Leon Uris (14 page)

Hands on her hips, Caroline stood before the great screen in the Long Hall considering the enormity its meaning was taking on. Every time she thought of the Ingrams pending departure the ache renewed itself. Andrew was a kind of jewel of a man anywhere in the world one might find him. Few such passed the way through Londonderry. God, it was going to be so empty.

She came to realize that the failure of Andrew and Enid to confide in her was not due to a lack of trust, but for her own good. Caroline generally got what she wanted, but there was no keeping the Ingrams in Derry. Her enthusiasm for the college project all but halted. Instead of a crafty, witty ally, she would be dealing with unmovable concrete blocks of bureaucrats and, Satan save us, Bishop Nugent.

Caroline was a positive and assured woman whose soft touch moved the big house with lightness and gave Londonderry a taste of creative spirituality. At this moment, Caroline felt very down about Caroline and no shopping binge in Paris would rectify it.

The screen and its decade-long perplexity loomed before her. She could possibly throw herself into another restoration attempt but she knew she could only be building herself up for a fall.

Like the compromise of her marriage to Roger, the
great screen was another aspect of her life that would never be whole or free.

What was that strange soul-stirring emotion that swept through her when she saw the iron vase on Andrew’s desk coming like a message from an unknown messenger?

As Andrew Ingram was closing the door behind himself, he wondered if he had unwittingly opened the door to something else? She admitted to herself that she had a schoolgirlish curiosity about this blacksmith in the Bogside, in a mild flirtation with herself. She had come to middle age with charm replacing dazzling beauty and she was an older woman… good Lord, how silly.

She had never felt the creeping of age until now. Was she not being ridiculous to dare even think this individual couldrestore the great screen?

Wasn’t it all so odd how one thing seemed to be flowing into another? As she studied the screen, remembering her history with it, images telescoped backward…She gasped and rang for Adam, the chief butler, a servant of three decades’ standing.

“The Countess rang?” Adam asked.

“Adam, how many times has this screen been shored up before I came to the manor?”

“Oh, hard to say exactly, m’lady. Once or twice a year some bolts would fall out of the overhead beams. The manor house blacksmith shop always had it in on schedule for maintenance. There was an annual cleaning of the parts that could be dealt with”

“Do I recall correctly that the screen shifted and tilted rather ominously?”

“Oh m’lady, what an incredible memory. Yes, fourteen years ago it took a dangerous tilt.”

“Lord Roger and I were on our honeymoon. My father recalled us because Randolph Churchill was going to make an appearance in the Long Hall to play his famous Orange card. We used outside help on the screen, did we not?”

“Astonishing you should remember, what with all the
excitement and your own honeymoon cut short. Our late blacksmith, Mr. Leland, God rest his soul, was rather limited in his skills. He would generally call on Mr. Lambe, a very talented smith who served the area around Ballyutogue. Old chap is still alive.”

“And this Mr. Lambe came and shored up the screen?”

“He did, m’lady, and just in time for Lord Churchill’s address.”

“I know this is going to stretch your memory, Adam, but did Mr. Lambe have an apprentice boy with him?”

Adam broke into an uncharacteristic smile.

“Don’t tell me you know him, Adam?”

“Conor Larkin is the one lad most likely to be remembered. Catholic boy but from a very, how shall we say, special Catholic family. Rather famous footballer. Brought Donegal a regional championship.”

“You don’t say.”

“I won a few bob on him. He now has his own forge down in Londonderry and is well considered.”

“Thank you very much, Adam.”

Well, that’s Ulster, is it not? Caroline thought. Everyone mixed up with everyone… a young boy of twelve or fourteen had stared at her and she had asked him why and he had said because she was very beautiful and he went on to snap out the forbidden name of Charles Stewart Parell….

“Anything else, m’lady?”

“Yes. Send around a carriage. Immediately.”

Having prepared himself for the playing out of his fairy tale in a decade and a half of daydreams, Conor Larkin was as cool as an autumn breeze off Lough Foyle when the Countess of Foyle’s carriage came to a halt in the muddy Bogside lane before his shop.

A small crowd gathered about. It wasn’t often they got a pair of white horses, driver, and footman in the Bogside unless it was a hearse or the paddy wagon.

Caroline swept into his shop. The game is most exciting when both players have a great capacity to show outwardly that no game is really being played, but then to perform a polite, subtle fiction filled with double meanings and all of it done with perfect demeanor, even indifference.

Conor let her know that he knew she was seeking him out as the scrapings of the pot after a decade and a half of frustration with all those European masters and Oxford dons. Having pleasantly established a bit of comeuppance, he justified it by letting her know that the great screen was not that much of a mystery to him. Andrew and Enid had issued fair warning. The paddy was a stunning specimen, eloquent of speech and wit and sure of his ground. A composite of a quintessential Irishman.

From Conor’s view, she had aged lovely. So long as his heart remained free there was no harm in the mystical feelings he bore her. Only Conor’s pal, Seamus, knew the whole gut-wrenching fantsy beginning when they were kids. Conor had spotted her now and again at the opera house and never failed to catch a thrill from it.

When their stifled panting played out, they focused on the screen. Conor’s office was too small to hold the both of them so he brought several books and rolled up drawings and blueprints and they repaired to a back booth in Nick Blaney’s public house.

The schanachie’s tale, widely accepted until the Countess sought out scholars, was that an original screen had been destroyed during the Cromwell conquest of Ireland. In a later war, which established Protestant rule, King William of Orange, now the British monarch, wished to thank the Earl of Foyle for his loyalty in arms.

Jean Tijou, a French Protestant, had come to the court of William and Mary and executed a number of out
standing works in England. Tijou, so the legend goes, was dispatched by the King to Ulster to build a new screen as his gift to the third Earl of Foyle. Alas, over the generations and centuries the screen became mangled and partly ruined by fire and insurrection. A bit more than a third of the original screen remained.

When Caroline Hubble redid the manor, she assembled the best historians on the various periods and commissioned research papers at Oxford. On the matter of the great screen, the principal study declared that the Jean Tijou myth was no more than that, a myth. Tijou, although a favorite of King William and Queen Mary, had never traveled to Ireland, they contended, and the original portions of the screen were probably constructed seventy years before Tijou was born. Its creator was a mystery. Years of patchwork on the screen set down a crooked trail, impossible to follow.

To Caroline’s surprise, Conor Larkin was familiar with all her research and dismissed it out of hand as academic claptrap, theories created in faraway places by men totally in love with their own conclusions.

It was now up to Conor to prove them wrong and substantiate his own beliefs. The two quit their flirting and went into a professional posture as Conor began to sway her with his dazzling reconstruction of history. She was both enthralled and bemused and cautioned herself to be on the alert for vast amounts of blarney from this incredibly charming paddy.

Rogue or brilliant scholar? Caroline sharpened her mind as he unfolded his story.

The first area of proof was never discovered by her researchers and most convincing: namely, the parish record books of St. Columba’s Church of Ballyutogue,
which dated back to the beginning of the fifteenth century.

Entries dealing with the great screen were in Gaelic and had been translated by Conor years before. The years between 1697 and 1701 described the arrival of “the Frenchman” and the construction of “grand ironwork at Castle Hubble. “ The men from the village who worked on it at various times were listed and included the ancestors of his dear friend and neighbor, Seamus O’Neill. There were intimate tidbits of daily life that could only be known by someone living in the village two hundred years earlier.

Moreover, Conor was able to quote from a number of published works on the history of Ulster by British historians, which matched perfectly with St. Columba’s records, although none of these historians had ever seen the church records.

“What have we here, now?” Caroline asked, looking at Conor’s open palm holding a small rusty black mass.

“Feel this.” She did.

“How does it feel?”

“Very satiny. What is it?”

Conor offered his shirt sleeve to wipe her hand clean. After an instant of hesitation, she did.

“Years ago, Mr. Lambe and I were both curious about the texture of the iron in this screen. He took a few scrapings and had it assayed at the royal assay offices in London. I took some samples on my first visit here with you. It was assayed in Belfast.”

“Where in Belfast?”

“At Weed Ship & Iron. Best assay office in Ireland.”

“What are you getting at, Mr. Larkin?”

“It took a long time for Mr. Lambe to ascertain its origin. All of the iron used in the original work here came from the Clanconcardy mine in Northern Wales. Once
Tijou discovered it, it became his ore of choice. All of his later works are of the same base.”

“Well, what is that supposed to prove?”

“This screen is the only work in Ireland made of Clanconcardy ore.”

“What makes this ore so special?”

“Other ores can be pounded, brutalized into shape. Your Italian chap, Tustini, had a nice delicate touch, but the screen conquered him instead of the other way around. Had he discovered and used Clanconcardy, this,” he said, pointing, “would look more like this.”

“Just what does this ore mean to you?”

“It’s angel’s ore, actually difficult to express my feelings without offending you,” Conor answered.

“Please go on.”

“Aye, how to say it? I’ve worked with this ore whenever I can afford a few hundred pounds of it for very special commissions or gifts. It’s… uh…”

“Mr. Larkin, just say it like you were speaking to one of the lads in your shop.”

“Working with this ore is like a woman’s flesh yielding in ecstasy to her lover. It’s pure magic. You see,” he quickly changed the subject, “the mine has been closed for decades for lack of yield. There are a few old-timers who will go in and flush some out, but at great expense. Twenty tons of this would be hard to come by.”

So, Caroline thought, the clever lad has finally sprung his trap. A king’s ransom in exchange for what might or might not even be the answer to the great riddle.

“Pardon my temerity, Lady Caroline, but you still have grave doubts about Tijou.”

“I must say, you present a compelling case.”

“Jaysus, madam,” Conor erupted, “Tijou’s case is right in front of you, here and here and here and here. No man before Tijou and few since have had the mastery to create lily pads floating on gossamer… this scroll, he used only once later, at Versailles…and here, this angel’s flute.
Why, the man’s fingerprints are all over this screen. Your Oxford research cannot be correct. If this screen were built seventy years earlier, no clunker in those times could have ever dreamed these things could be done with iron.”

Conor had been borderline impertinent, but having dealt with artists and artisans, she knew they demanded a certain headway if they were worth a damn. She made an abrupt decision.

“Why don’t we go forward with a small section?”

“Oh no, ma’am. I think m’lady has understood me wrong. The Italian and German counterfeits shriek out in horror and should be removed. Some small work can be done on the original screen, but one third of a Tijou is worth a thousand Conor Larkins.”

“Am I to understand you don’t want to restore this?”

“Sometimes I think that God meant for certain things to be left alone.”

Roger and Caroline had a cozy arrangement where they finished their late paperwork together in her boudoir at a partners’ desk facing each other. The matter of the screen was a testy bit of business; they had spent tens of thousands on it with no results.

“After all our travels and searching, there just may be an ironmaster right in our own backyard, a Conor Larkin in the Bogside.”

Roger knew full well of whom she spoke but played the act of stuttering memory. He had been O’Garvey’s pet enterprise in Bogside and was quite good but had to be burned out after he entered a bid against Caw & Train. Later he was assimilated into the overall system and actually did some splendid work at Lettershambo.

“Hmmm,” Roger said at last. “Oh yes, Larkin. The family has been here about a century, always mixed up in some sort of disobedience. His grandfather was imprisoned.”

“Would that cancel him out?”

“Not really. We’ve managed to stay in business because we’ve learned we have to live and deal with these people. Actually, it’s always a good show for the Catholics to have one of their people do this and that. Mind you, they can be frightful liars and clever with the language.”

“Why don’t you look over his credentials and this report he’s prepared and give me your assessment,” she said, sliding a folder over to him.

“Certainly, darling. Problem as I see it from the onset is that a restoration will take several years. You know how feckless they are. He’d probably sell his mother to get that commission and eventually leave things in a worse mess than we have now.”

“Larkin doesn’t want to do a restoration.”