ‘Not yet. I will – I just need to process this first.’
‘Why did he do it, do you think?’ Harp asked quietly.
Rose thought for a moment. ‘Well, he had a connection to you, something nobody else could understand except the two of you really. I was there, I saw it, but even I wasn’t part of it. Ever since you were little, he was never anxious around you. Even the way he spoke to you was more relaxed, more at ease than with anyone else in the world. And he never spoke to you like you were a child, but always as an equal. And you and he liked the same things, books, music. He would speak to me too, but not the way he was with you. His mother used to terrify him, the poor man. Whenever she would deign to speak to him at all, she had him tongue-tied and stammering. He wasn’t like that with you.’
‘We didn’t talk all that much. Sometimes we wouldn’t say anything for days – we’d just read and listen to music. But I didn’t mind. It wasn’t awkward.’ Harp smiled at a reminiscence. ‘I remember once, when I was seven or eight, reading Pride and Prejudice. Mr Darcy was enduring Mrs Bennet and her quest to marry off her daughters, and I asked him if he’d ever thought about marrying – he had a fine house and a good family name. But he said he was no Mr Darcy and that the Cliff House was a poor relation of Pemberley, and that the only thing he and Mr Darcy shared was a tendency to social awkwardness.’
Rose nodded. ‘He hated meeting new people undoubtedly.’
‘He took care of us, though,’ Harp said with a smile.
‘He did.’ Her mother turned to her. ‘He wasn’t like anyone else, and that’s the truth. He wasn’t perfect, he had faults, but he loved you, Harp, in his own way, and he took care of us.’
‘So does this mean I can go back to school?’ Harp asked tentatively. Much as she hated the bullying, she longed for the opportunities to advance that formal education afforded her. She could learn independently, of course – she’d done that all her life – but she’d need to matriculate to get to university, and to do that, she had to go to school.
‘Do you want to?’ her mother asked.
Harp nodded.
‘Even with Emmet Kelly and all of that?’ her mother pressed.
Harp thought for a moment. Perhaps her mother knew more about the torment she’d endured thus far than she realised. ‘I don’t like him teasing me, or the way the others think me strange, and I would like a friend but nobody has ever tried to be my friend. I did try, before, but it never worked. I am different, Mammy, I know that, and not just because of Mr Devereaux and living here. I react differently to other people. It’s hard to explain. Sometimes I feel like everyone else knows how to be and I don’t. I say the wrong things, or I freeze up when someone talks to me. I try to be like the others, but I never seem to get it right. But I’ve learned to like school despite all of it. I love learning, I love books and finding things out, and I really want to go to university, so I would like to go back.’
Rose reached over and cupped the side of Harp’s face in her hand. ‘He was right about you. You are so special and different. And I know that’s not much use to you when you go to school, and I know you’d like a friend, but there are people in the world who will love you for who you are, Harp, I promise you that.’ She exhaled. ‘This is a small place and the people here are good, decent, you know, but they don’t trust what they can’t understand. And they can’t understand you, any more than they could understand Henry. The people of this town, they’re not your people, but your people are out there – they really are. People who will understand you and admire you for the amazingly brilliant person you are. So if you want to go back, then of course you can.’
Harp heard a hesitation in her mother’s voice. ‘But?’ she asked.
Rose gave her a small smile. ‘Well, getting this house, it’s the most wonderful and unexpected thing in the world, but it doesn’t solve the problem of us having no money at all. I will need to find a job, and even then, there is so much to be done here.’
‘Mr Quinn was looking at the roof when he called to check on us,’ Harp said, remembering the kind man’s look of pity when he saw the damage the weather had done.
‘I know. He told me it would need to be looked at soon, otherwise the timbers will rot completely and we’ll need a new roof. But at the time it was going to be Ralph Devereaux’s problem and I had enough of my own, so I didn’t take much notice.’
‘But now it’s our problem?’ Harp said.
‘It is. But we’ll figure something out, don’t worry.’
Harp watched as a tender approached the quay wall far below. Another ship, nothing as big or as celebrated as Titanic, was at anchor in the bay, and people were assembled in order to board it. She
wondered what terror was going through their heads. Was fear overriding the excitement? If the mighty unsinkable Titanic could go down, then anything could. The sea stretching out before her looked benign, pretty and cheery, but she knew it was not that. The sea could be unforgiving, cold and grasping and did not give up if it wanted you.
‘“Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes, nothing of him that doth fade”,’ Harp recited gently.
‘What is that?’ her mother asked.
‘Ariel’s song, from The Tempest.’
Rose raised an eyebrow.
Harp smiled. ‘Shakespeare. It’s about Ferdinand’s father, who was believed to have drowned at sea. I was thinking about the people on Titanic.’
‘It’s so sad, but they’re in heaven now,’ Rose said.
Harp said nothing. The whole town was subdued in the wake of the disaster…or was it? It was hard to tell. She was defeated by loss herself so perhaps it just felt that way. There had certainly been more activity than usual, and even some newspaper reporters had been asking questions and taking photographs, but it had all passed her and her mother by. In the time since the disaster, they had gone out to buy food when it was necessary but nothing else.
The streets of Queenstown were always busy with locals and travellers alike. Titanic had garnered so much attention undoubtedly, but every few days a ship was in, either coming or going to the US. They sat, side by side, looking down at the bustling town. Everyone and everything in Queenstown was somehow connected to the transatlantic voyage business.
Suddenly, Rose had an idea. ‘What about if we opened a guest house?’
Harp looked at her mother. What did they know about running a place like that? Maybe her mother did, but Harp knew absolutely nothing.
‘We can’t do that, Mammy. Sure Mrs O’Flaherty has the boarding house below at World’s End. She’d have a fit if we set up in opposition to her, and I wouldn’t like to be at the wrong end of her. She’s a right demon. And the Imperial is lovely but only for the very wealthy who want butlers and footmen and all the rest of it.’
‘No, Harp, listen. Not for the third-class passengers – they will always stay at the boarding house – and only the first-class passengers can afford the Imperial Hotel, but what about the middle group, the second-class passengers? Or the better-off third class who don’t want to share with all sorts of people, or the less-well-off first class? What about if we opened the rooms upstairs? There are so many empty bedrooms, and what if we did them up and offered more upmarket accommodation than the boarding house but not as fancy as the Imperial with the saltwater baths and the stables and all the rest of it. Something between the two, for people who don’t want to sleep six to a room on hard bunks picking up all sorts of things but can’t afford the real luxury. We could do it, and they would love staying here, with the views and everything. We could offer a nice comfortable night’s sleep in a private room and a good breakfast.’
‘But the rooms here are in no fit state for anyone to stay in. They’ve not been used for decades.’ Harp considered her mother’s idea and dismissed it. She loved the Cliff House, and even she, not the most observant person when it came to things like that, could see the place needed a lot of work. Besides, the idea of having a whole lot of strangers in their home, touching their things, frightened her.
‘But couldn’t we make them usable? I mean, what do they need?’ Rose was warming to the idea. ‘We could make new curtains and bedspreads. The beds and furniture are all there. What do they need except airing and a good cleaning? We have the five big bedrooms on the second floor, and that’s not counting the ones on the top floor, although they are in the worst condition, in all fairness, so it’s a bigger job bringing them back from the dead. But the ones off the first landing aren’t too bad, I think, if we put some elbow grease into it. We could keep the top floor for ourselves, so we’d still have our privacy. That’s ten people at two to a room, and if we charge a pound per person for bed and breakfast, that would be ten pounds a night. The breakfasts would be easy – tea, porridge, brown bread and home-made jam. And we could get hens, and we could offer a cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs for an extra charge, and it would be our own business.’ Rose’s eyes glittered with excitement. ‘Imagine, Harp, never having to work for anyone else again? Making our own money? We could control our own lives, Harp, be our own masters.’
Her mother’s eyes gleamed with the possibility of it all. Harp swallowed her misgivings. Rose was right – they needed an income and Cliff House was beautiful and in the most ideal location. ‘I’m not much good at stuff like that, but I could help before and after school and during the holidays. And maybe if it was busy, we could take someone on for laundry or something, or send it out if we made enough… And I could entertain the guests by playing music for them… And it would mean…’
Harp paused. She had not plucked a string since Mr Devereaux died, but now, for the first time, she felt like she could. Part of her actually wanted to feel the bittersweet heartbreak of the tunes he’d loved and to see in her mind’s eye the sheer bliss on his face when she would play.
‘If it worked, I could save up and we could afford to send you to university,’ Rose finished for her.
Harp coloured. It was her dearest wish to study literature and science and music and art. She had no idea what she wanted to do. Some days she thought she might be an archaeologist, other times a musician or an artist. She had so many ideas, so many plans.
Rose placed her hands on Harp’s shoulders. ‘I really think we could do this,’ she said.
Harp nodded. ‘Of course we could, if you think we could. And there’s a need. Mrs O’Flaherty is always full, even if it is with fellows full of drink looking for a fight or women with loads of children, and there are people coming and going through here all the time. The Imperial is so expensive, almost two pounds a night. For people who are about to embark on a big adventure, even if they’re rich, maybe they’d want to save their money but still stay somewhere nice and respectable?’
Rose smiled slowly. ‘You know, Harp, Henry was right – you’re a marvel. We could go down to the ticket office and maybe put a sign up, and one in the railway station as well. We won’t be stepping on anyone’s toes – well, except the Imperial Hotel, but I doubt we’d be much competition to the mighty Mr Bridges.’
Harp felt a surge of excitement. ‘So we’ll do it?’
‘I think we should certainly give it a try anyway.’ Rose hugged her daughter. ‘Henry would want us to stay here and we can’t do it if we don’t have any money, so this is a way of staying in our home. Imagine, Harp, it’s our home now and we can make a living from it if we do it right.’
‘All because of Mr Devereaux,’ Harp said softly.
Rose Delaney sat on her bed. Harp was down in Henry’s study playing an O’Carolan piece; she could hear her up through the floorboards. Her daughter was entranced by the music, Rose knew, even without seeing her.
The stiff envelope was in her hands, still unopened. What was stopping her? She didn’t really know, but there was no way she could put it off any longer. She slid her finger under the flap, opened it and extracted a single sheet.
Dear Rose. She smiled at that. He hardly ever used her name, and when he did he always blushed and mumbled.
I had to leave, it seems. Something that will break my foolish and, as it turns out, distinctly defective heart. A family failing, apparently – the same complaint got my father. Though I suspect he was happier to check out than I, a final welcome finale to my mother’s endless carping.
My death means I can finally say the words I could never utter in life.
I want you to have written in black and white the truth of my feelings for you so you might never doubt them as the years slide by. Rose, you and Harp are all I care about, the only people on earth I ever loved.
I know the truth of her parentage. I found a sworn statement among my mother’s p
apers after her death last year, a horrible document she made you sign, forcing you to silence on the subject of Harp’s father in return for allowing you and Harp to stay here. Though the document didn’t name Ralph, it wasn’t me, my father was dead, and so it could only have been my brother.
Despite that difficult start, and your appalling treatment at the hands of my family, we created a world inside these walls where we were just three people living happily together. I loved those years and hated anyone to enter our bubble, fearing that to bring our perfect little family out into the cold, harsh critical light of the world would somehow break the magic spell. Perhaps you saw me as just the last Devereaux, the peculiar son who rejected the world in favour of books – you have no reason not to. But know that for me, you and Harp were my whole world.
I know you both thought me odd, and I was. How strange to refer to yourself in the past tense! But the world confounded me in ways I couldn’t explain to you in life. I feel compelled to try now.
When I was a child, my father was aloof and distant, my mother nagging and haughty. Ralph and I were nothing more than a necessary inconvenience. People like them were bred to breed, and we were the result. There was no love between my parents. Not even affection, I’d wager. A succession of British nannies and governesses were shipped out to Japan for our youth, all authoritarian, some violent and others negligent, and they were followed by excruciating years at boarding school in England, where every aspect of my being was assaulted – physically, emotionally, intellectually.
Returning to the Cliff House after school was a mercy, and by then I believe my parents had given up any faint hope that I would make anything of myself, and so I was left alone with my books. It was bliss.
Ralph and I were not close; we might as well have been different species altogether for all we had in common. He and I lived here for a time as young men, but he was sent to India soon after you came to work here. Now I know why, though there were other reasons too, I think. Other women, debts and so on. Nothing was ever said outright, but when you say as little as I do, you hear and notice a lot.
Last Port of Call: The Queenstown Series Page 9