Another Heartbeat in the House (12 page)

Outside on the parterre stood – as I had hoped – the cart that had served Mercy as a tumbrel for her kittens. I loaded it with my baggage, turned my back on the odious O'Dowd domicile, and set off for Grattan Hill.

THE GREY MOIRÉ
. The rose-pink sash. Unable to wait for evening, Edie had set the alarm clock for seven rather than eight o'clock and read another section of the manuscript over breakfast. She felt her mouth go dry and her heart pitter-pat as she reached for her notebook and ran a finger along the listed items. There!

74: A grey silk moiré evening dress.

67: A rose-pink sash with appliqué.

She mentally reviewed the other garments she had found in the trunk – the riding habit, the cashmere robe, the dinner gown – and wondered what had happened to the green tabinet and the sprigged mousseline mentioned by the narrator. Had they even existed? Was the manuscript a work of fiction, or was it a memoir? Had Eliza Drury lived and breathed, and maybe even walked the corridors of this house? And if so, what had brought her here from the O'Dowds' grotesque ménage?

Milo, who had been chewing his teething ring under a kitchen chair, stopped abruptly and pricked his ears. ‘Listen!' he said, and Edie heard the scrunch of bicycle tyres outside. The postman! She would not let him get away this time.

‘Shut up, Milo!' she commanded, as he started to bark. ‘Stay here!'

She slipped through the door, shutting it on Milo's affronted expression, and scooted along the corridor to the front door just in time to see a postcard land on the mat. From the kitchen she could hear Milo wailing in protest at being abandoned.

‘Hello!' Edie called, unlocking the door and pulling it open. ‘Hello there! Please don't mind the dog – he's only a pup.'

‘How are you, Miss?' The postman propped his bicycle against the gatepost and approached cautiously across the courtyard. He nodded at the front door. ‘I just left a postcard. From France.'

‘Thank you very much,' Edie said, smiling at him brilliantly. ‘Oh, it's so nice to talk to someone who isn't a dog with a jejune sense of humour! I've been immured with a Maltese mutt for the past few days,' she explained, on seeing a wary expression creep across the postman's face.

‘You're from across the water?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘From England?'

‘Yes. I'm here to close the place up for the Frobishers. It's to go to auction.'

‘I'd heard that, all right.'

Edie squinted up at the sky, amazed to see that it was cloudless, for a change. ‘It's a lovely day! What a surprise!'

‘The weather's set to be good for the next day or two.'

Edie's eyes went to the green post office bike.

‘May I borrow your pump?' she said.

‘What?'

‘Your bicycle pump. There's a bicycle here, but I just discovered yesterday that the tyres are flat.'

‘Show me,' said the postman, ‘and I'll do it for you.'

He detached the pump from the frame of his bicycle and followed Edie into the stable where the bicycles were stored.

‘How long are you here for?' he asked, hunkering down to attach the pump to the valve.

‘As long as it takes. I thought maybe a week, but there's masses to be done. I keep getting distracted, and thinking about whether or not to put something in the pile that's going to auction, or just chuck it out.'

‘You'll never plough a field by turning it over in your mind.' He looked up at her and tipped his cap. ‘Am't I after forgetting my manners. Seán the Post.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘That's my name. Seán the Post.'

‘Oh. I'm Edie. Edie –'

‘Chadwick. Pleased to meet you, Miss Chadwick.'

Edie wondered how he knew her surname, then remembered the postcard that he'd put through her letterbox.

‘I'd say there's a lot of junk, all right,' said Seán the Post. ‘It's a wonder, what piles up in these old houses over the years. The Grove-Whites sold up their big house in Doneraile in '31. There was stuff belonging to them going back a hundred years or more.'

‘Really? How thrilling! I've found trunks full of bits and pieces from Victorian times. When was this house built, do you know? There's a date carved on the shutter in the drawing room, but that could be random.'

‘I haven't an idea. It was here during the Great Hunger, far as I know.'

‘The Great Hunger?'

‘The potato famine that happened back in the last century. Did you never hear tell of it?'

‘No.'

‘Arra, why should you? 'Twas way before your time. But my grandfather is full of stories of it still.'

Because Edie's history teacher at school had been brain-numbingly boring, her grasp of the subject was flimsy; her acquaintance with Irish history even flimsier. She knew there had been dissension between Britain and Ireland that had led to numerous uprisings and that kind of thing, but any famines referred to in the pages of her history books had happened aeons ago, in places like Egypt and Ethiopia. Then suddenly she remembered the newspaper cutting she had unearthed, which had contained the lamenting proclamation,
A cry of Famine is rising from every parish in the land
…

‘Did many people die in the famine?' she asked.

Something clogged the air, some taut new dynamic stretched between them. Seán the Post stopped pumping for a moment or two, then began again more vigorously. ‘A million,' he said.

Edie said nothing, for her voice had deserted her.

‘A million died, and a million emigrated. Ireland lost a quarter of her population to starvation.'

‘I'm sorry. I didn't know. I really had no idea …' Edie felt herself colour. She wanted to turn and walk out of the stable and be sick from the shame she felt.

‘Sure, why would you know? They wouldn't care to remember those times in England. It didn't affect them over there.'

She remembered advertisements she'd seen in the Classified Ads sections of newspapers that stipulated
No Irish Need Apply
, and she felt another wave of shame wash over her. She cast desperately around for a question.

‘Was your grandfather alive at that time?' she managed.

‘He was just a boy then. But the stories that were handed down would shock you to the core. There's few living still that survived
an Gorta Mór
.'

‘An Gorta Mór?'

‘When the potato crops failed.
An Gorta Mór
means the Great Hunger.'

‘But there must have been other foodstuffs, other crops?'

‘They were all exported to England.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said, feeling again that rush of mortification. ‘How you Irish must hate us.'

Seán's expression was inscrutable. 'It was nearly a hundred years ago,' he said, squeezing the bicycle tyre between fingers and thumb. ‘That's good and firm for you now.'

‘Thank you.'

Detaching the valve from the front tyre, he set to work on the back one. ‘If you want to find out about the house, it's Mrs Callinan you should be talking to. She knows all the history hereabouts. She was the headmistress in the school for years.'

‘Mrs Callinan. Where might I find her?'

‘I'll write her address down for you.'

‘If it's no trouble …'

‘Sure how would it be trouble? Don't I know the exact whereabouts of everyone in these parts, and in the parish beyond?'

Seán pumped steadily for another minute, then twisted the cap back on the valve. ‘There. She'll be right as a trivet for you.'

‘I can't thank you enough! I was all set to walk into town today, but it'll be much more fun to cycle, especially since the weather's cleared up. I really need to get some groceries – there's practically nothing in the house to eat.'

Seán took a notepad from his pocket and scribbled something on it with a pencil stub. ‘There's Mrs Callinan's address for you,' he said, tearing off a page and handing it to her. ‘As for groceries, you'll find everything you need in the general stores or in Tom Sheehan's shop. Earl Grey tea –'

‘Oh, good!'

‘– and Bath Olivers and Patum Peperium and all.'

‘I don't really care for Patum Peperium. Though I am rather partial to Bath Olivers – with Wensleydale cheese. Yum!'

As Seán slung a leg over the crossbar of his bicycle, she thought she saw him smirk. ‘Goodbye, Miss Chadwick.'

‘Goodbye. Thank you for everything! You're an awfully good sort.'

And off he went.

Edie turned and walked back towards the house, the muscles of her face stretched in a rictus. What a chump she was! What an absolute muggins! She repeated her observations back to herself in a parody of her own voice.
There's practically nothing to eat
…
I don't really care for Patum Peperium
…
I
am
rather partial to Bath Olivers
… This to a man who had just acquainted her with the fact that the population of an entire country had been decimated – more than decimated – by starvation.

He'd been sending her up, of course, with his remarks about Bath Olivers and Patum Peperium and Earl Grey tea. Oh, God. And he was a
post
man! Word would get around to every house in the neighbourhood that there was a birdbrained ninny of a posh girl staying in Prospect House who didn't really care for Patum Peperium, but who
was
rather partial to Wensleydale cheese.

It got worse. When she picked the postcard up from the front door mat, she saw that it was from Deauville.

Fine cuisine! Cocktails by the pool! Baccarat! I'm living la vie en rose! How are you enjoying life among the bogtrotters, darling? Ian. XXX

Edie cycled into the little town of Doneraile that afternoon, since a map of the locality told her that it was closer than Buttevant by a mile or two. After two days stuck indoors it was blissful to be bowling along between hedgerows busy with birdlife, the faint scent of meadowsweet in the air, the sun warm on her face.

Doneraile was a small, pretty town, with plenty of picturesque cottages as well as houses of cut stone substantial enough to be dubbed ‘residences'. In ‘Doneraile Stores' there was a section devoted to animal feed next to the grocery counter, and Edie was glad to see Bonios, which were top of her shopping list. There were, of course, no Bath Olivers nor Patum Peperium to be had, but there was decent coffee, Huntley & Palmers Ginger Nuts, and jars of homemade jam as well as all the basics Edie required.

Word had, of course, got out that there was a lady staying in Prospect House. Edie did not even have to introduce herself.

‘Are you not afeared to be staying there all by yourself?' asked the shop girl.

Not until now, thanks, Missy, Edie wanted to say, but didn't. Instead she said, ‘Not at all! I have a dog for company. And lots to keep me busy.'

‘You're very brave. I wouldn't like to be stuck out there on my own,' said the shop girl, shaking her head lugubriously. ‘But maybe you don't believe in ghosts.'

I guess it doesn't matter whether I believe in them or not, thought Edie, because you're clearly going to enlighten me.

‘My cousin saw a ghost in the woods near there, with her own eyes,' declared the girl. ‘She and her sister-in-law and a friend were driving in a gig by the lake when the horse got a stone in its hoof and they got down to walk. Her sister-in-law had gone on in front, and she hadn't got far when my cousin saw a lady in an old-fashioned dress stepping along beside her. But the sister-in-law didn't pay any heed to the lady, and so my cousin and the friend made haste to overtake her. But just when they were catching her up, the lady dashed into the woods by the side of the road and the horse – which up to this had been perfectly quiet – reared up!'

The girl paused for effect.

‘Goodness,' said Edie, obligingly.

‘It was a bright moonlight night, but the sister-in-law – that the lady had walked beside – had seen nor heard nothing. My cousin described the appearance of the lady to the priest afterwards, and guess what he said? He said, “It is very like a tinker woman who was found dead nearby about six months ago.” But my cousin said no, it was a lady.'

Edie thought that this was possibly the most boring ghost story she had ever heard. ‘Well I never,' she said, packing her groceries into her string bag. Then, noticing that the shop girl seemed to be disappointed by her blasé response, she added, ‘You've sent shivers all along my spine!'

The girl seemed satisfied by this, so Edie made her happier still by asking for a bag of the treacle toffee that lay in a tray on the counter, and two or three postcards – including one of the local Presentation Convent to send to Ian.

‘I hope it's a good big fierce dog you have,' said the girl, as Edie left the shop.