Ashes In the Wind (17 page)

The big vet doesn’t come until the afternoon. The Elector is back in his box, head lowered and swinging from side to side, clearly in pain. Now and again he makes a low harsh groan, a sound John has never heard from a horse.

‘If it’s colic it should be better by the morning. See if he’ll take this in a bucket of water. Keep him on his feet if you can, but if he goes down, leave him be.’

By the evening The Elector is down again. John spends the night in the box, watching for any signs of recovery. There are none. The vet comes back, looks the horse over, takes his temperature, and says, ‘It’s not colic, more’s the pity. It’s grass sickness.’

‘Grass sickness? We’ve the best grass in the county, and there’s no ragwort in our paddocks.’

‘It’s not the grass, it’s a virus and we don’t know much about it. I’ve only ever seen half a dozen cases.’

‘What’s the cure?’

The vet looks first at John, then at The Elector and says, ‘There is no cure. It kills a horse in forty-eight hours or less. The kindest thing...’

John turns his head away; he doesn’t want to hear the kindest thing.

‘He’s in great pain, you can see that, hear it in his breathing. And it’ll get worse.’

Charles comes down ten minutes later. ‘We had a case here six years ago,’ he says to John. ‘The first and I hoped the last. It’s nothing you’ve done, or not done.’

‘Best do it out in the yard if you can get him up,’ says the vet.

John, in a daze, scarcely believing what is happening, gets The Elector out in the yard with Mick and Sean.

‘You hold his head up, and mind you stand clear when he goes.’

The vet holds the bolt gun to The Elector’s forehead, there is a sharp crack, and the stallion goes down sideways onto the cobbles, twitches and lies still.

‘I’ll get Timmy to come tomorrow and take him away for the hounds,’ Charles says, sees the look on John’s face and adds, ‘We’ll bury his heart by the big oak alongside The Archduke.’

John, unable to hold back his tears, walks over to his cottage.

The next day John watches as Timmy, Mick and Sean haul The Elector’s body up onto a trailer and drive away to the kennels. By now the dead stallion’s legs are stiff and straight like a child’s horse that has fallen over. He tries to remember The Elector proud and gleaming in the Dublin Show ring, but terrible images of the stallion being cut up and used to feed the hounds are hard to force away. Cis comes and knocks on his door in the evening, but he doesn’t answer.

John spends the next day looking for ragwort in the paddock. He wants to be sure that it is a virus that has killed The Elector, and not carelessness on his part. The paddock grass is clear. All day he is unable to rid his mind of the stiff dead body of the stallion. He goes to bed early, and is lying awake when he hears a horse come into the yard; a few minutes later Grania comes into his bedroom. He jumps out of bed and she holds him, his head buried in her shoulder. After a minute or two John lights the oil lamp.

‘We’ve never been naked,’ says Grania.

She undresses quickly, and they stand together in the lamplight, looking at each other, touching each other. John bends down, runs his hands from her heels to her calves, the backs of her thighs, her buttocks, strokes the channel of her back, then lifts her into bed. A few moments later Grania gives a little cry, and says, ‘That’s where you belong.’ She stays until morning.

‘You’ll be all right now?’ she says as she leaves.

‘We’ll be all right.’

J
OHN
SPENDS
THE
next three months working around the stud, repairing fences, painting gates, replacing old water troughs and cleaning every saddle, bridle and bit until they are almost worn away. Charles and he go to look at possible replacements for The Elector, but don’t see anything they like. Charles will consider only a stallion from The Archduke’s bloodline.

‘That two-year-old up in the home paddock might do,’ says Charles. ‘He’s by The Elector out of a good mare, and he looks the part. But he’ll have to do something on the racecourse first. He’ll go into training next month.’

John continues to ride out most mornings at Paddy Brennan’s yard. He wins another hunter chase and is placed a couple of times on Hunting Cap, but the horse pulls up lame after a race at Naas and is put away for the season.

John wants to forget The Elector; he wants to remember his night with Grania. He gets only a single unsigned postcard from Connemara, a view of the Atlantic and the Cliffs of Moher; on it Grania has written, ‘Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still.’

The words make John happy; he is not sure what the Post Office will make of them.

Towards the end of July he is called up to Dublin to see his solicitor in Leeson Street.

‘We’re making good progress with the claim. You’re entitled to compensation for the burning of Derriquin and its contents; we’ve asked for twenty thousand, and you might wind up with ten. Your mother was a careful woman; she maintained a detailed inventory of all the pictures, silver, books and furniture in the castle, and all the livestock and farm machinery.’

John is shown the ledger, bound in dark green cloth, with ‘Derriquin’ in gold letters on its cover. Seeing Eileen’s neat writing brings back memories of his mother at her desk in the Derriquin library, her face illuminated by the soft light of the oil lamp, her fingers brushing a loose strand of hair from her cheek. John has to blink hard to avoid tears. He stands up, walks over to the window, looks at the busy street below for a moment.

‘How long will the claim take to settle?’

‘Probably a year or two. They’re snowed under with claims. We can arrange an advance against the final payment if that would help.’

John declines the offer, but he goes away pleased. He’s never felt he needed more money, but he has started to think about Grania’s return.

Two days later John is cleaning out the visitors’ stables when Mick comes into the yard looking worried.

‘He’d like to see you up at the Fort now.’

John walks up to the house and sees an unfamiliar car standing outside the front door; he recognizes the driver, the man McCarthy who had come to collect Grania’s mare. He has a moment of elation, followed by a feeling of unease when he sees Mary the kitchen maid. She is not normally on duty at the front door.

‘They’re all in the dining room,’ she says.

At one end of the mahogany dining table, below the full-length portrait of Nathaniel Burke in the full wig and red robes of a judge of the Prerogative Court, next to Grania, is a man he has never seen before. Johnnie Mannion is strongly built, with dark hair, bushy eyebrows, brown eyes, big hands that he opens and closes on the table in front of him. The knuckles and backs of his hands are covered in black hair. Grania has been crying and there is a bruise on her cheekbone, which she hides with her hand. She looks at John for a moment, then looks away. At the other end of the table are Charles and Cis.

John goes towards Grania and is pulled back by Charles. ‘Better sit with us and hear what Mannion has to say.’

‘It’s Mister Mannion. And I won’t take long. Grania’s pregnant, and it’s down to you, Mister John Burke.’

John looks astonished, then smiles.

‘It’s no laughing matter. You seduced my daughter.’

Grania looks up, manages a little smile of her own, and says, ‘That’s not...’ John notices that her lower lip is cut and swollen.

‘That’s enough. I’m doing the talking. I know all about the love nest at the Folly, and it’s not the first time that it’s been used by a Burke for this sort of carry-on. You are never to see her again. And you’d better leave Ireland, else I won’t answer for the safety of this house nor anyone in it.’

‘There’s no need for that kind of threatening talk, Mister Mannion,’ says Cis.

‘I’ll marry Grania. I love her.’ John stands up, and Charles puts a restraining hand on his shoulder.

Grania begins to cry quietly and holds her face in her hands.

‘I’ll see you both dead first,’ says Mannion. ‘You’re an English Protestant, the son of an informer. Your mother was responsible for the death of thirteen Volunteers, all good men. Grania’s to marry Eamonn McCann next week, and she’s lucky he’ll take her and your bastard. I want you to hear it from her.’

Grania takes her hands away from her face, looks at John, says, ‘It’s true. It’s what will happen. Else you’ll be killed and this house burned.’ She buries her face in her hands again.

‘She wouldn’t say this if you hadn’t beaten and browbeaten her. What kind of man are you to knock your own daughter about, bullying her into marriage? Grania, I love you, you know that. I meant what I said.’

‘I meant what I said,’ replies Mannion. ‘Stallion man, is it? More a pony boy, I’d say.’

He gets up, one hand around Grania’s elbow, the other in the small of her back. John looks at her stomach, still flat, not showing. As they push past John he reaches for Grania’s hand, but she pulls away, and they leave the room.

Charles holds him back. ‘It’s a youthful infatuation and you’ll get over it soon enough, you’re only twenty-three, for heaven’s sake. The girl’s better off with her lawyer. But you can’t stay here; Mannion means what he says, and I’m not having Burke’s Fort go the way of Derriquin. Besides, we’ve no stallion now.’

John says nothing more. He remembers how he had been slow to react when Eileen and William had been kidnapped by the IRA Volunteers; he is not going to make the same mistake again. He is determined to talk to Grania, confident that he can persuade her to come to him. Mannion’s a loud-mouthed bully, he thinks to himself. It’s our child she’s having, not Mannion’s to give away to Eamonn McCann. Our child, he says out loud, our child.

John walks over to Mannion’s farm after dark. As he comes into the farmyard a dog starts to bark. He hears a noise behind him, turns and is knocked over by a powerful blow to the head. Half conscious on the ground, he curls up into a ball to avoid a series of kicks to the ribs and groin and head until he blacks out.

Charles and Cis find him, more dead than alive, dumped on the front steps of Burke’s Fort the next morning. He is still unconscious, his face bloody and bruised, his jaw and nose broken, both eyes completely closed, one leg at an impossible angle. The ambulance is called and takes him straight to hospital in Dublin.

For five weeks John lies in a coma. He wakes up to find Cis beside his bed.

‘I thought you were gone, gone beyond my prayers and the Poor Clares. Thanks be to God you’re back.’

John, through a splitting headache, says only one word. ‘Grania.’

‘She’s married, she’s Mrs McCann now, and that’s for the best. They burned the Folly the day you were dumped on our doorstep; Mannion has said Burke’s Fort will go the same way if you come back to Queen’s County.’

John turns his battered face into the pillow.

A
WEEK
LATER
John is moved to a convalescent home, a handsome Italianate villa in Howth with a view of the Irish Sea. There are only twenty-four patients; one other civilian, a lawyer injured when the Four Courts were blown up, the rest British Army soldiers wounded during the War of Independence. These are men who have lost legs, whose arms have been amputated at the elbow or shoulder, one man blinded, several with bad burns. The home is kept going by a charitable trust set up by public subscription just after the Great War. Charles Burke pulled some strings.

‘He’s a war casualty,’ Charles argued without going into unnecessary detail. ‘His father was a major in the Royal Irish Dragoons. Won the MC, killed in 1916 on the Somme.’

It is the regimental connection that clinches John’s place. Questioned by the other patients about his injuries, he gives non-committal replies. By now his face has recovered its normal shape; there has been no permanent damage to his eyes. His broken nose and jaw have healed, although his nose has set at a crooked angle.

‘You look like a boxer,’ says one of the nurses, who has taken a fancy to him. ‘Not a very successful one, I must say.’

His right leg is the problem, broken at the ankle and in two more places below the knee. When finally the plaster comes off, John is shocked at the shrunken, bleached, scarred leg that emerges. It throbs continuously, and he cannot put any weight on it for more than a few seconds.

‘Will it ever come good?’ he asks.

‘Only if you do the exercises. Some of the men here would be glad of a leg like that,’ says an unsympathetic doctor.

John, chastened, takes his regime seriously. He abandons his crutches, swims every day in the small sea-water pool, and lifts weights attached to his ankle every morning and evening to build up his muscles.

He has too much time to think. Images of his night with Grania, her body in the lamplight, her last kiss as she left in the morning, the meeting with Mannion at Burke’s Fort, the bruise on her cheek, her last words to him as she left, ‘It’s what will happen,’ shuttle through his brain in an agonizing slideshow. Thoughts of Grania with Eamonn are impossible to banish. He plans a trip to Maryborough and then realizes he has no idea what to say or do if he meets her again. Is she still pregnant? Could that child ever be mine? He torments himself with unanswered, unanswerable questions until he thinks he will go mad.

Cis comes to see him and is a comfort, although he cannot share her faith that everything is God’s will and must be borne. She prays for him, and smiles when he says he is a lost cause. She gives him a little book of prayers, in the front of which she has written, ‘To John from Cis Burke, in the hope that he will come to God through all his troubles’. Although he cannot pray any more – he had prayed for Eileen’s life, and was unanswered – one of Cis’s prayers,
‘
Mother of God, Star of the Sea, Home of the Wanderer, Pray for me
,’
sticks in his mind, and he says this in spite of himself.

When his leg is healed he takes long walks along the sea, often pushing a captain from the Lancashire Fusiliers who has lost both legs above the knee.