My father was dead, of the same condition that now besets me, having not uttered more than a few syllables to me since I returned from school.
Then we endured all those years with my mother, and when she took ill and died, I’m not ashamed to say I felt nothing but relief. It would be just me and you and Harp. Though my mother was confined to her bed for the last years of her life, her cold, malevolent presence was as pervasive as smoke. It might sound harsh, but she never loved me, or even liked me much, and the feeling was mutual. Her treatment of you, my dear Rose, is testament to the fact that my perceptions of her were completely accurate. You are the polar opposite of her as a mother. You are what a mother should be – warm, loving, gentle…yet strong.
What a wonderful girl Harp is, Rose. You should be so proud. I never in my life met anyone like me, but Harp is. She’s lovely and sociable, where I am neither, but she understands me, and I her.
I love her, Rose, and I love you. I know I could never have been a man worthy of your affection in that sense, and I would never have had the audacity to suggest it, but know that you were treated badly by one Devereaux brother, for which I am incredibly sorry, but you were adored by the other. Completely and totally.
Rose didn’t realise she was crying until a tear smudged the ink. Henry was an unusual man, and he was right – she’d never thought of him in that way – but he was ten times the man his brother was. She should have seen it. Maybe things could have been so different. But she didn’t, and because he was such an insecure and sensitive adult who never wanted to hurt anyone, he never said.
And so, my love, I have had to leave you and Harp. The Cliff House is your home and I hope it always will be. I love the thought of you living happily here. Please, Rose, continue to care for Harp as you have. Love her. Do not allow anyone to dim her light. She is special, Rose, and though I don’t have a right to be, I am so proud of her.
Marry if you meet someone worthy of you and Harp. Be happy, my love, please. You deserve so much.
I am leaving you both the house. It is bequeathed to Harp because of the proviso in my mother’s will that it must go to a Devereaux, but I know you two will stick together. I wish I could leave you more. Perhaps if I’d been braver, I could have.
Live a long and happy life, my darling.
All my love,
Henry
Rose folded the letter and placed it carefully in its envelope. It explained so much. She’d never had an inkling of his feelings for her, but she now took comfort in the afterglow of his love. Though nobody would see it as such, he was a father to Harp all of her life, not just since he discovered she was his niece. He was kind and constant and noble, cherishing and nurturing her, and Rose knew she was doing the right thing by accepting his last gift to them.
Chapter 10
The next three weeks passed them by in a blur of sewing and cleaning and dusting and polishing. The rooms had to be aired and repainted, the floorboards sanded and polished, but they did it, the two of them, working day and night.
They used what little money Rose had saved to buy paint, and when Mr Quinn heard of their venture, he cleared out his shed and found all sorts of tools and paintbrushes and even some paint left over from his house. He and Brian arrived one day in overalls ready to help out, and Rose and Harp were delighted to have strong men around for lifting.
Mr Quinn was a slight and quiet man and restful to be around and Brian was very nice, and as they sanded the floor together, Brian told Harp how he was going away to university next year to train as a doctor. She envied him all the opportunities he had and told him so.
‘Sure won’t you want to stay and run this place with your mother now?’ he’d asked when she said that.
‘No, that’s not my dream. I want to study, get a degree, travel,’ she said, wrapping the sandpaper around a wooden block as Mr Quinn had taught her and rubbing the floorboards vigorously.
Brian gently took the block from her hands and turned it around. ‘Sand with the grain, not against it.’ He smiled. ‘Well, Harp Delaney, if anyone can do that, it would be you, sure you’re a pure genius,’ he said with a lopsided grin.
‘I’m not,’ she protested, colouring at the thought and getting flustered. ‘I just read a lot, and Mr Devereaux taught me lots of things so I –’
‘Harp, it was a compliment.’ Brian smiled again, throwing some sawdust at her. It lodged in her wavy hair and she started to giggle as she extracted it. ‘You’re the cleverest person in that school, by a million miles, and some people resent it, but I don’t. I think you’re amazing.’
‘I’m not,’ she began again. ‘And you’re not even in my class, so how could you know –’
‘Harp Delaney is a legend in the school, surely you know that?’ He went on sanding. ‘You know Mrs Barry, who taught you in third class, is my aunt, don’t you? She said you were a child genius.’
Harp blushed to the roots of her hair. She’d loved being in Mrs Barry’s class; she was such an inspiration. All the other teachers were either men or nuns and they asked the boys the more difficult questions and often ignored the girls altogether. Mrs Barry was married to the master, who taught Brian.
‘So Master Barry is your uncle?’ she asked.
‘Well, uncle-in-law. Mrs Barry is my aunt Kate – she’s my mother’s sister – and she married Ted Barry.’
‘Is he nice at home?’ Harp asked. The headmaster always seemed forbidding and unapproachable. He taught the senior class, so she’d had no direct dealing with him.
Brian nodded. ‘He is, and in fact he had great time for your Mr Devereaux. He and Henry Devereaux were pals as lads, I think, after the family came back from Japan, but neither Mrs Devereaux nor Mrs Barry thought it was a good idea. And so then Henry was sent off to some fancy boarding school in England. He always said he would have liked to renew the acquaintance, but since Mr Devereaux never came out, he didn’t like to intrude by calling, so he never got the chance.’
Harp felt profound sadness at that. She would have liked Mr Devereaux to have a friend. ‘He was sent to Stonefallow, a boarding school in the New Forest. He hated it.’ Harp remembered him telling her the horror stories of boarding school, where the PE master made them do midnight runs in the dark and the rain, of the poor food and regular beatings that were the norm.
‘Poor fella. I’d say it was bad, all right. Uncle Ted always said to those of us in school that he was great, funny and interesting.’
‘He was,’ Harp confirmed, glad to have some tenuous point of contact between Brian and Mr Devereaux. ‘He was very clever, and he always had time for you, to explain things. He never spoke to me like I was a silly child like most grown-ups do. And he knew everything.’ Brian smiled and she insisted. ‘Honestly, he knew every single thing. I never asked him something he didn’t know the answer to.’
‘I’m sorry I never met him,’ Brian said, and Harp nodded.
‘You would have liked him very much.’
That evening, after Brian and Mr Quinn left, Harp tuned the harp in the guest room that had once been Mr Devereaux’s study for the first time in weeks and played some slow airs, finishing with O’Carolan’s concerto. She rested the soundbox on her thin shoulder, her fingers reaching through all the strings from soundboard to pillar effortlessly, instinctively finding the strings without looking or reading notes. She’d tried to read sheet music, and she could if pressed, but the music was so intuitive for her, so much a part of who she was, that the pages of black dots seemed superfluous, an unnecessary hurdle between her and melody.
She’d been avoiding playing, fearing it would be too painful, but she found to her surprise that it had the opposite effect. She was comforted by the familiar tunes and could almost feel Mr Devereaux’s presence in the room. He would have dismissed it as a fanciful notion, a fiction made up by those who could not face the fact that the mortal realm was all there was, but she smiled and played and felt him there with her.
The weeks flew by in a b
lur of renovation and cleaning, and soon the town was at its peak of hustle and bustle. The summertime was the busiest around Queenstown, people preferring to make the transatlantic voyage when the seas were calmer and less prone to storms, especially in the wake of Titanic. But there were also lots of people just taking the sea air on their holidays in Queenstown, and her mother planned to take advantage of that market too.
They’d received some cash from Mr Cotter, the solicitor, the funds left in Mr Devereaux’s estate, and had used it to patch up the worst of the wear and tear on the house and to take out an advertisement in the Cork Examiner and the Irish Independent announcing the opening. The trust fund set up by Mrs Devereaux that had paid Rose’s wages and the upkeep of the house had reverted to Ralph, such as it was. They lived as frugally as they could, using the furniture and china of the house and darning moth holes in ancient sheets and blankets. Buying something new was a last resort.
They had received so many enquiries by post that they were booked solid from the 21st of June. They had one week left to turn the house into the beautiful guest house they’d promised.
They bought fabric – yellow gingham and white cotton were the cheapest they could find – for Rose to make curtains and bedspreads. Harp polished the old furniture with beeswax until her arms ached. The house was very slowly coming back to a slightly shabbier version of its former glory. The leaks were disguised and thankfully were not that noticeable in the new guest bedrooms; at least in summer they weren’t. Hopefully by winter they would have made enough money to do a job on the roof. The worst of the rot on the windows was patched up with paste and painted over. The plan was that they would be able to invest in a man to come and do repairs next winter if they made it through the summer season.
They’d contacted Mr Quinn to see if he would consider running a taxi service with his carriage from the station for their guests, and he was happy to do it. The steep pull of the hill would be a bad start to a guest’s experience at the Cliff House, especially with luggage. His hearse was lying idle most of the week, so he was glad of the business.
Harp and her mother worked night and day, falling into bed each night after midnight, their limbs aching, only to wake again at six to tackle the house once more. Word got around about their good fortune, and though undoubtedly it had set the tongues wagging behind their backs, to their surprise there was no sneering or smart remarks.
Harp noticed that Mammy had started to dress slightly differently – still very proper and ladylike, of course, but with a little more flair. She didn’t dress all in black any more, as was befitting a housekeeper, and now wore pastel blouses and neutral-coloured skirts. Harp hid a smile when she and her mother walked into the cobbler’s a few days earlier to have their boots heeled and Mrs Deasy, the cobbler’s wife, was passing a remark to her husband about how Rose was looking very pleased with herself these days. Her back was turned to the shop door as she spoke, and she nearly died when she turned to see them standing there. Harp almost felt sorry for Mrs Deasy, who blushed bright pink when she realised Mammy had heard every word she said. Mr Deasy, a nice, polite man not given to gossip, hid a grin at his wife’s discomfiture and took their boots.
Harp had noticed that a lot, how some women seemed to be a bit resentful of her mother while men admired her. It wasn’t as if Rose was flirtatious or anything like that; she could never be accused of that. She was polite and courteous but a bit distant, Harp supposed. It was just that people always noticed her mother as she was so striking. Now that she was dressing like a business owner, she seemed to really irk the women, whereas the men just gazed appreciatively. Having notions above your station was a very grievous sin in Queenstown, and even before the inheritance, Harp imagined she and her mother were suspected of having outlandish notions. Harp considered it sometimes, wondering if there was merit to the way the people there thought, that one should know their place, but she decided there wasn’t. If nobody had ever tried to advance, to better themselves, to educate themselves, then mankind would still be living in caves. She wanted better for herself than she was entitled by virtue of her birth, and she would never apologise for it. Her mother too should, by the ideology of a small Irish town, be hanging her head in shame to have borne an illegitimate child of a Protestant gentleman and then, to add insult to injury, inherited his house. But Rose held her head up; she always did and always would.
Rose’s admission in school that Harp in fact was a Devereaux would be general knowledge by now, and so the fiction of Rose’s dead husband would have been exposed. But Mammy said the people of Queenstown were nothing if not business-minded. A guest house such as theirs could only elevate the status of the town as a destination, and so all businesses would benefit. Besides, they were not bad people. Gossip was the fuel that drove social interaction. She and Harp were headline news now, but next week their story would be forgotten in favour of someone else. It was just a case of riding it out. As usual she was right.
Mrs O’Flaherty from the boarding hostel even wished them well when she saw the advertisement in the newspaper for the Cliff House and said she would send anyone she thought could afford it up when she was full. To their utter astonishment, even the haughty Mr Bridges, the town magistrate and owner of the Imperial Hotel, called one day to see the progress and with a gift of a lovely leather-bound guest book for their hall table.
Mr Bridges was one of those Irish men who was more English than Irish, though to Harp’s knowledge he had lived all his life in Cork. His wife and the wife of Lieutenant Colonel DeVeers, the Royal Irish Constabulary senior officer stationed in Queenstown but who oversaw the entire lower harbour area, were sisters, the daughters of some high-ranking British official in Dublin Castle apparently.
The rank and file of the RIC were made up of locals mainly, though their quasi-military way of policing was different to other parts of the United Kingdom. Ireland had rebelled so many times under British rule, it was deemed necessary, but in general the constables were all right. The senior officers, though, were almost all Anglo-Irish Protestants. And the DeVeers and the Bridges families were certainly that.
‘You’re filling a niche in the market, Mrs Delaney. Well done,’ Mr Bridges had said warmly. ‘The people you are aiming at currently don’t stay in Queenstown – they stay in Cork and come down on the train – but if we can put them up here, well, they will use the local shops and services and they might pop into the hotel bar for a drink. So as I frequently say to Mrs O’Flaherty, a rising tide lifts all boats, Mrs Delaney. We are allies and friends, not enemies. There is business enough in this town for us all, and much better we pull together than separately, so if there is anything I can help with, please don’t hesitate.’
The idea of the impeccably groomed Mr Bridges having anything in common with the wild and frequently terrifying Mrs O’Flaherty was one that tickled Harp. The boarding house owner was well known in the town as being more than a match for any drunkard or man spoiling for a fight. Despite the rough-and-ready appearance of O’Flaherty’s, it was a well-run establishment and any nonsense was dealt with by the proprietress swiftly and severely. Mrs O’Flaherty had been married four times, each husband dying prematurely, though it would be a very brave or foolhardy man or woman who would remark upon it. But no matter what the state of her romantic life, Mrs O’Flaherty always managed well enough. She had a number of sons and daughters from those marriages, but the boarding house was her own, and she ran it alone.
They’d accepted Mr Bridges’ gift graciously and laughed when he was gone at what kind of a friendship could exist between the ruddy-cheeked, straight-talking Mrs O’Flaherty and the oh-so-perfect Mr Bridges. While her mother reminded her of the wonderful Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in the way that she refused to be cowed or made to feel inferior in a society that demanded that she should, Mrs O’Flaherty was more like Moll Flanders in the story by Daniel Defoe.
Mammy remarked how relieved she was that Mrs O’Flaherty w
as now too an ally of theirs rather than an enemy, for she would be a formidable one.
The night before the first guests were to arrive, Harp and her mother did one last tour of the house.
The front door no longer scraped across the tiles since Matt Quinn had taken it off the hinges and planed it to make it fit better, the wood having expanded over the years. The tiles shone after Harp scrubbed them using baking soda and bleach to rid them of decades of staining, and the rosewood hallstand gleamed with polish. The mirror was age spotted, but there was nothing to be done about that. The hatstand and umbrella holders were brass and looked like new after Harp’s rubbing with polish which she then buffed off with a soft cloth.
They’d revarnished the bannisters, and the royal-blue and gold stair-runner carpet that was threadbare on the corners had been released from its grips on the top and pulled down, then retacked, so the risers were now the treads. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best they could do.
Old paintings that had been in the family for years – that Henry had hated, claiming his ancestors were glowering at him from the walls – were retrieved from the attic, their gilt frames cleaned first with a soft brush to remove the dust and then washed with lukewarm soapy water. Harp agreed with Mr Devereaux as she washed them under her mother’s watchful eye – they looked very grumpy and sour – but her mother insisted they lent the place an air of sophistication; besides, they covered up the damp patches.
The kitchen was largely ignored in the work as the guests would not see it. They had four fully ready bedrooms, two bathrooms, the kitchen, a dining room and a drawing room. The other rooms were too badly in need of refurbishment, so they remained closed for now.
Last Port of Call: The Queenstown Series Page 10