Dorothy Eden (5 page)

She threw back her veil, letting the sunlight fall on her face. And suddenly he gave his slow sweet smile.

“That’s better. Now I can see you. Ah!” He sighed. “This is what I needed.”

“Why do you care for Ireland so much, Mr. Parnell?”

“Because I hate injustice. I hate suffering. I hate and loathe and fear premature and unnecessary death. I do love Ireland. I was born there and its mists and its soft air and its grief are in my bones. I will give my life to it. I made that vow some years ago. But don’t imagine,” again he smiled, looking directly in her eyes, “that Ireland takes all my emotions. Are you happy?”

“At this moment? Very.”

“So am I. Sunshine, the horse jogging along, no hurry, nothing in the world but ourselves. I wish it could last.”

The small coldness settled on her, and was resolutely banished.

“How can it, when you have such an enormous job to do, and I—”

“And you?”

She said lightly, “I am becoming quite a politician. My husband will be pleased.”

“Shall we not talk about your husband?”

She gave him a startled look. He said, “I prefer, at this moment, to indulge in a daydream that there is no one in the world but ourselves. I like you in blue. And that little fur tippet. Do you know that I have thought far too much of you since our evening at the theatre.”

“But that is—” She stopped, and amended her protest to a simple, “I have thought of you, too.”

She was thinking how mistaken people were to say that he was cold. The tenderness in his face was making her heart stop.

“I should like to see you a great deal. Is that possible? I know that you have a family to look after. But it would mean so much to me if it were possible, now and again, like this. I work too hard because I’m lonely. I go from one hotel to another, one meeting to another, one country to another. I spend a good quarter of my life on the Irish mail steamer.”

“You should marry. You need a wife.”

“I suppose you had to say that.” His eyes lingered on her for a long time. “But what do you say to the present situation? I have no wife and I want to be with you on as many occasions as possible.”

“You scarcely know me.”

He smiled with that unnerving tenderness.

“But I do, Mrs. O’Shea. You would be surprised how well I know you. Or is it presumptuous of me to think so? I’m a clumsy fellow sometimes.”

“I’m sure you’re not.” Her answer was so emphatic that he laughed, his eyes glinting with amusement and pleasure.

“I may be, or try to be, a master of strategy in Parliament, but I fear I’m not that with the opposite sex. I make far too many blunders. I would hope very much not to blunder with you.”

His lightning changes from light riposte to deep seriousness shook her poise. She was moving into a commitment she had not intended by saying:

“I have three children. I couldn’t let them be hurt by any scandal.”

“Would it be scandalous if we were to drive together occasionally? I suppose the world would think so.” He looked wistful. “You see what I mean by being a blundering fellow, Mrs. O’Shea.”

She turned swiftly to face him. The impulsive words were out before she could stop them.

“For myself I wouldn’t care.”

His extraordinary deep dark brown eyes seemed to flicker and burn. He laid his hand over hers but did not immediately speak. His touch and his look were eloquent enough. When he did speak his voice was deeply troubled.

“Think carefully, Mrs. O’Shea. Hurting you would be the very last thing I would want to do. Now I fear we must return, if I’m to be in time for the debate.”

He slid up the window to give orders to the driver. Then he settled back and took her hand again. It lay in his all the way back to Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. She only took it from his clasp once, and that was to remove her glove.

W
ILLIE CAME HOME ON
Sunday. He bounced into the house, shouting in a loud voice for the children.

“Where are they, Lucy? Are they ready for Mass? Kate—” He watched Katharine coming down the stairs. “You’re looking extraordinarily well. I hear you’ve been going up to the House. Are you taking an interest in politics for my sake? That does surprise me.”

“I’m finding the debates interesting,” Katharine said. “I was getting dull down here. My brains need sharpening. I hope to hear your maiden speech before long,” she added.

He was pleased. “Yes, I must work on that. I fancy they’ll find me quite literate compared with some of our members. By the way, I hear that you persuaded Mr. Parnell to come to dinner. You’ve had quite a social success, haven’t you? Clever Kate. What persuasions did you use?”

“None. Mr. Parnell isn’t the misanthrope he’s reputed to be. He refuses to go into the houses of the English because he feels it weakens his case against them. He says this is one of the tricks the English deliberately play—they entertain the Irish with lavish hospitality and then expect them to have the good manners not to bite the hand that feeds them. But Mr. Parnell won’t be caught that way. He came to my dinner party because I’m your wife. He’s counting on your support in his campaign. I hope you’ll give it to him.”

“I daresay I will, if he doesn’t get too extreme. I certainly don’t agree to cutting my English friends. I’ll dine with them if I please. But I’m glad you got him, Kate. It’s quite a feather in your cap.”

There was no time to say more for the children came hurtling down the stairs to greet their father.

“Papa, you came! Carmen said you wouldn’t, but I said you would.”

“Thank you, Norah darling, for your faith in me. Then are we ready? Is Miss Glennister coming with us? Splendid.”

Miss Glennister, dressed for church, had followed the little girls down the stairs. She was looking animated, too, her sallow cheeks quite flushed. She admired Willie who no doubt said flattering things to her because he had a compulsion to make all women like him. She was full of coyness and arch remarks when he was in the house.

“I hope you haven’t anyone coming later, Kate,” Willie said. “Let’s have the day to ourselves. I believe I’ll stay overnight for once. I have no urgent business in town tomorrow.”

She did not miss the familiar and very unwelcome gleam in Willie’s eye as he looked at her in her freshly laundered morning gown with its snowy collar and cuffs. He suspected nothing, he only thought her good looks due to the country air. Couldn’t he see the way her eyes grew secret and her lips were inclined to tremble? She must be careful. Willie had had the grace not to make any demands on her since their last disastrous quarrel in Thomas’s Hotel. She had thought then that any further lovemaking from him would be excessively repugnant, but now she regarded it as quite impossible. The fact would have to be made clear to him.

There was disappointment and a look of outrage on his face when later he came into her room to find her lying with the curtains drawn against the sunshine.

“Dammit, Kate, you can’t have a headache on a day like this. Anyway, you’ve never been the type for headaches.”

“I am now,” she answered in a low deliberate voice.

He was not slow to get her meaning.

“You’ve never been angry with me for as long as this before. What’s happened?”

“Nothing’s happened except that I never was so angry before.”

“I wasn’t with a woman that night! If that was what you’d caught me at—” He saw that he was not believed and had the grace to colour and avoid her gaze. And hearing at last the thing she had suspected for a long time gave her no sensation except a wry relief. She knew now, indeed had known since that other hand had lain over hers, that she could never bear Willie to touch her again.

“Oh, dammit!” Willie exclaimed. “Every man sins a bit now and then even if he loves his wife.” He grew resentful, looking at her recumbent figure. He had expected anger, not indifference. Had she been shocked into a stupor? No, not clever Kate. She was playing a game with him, making him suffer a bit. He didn’t like it. He turned on his heel.

“I’m not coming begging to you. Now you can come to me when you return to your senses. And I warrant that won’t be long. You’re a healthy woman.” He was smiling coarsely. “So you’ll have to climb down from your high horse, my lady.”

Lucy came fussing in when he had gone. She was puzzled and distressed.

“The Captain said he was staying, but now he’s changed his mind. You didn’t do anything to upset him, Miss Katharine?”

She scanned Katherine’s face for signs of tears. She knitted her brow at Katharine’s expression of half-smiling peace.

“You don’t look as if your head’s very bad, I must say. But I’ll tell cook to prepare a light supper. A little soup and a lightly boiled egg?”

Katharine sat up. “That wouldn’t satisfy a baby, Lucy. Anyway, I’ll be coming down to supper. I feel almost quite recovered. I think I had a little too much sun this morning, that’s all.”

But how long could she go on like this, subterfuge, excuses, long absences that became more difficult to explain to the children who were acutely hurt if Mamma missed kissing them goodnight? Amends could be made for everything but one person’s disappointment. She noticed how eagerly his eyes sought hers across the space that separated them, he on the floor of the House, she in the Ladies’ Gallery.

She had begun to call him Charles and he called her Katharine or Kate, or when he was particularly tender, Katie. They had several more afternoon drives in hansom cabs, taking care never to engage the same driver twice. Sometimes they scarcely talked at all. He sat beside her, their hands touching, and simply relaxed, the peacefulness taking the lines of tension out of his face until he looked what he was, a man of only thirty-four years of age.

Sometimes he was in a gay mood and they laughed a lot. She suspected this was a side of him that he usually showed only to his own family, of which he was very fond. He talked about his home, Avondale, in the misty blue Wicklow Mountains, which had been left to him by his father.

His eyes glowed as he talked about the house, with its hall large enough to take a coach and four, the carved oak minstrel’s gallery, and the railings hung with memorials of Parnell ancestors. There were huge wood fires, and dogs, and devoted servants. He had always tried to treat his tenants well, with the result that there was seldom trouble on his land.

Avondale stood on the River Avon, not far from the beautiful vale of Avoca. There was a shooting lodge at Aughavanagh and this was where he went when he most needed relaxation and peace. He and a keeper and his two dogs stayed in the lodge and no one came near them. There was sun and misty rain, and the grouse in the heather, and blue glimpses of water and the peace that he dreamed all Ireland should have.

His father had died when he was a boy at school in England. His mother, who was American, was on one of her restless jaunts to America, and he was the only one to follow his father to his grave. He had been full of resentment that his mother had left his father to die alone. He had stood, a gangling boy of thirteen, watching the earth being tipped into the grave, and clenching his fists to prevent the awful ache in his throat turning into actual sobs.

He hated death. He found its enormous aloneness something too terrible to contemplate. Even if his mother had been there he might not have felt any better. But she was in Philadelphia talking Fenian rebellion to Irish immigrants and sympathetic Americans who, like her own father, had fought the successful War of Independence against England.

He thought that his hostility towards the English had probably been engendered by his mother, although his father and his grandfather even though of English descent had been notable advocates for Ireland’s rights.

But his mother was a fiery patriot. She boasted of her husband’s remote kinship with the romantic young martyr Robert Emmet, and was certain that the blood would come out in her sons. She made the boys read the histories of the Irish martyrs, and the speeches of the great Daniel O’Connell.

She was constantly in trouble for her seditious statements, and on one occasion the English militia actually raided her house. But all they found to take away was Charles’ sword, the one he had used when he was a cadet in the Wicklow Militia.

That had angered him as much as it had his mother. “Damn their impudence!” he had said, and his mother, with the familiar fanatical gleam in her eye, had applauded, and urged him to say it to their faces, to do something to end their tyranny.

His mother, he feared, was a little unbalanced because, while still reviling the English, she had taken the greatest pleasure in attending functions at the Vice-regal Lodge in Dublin. An invitation from Lady Carlisle, the Lord-Lieutenant’s wife, would make her get out all her party finery. Perhaps she wanted to know the enemy, or perhaps she simply loved a party.

His sisters—they were all beautiful, particularly the dark-eyed Sophia—loved gaiety, too, although Delia, the eldest, was touched with melancholy, and Anna had an obsessive militant tendency that she had inherited from their mother.

They loved him to come home to Avondale and join in their balls and parties. There was nothing like a ball in an Irish country house with fiddles playing, the swish of taffeta and silk over the old polished floors and the shine of a hundred candles in the beautiful Waterford glass chandeliers. Dawn would be breaking and waterbirds calling over the river before the music stopped.

The balls at Avondale were never marred by hungry faces at the windows, or scarecrow figures lurking at the kitchen door hoping for scraps to take home for famished children. No one starved on Charles Parnell’s estate, and he would not rest until the same could be said of all other landlords in Ireland.

When Katharine asked him what had eventually made him take up politics he replied that no one thing had done it. He had always known that it would be his life’s work. Perhaps it was because he had been born in the year of the Great Hunger and some precocious memory of it had stayed in his heart. But he had at first shied away from the sacrifices and the enormous expense of physical and mental energy involved. He had had to grow older and gain courage and dedication. Ireland had a way of consuming and eventually destroying her great men. She demanded nothing less than their life, their bones to lie in her unhappy soil. She loved and revered bones.