Dark Rosaleen (14 page)

She sipped a glass of Sir Robert's elderberry wine. It had been a sparse but splendid dinner of roast hare. Sir Robert had shot it that afternoon and cooked it himself. He thought it might be the last.

‘It took father four hours to find that one,' Robin said. ‘In the old days he'd have had him in minutes. There's nothing left out there. Not a crow in the trees, not a fox in its hole. Every starling and tom-tit has gone and I don't think I've seen a hedgehog or a squirrel or even a frog for months. The hungry have finally cleared this land of life.'

‘That is why it's so quiet now,' Una said. ‘Haven't you noticed in the mornings? The only sound is the wind and the rustle in the trees.'

Robin reached out and held his sister's hand. ‘Even the nights are silent now. Do you remember how terrified we were of the owls as children? How we were told not to leave the window open or they would come and tear our eyes out?'

Una laughed. ‘And the bats would suck our blood until we were dry and no bigger than a pumpkin.'

‘And banshees were hiding behind the curtains to carry us away and turn us into frogs.'

Robin and Una had come from the same womb at the same time, but it was she who had been favoured in the making. She was plump and round with full cheeks, her skin the complexion of honey. Her hair was a tangle of chestnut curls, her eyes the colour of amber. She did not use face powder or rouge, nor did she wear a bodice, so her breasts stood full and firm against her blouse.

Her brother was slender, almost frail, and even now, in his mid-twenties, he had the look of a man who was already growing weary. Una told Kate how his health and strength had been taken from him as a little boy. She said that when he was a child he had decided that when he grew up he would become a bishop. He had turned their playroom into a chapel, with a tiny altar and a cross and every morning and evening he made her kneel and they said their prayers together. He was a determined little boy and his future as a man of the cloth seemed assured. Until the day of his conversion.

Una remembered it vividly.

‘May I tell it, Robin?' she asked. ‘Tell Kate the story?'

Robin nodded. Una began.

‘He was ten years old and we were climbing a tree on the estate when he fell and broke his ribs. One pierced his lung and he could not breathe. He was screaming. He was in such pain but I sat helpless, not daring to move him, afraid the rib would dig deeper and tear his heart. Father had ridden off for a doctor and left the priest to pray for him. But it was father's fast horse and the doctor who saved him.'

‘I remember the priest crossing himself and praying for my soul,' Robin said. ‘But he could not ease my pain, he could not mend my broken bones. All he could offer was a prayer and a promise.'

‘And so', Una continued, ‘he said he would not become a bishop when he grew up. He would become a doctor instead and our playroom, which had once been a make-believe chapel, became a hospital ward.'

For the first time in her life Kate glimpsed family life, watching, listening to their banter, joining in their laughter. She had never known what it meant, nor had she ever expected to discover it. Now she had been enveloped by two families, both so different, and she knew she could love them both just as comfortably. She arranged to stay the night and as she lay in bed, she wondered how she might join the two together.

She was woken by the sound of gunfire. She opened the window wider. She counted twenty shots and then the boom of a distant cannon. She heard Sir Robert shouting in the kitchen below. She put on her dressing gown and went down. Robin and Una were there. Sir Robert was still in his nightshirt and sleeping cap.

‘That's forty shots at least,' he said. ‘What on earth is happening?'

‘I thought I heard a cannon,' Kate said.

Sir Robert nodded. ‘So did we all. And I wish we hadn't.'

‘The firing is coming from the harbour,' said Robin.

‘From the harbour it is,' said Sir Robert. ‘And by God, I think I can guess what it's all about.'

Within an hour, his agent arrived at the door. Sir Robert had guessed correctly. Crowds in Youghal had plundered the shops and marched on the ships anchored in the harbour, ships about to sail with their cargoes of Irish wheat and oats, bound for Liverpool. The magistrate had sent troops to stop them crossing the River Bride at Youghal Bridge, but they had pushed past, shouting that it was a sin for Irish food to be sent abroad to England. Women had held their babies to the soldiers and bared their breasts to show they had no milk.

‘But the shots?' Sir Robert asked. ‘The cannons?'

‘It's Dungarvan, sir,' said the agent. ‘Things are worse there. They say that a thousand or more have marched on the town. They charged through the line of soldiers and crossed the bridge to the quayside. The first volley of grapeshot killed a dozen but it didn't stop them. Before the ship's crews could cut the mooring lines, the leaders were aboard, pulling off the sacks of grain and heaving them ashore. Then the soldiers let go their second volley and there was nowhere to hide. Many fell overboard and were taken by the tide out to sea. When it was all over, the dead were thrown on the carts and taken to the lime pits.'

‘It was long happening,' Sir Robert said. ‘But I knew it had to. Youghal, Dungarvan. What next? You mark my words. There'll not be a ship that's safe. The government will have to send warships to escort them out and put a Redcoat in every field that's being harvested. The people won't put up with this any longer and who can blame them?'

Sir Robert was as close to his tenants as any landlord could be. He knew their grievances and the limit of their patience.

‘The government was so sure that people would sit tamely by until the potato was ready again and maybe they would have done if there had been some work and a little money. But there's been precious little of either and when you grow thinner and hungrier and see the ships taking food away, what is a man expected to do?'

He rose and brought the heavy kettle from the cooking range and refilled the teapot.

‘Is it any wonder the English consider the Irish so stupid? And is it surprising these poor people should need to do such desperate things to prove they are not?'

‘I was told of something yesterday by one of the Quakers,' Una said. ‘Something so desperate it made me cry. It was in a village at Tallow just below Lismore. They visited a young lady who was said to be alone and desolate. They say she could not have been older than twenty and very pretty. She came from Dublin, from a family of business people, but they had all broken up and deserted her. She was living in a small cottage on her own and when she knew the Quakers were visiting she had hurriedly made it trim and proper. She put on such a show of genteel respectability and laid out her table with little items of crockery and ornaments she had brought with her from Dublin. She did her best to hide her worn dress with an apron and a silk scarf. They brought her a little bread but she refused it, saying it should go to the poor and yet she was herself starving. Such pride. Such sad, helpless, gentle pride.'

Robin nodded. ‘It is the same with them all, Una, young and old. I heard of a fisherman's widow who walked twenty miles to the coast, pushing a hand cart with two planks of wood in it so she could give her dead husband a decent burial. He had drowned in a storm and was washed ashore at Curragh. She eventually found what was left of him, carried his body to higher ground and dug a grave with her bare hands. She put his body between the two planks and bound them together with rope. That was his coffin, the best she could do. But she would have been satisfied he'd had a proper Christian burial. Pride by another name. And proper.'

For the first time in over two months, clouds covered the sky. Thin long fingers of sunlight poked their way through but then quickly disappeared as if God had clenched His fist. A chill sea breeze rushed in and shook the trees that had been still for so long. Kate tasted salt on her lips and waited for rain. But the clouds burst a long way out and thunder was only a soft rumble. Then came a perfect rainbow, a thick arc spanning half the horizon, each of its seven colours pure and vivid. Its beauty mocked the drama of the day.

Sir Robert and Robin had gone to Dungarvan to discover if any of their tenants were among the dead and wounded. Una had instructions to keep the gates locked and leave the loaded shotgun ready on the kitchen table.

The girls sat side by side on a bench in the garden beneath one of the old oaks. There had not been a gardener in the grounds for over ten years and much of it had now returned to nature's own indiscipline. The grass around them was long with scattered clusters of cornflowers, rosebay willowherbs and daisies and, beyond the lawns, creeping carpets of nettles. There was a mass of scarlet poppies where once there had been peonies, creeping ivy where there had been rose beds and a great sprawl of pink and white rhododendrons bending under the weight of a thickening canopy of bramble. Only the stone statues of the Connemara Bacchus and his sprawling maidens at the front of the house reminded a visitor of how splendid the house had once been.

‘Why is the house called “Salvation”?' Kate asked. ‘Was your father's family religious?'

‘They bowed their head and paid their dues and kept the clergy in liquor. At least that's how father describes them. He has no time for either Church. He thinks the Catholics are servile worshippers and their priests dreadful bullies. I've heard terrible stories about them, especially what they do to …'

‘I don't want to hear,' Kate interrupted. ‘Not on a beautiful day like this. Tell me about the house. Why Salvation?'

‘It was built by an Englishman, about a hundred years ago, we think. He meant to settle here and breed horses but it was the Irish weather that defeated him. Some scoundrel selling him the land must have told him our summers were always dry and warm. But when the winds turned in autumn and it rained until the next March, he packed his bags, went straight back home to England and never returned. The house stood empty for another twenty years and became the home of bats and crows and a succession of tinkers who tore the place apart. But then came the wonderful part. A sailing ship on its way to Cork was caught in a storm, blown inshore and floundered on Clonard Rock. All forty crew aboard were drowned except for one man. He was washed up on the beach and his name was Sir Walter Fitzgerald, a wealthy landowner from Country Antrim. The story goes that as he lay on the sand and raised his eyes to heaven to thank God for his salvation, he saw this house beyond the cliffs. At that moment, he vowed he would settle on this parcel of land that had saved his life.'

‘And so he did?' asked Kate.

‘And so he did. With his wealth and energy he restored the house and named it Salvation and every morning, whatever the season, he would go from his bed to the balcony and bow respectfully to the sea that had so very nearly taken him.'

‘It's a wonderful story, Una.'

‘But that's not the end of it. When Sir Walter, my great-grandfather, died content in his old age, he left the estate to his eldest son. But he was a wastrel and cared nothing for the house or his father's love of it. Soon he mortgaged it to pay for his gambling debts and his drinking and whoring. The house went to ruin, and the parkland returned to a jungle. He died on his thirty-fifth birthday from a liver destroyed by gin and a variety of other ailments given to him by those he chose to live with. Then my grandfather inherited it and began its restoration all over again, all the time struggling to pay off the debts. Now my father carries on that same struggle. But every year he grows more weary and poorer. Like Ireland itself.'

‘It must have been so beautiful,' Kate said. Una plucked a blade of grass and chewed its juicy stem.

‘When I was a little girl,' Una said, ‘one tiny stray weed would have caused a commotion and given the head gardener a fit. But it is not easy to worry about weed-free gravel, topiary and the symmetry of the lawns when people are so wretched beyond the hedges. I don't think a pretty garden would ever occupy my time again. If I ever had one, and I doubt that very much, I should let it grow like this, free and full of itself. Only the English seem to care so much for gardens.'

‘Perhaps we have nothing more important to worry about,' Kate said.

Una laughed, in her loud, unaffected way.

‘No,' she said, ‘you mustn't ridicule your own people that way. The English have done many fine and wonderful things in this world. But father says the moment the name ‘Ireland' is mentioned, they bid goodbye to their humanity and common sense. He says they act like tyrants towards the Irish.'

‘I've heard my father say that whatever's good for England is bad for Ireland and vice-versa,' Kate said.

‘But I remember my father once saying that if more of the world was English, it would be a better place.'