Lucinda Sly (5 page)

Sly spoke so earnestly that Lucinda believed every word.

That Sunday evening Walter Sly swept Lucinda off her feet. They left her house together and went for a drive in Sly’s trap. He guided the horse in the direction of Kilkenny. Lucinda hadn’t felt so alive since she was a young girl travelling the same road with her husband, Thomas Singleton.

Sly described the advantages she would have living on a big farm and the comforts she would have there. He let her know that
he would be willing to put her name on his farm if they were married.

They decided that Sunday that they would meet at least once a week to get to know each other better. It wouldn’t always be in Lucinda’s house that they would meet because Sly knew that Lucinda wanted to cast her eye on the house and the holding she might marry into. She herself had a small house and holding from which she eked a living and kept the landlord from her door when times were tough. After all that, she didn’t want to buy a pig in a poke.

Having taken Lucinda home, Walter Sly guided his horse in the direction of Carlow town. It was almost a week since he had had a drink and his desire for it was pricking him constantly but he considered it worth the trouble if he managed to entice Lucinda to marry him even though it bothered him that she was getting long in the tooth and there was no chance that they would have a family. But yes! She would be a good workhorse. It wasn’t for racing he wanted her.

He tied the horse’s reins to the ring on the side of the pavement directly outside Langstrom’s tavern and looked at the door with a light heart. It wasn’t open yet. ‘It has got to be close to seven o’clock,’ Sly thought to himself. He looked around in case there was a policeman strolling around the street. He knocked on the door of the shop next to the tavern. He knew John Cooney, the shopkeeper, very well. Wasn’t it in his shop he sold his butter and eggs and wasn’t it there he bought flour and any other food he needed?

‘Is it yourself, Walter?’ Cooney greeted him on opening the
door. ‘I haven’t seen you any night for a week. I heard that you have given up the drink and that you are looking for a wife. Is there any truth in the rumour?’

‘Stop your mocking and take the lock from the gate into your yard until I unyoke my horse and put him out of the people’s sight in your stable,’ was Sly’s reply.

The shopkeeper opened the gate at the side of his house and beckoned to Sly to guide his horse and trap in. When he had put everything in order, Sly thanked the shopkeeper.

‘Lock the gate when you are leaving,’ Cooney ordered him. ‘I’m going to bed early tonight. Tomorrow is another working day.’

Sly headed for the Langstrom’s tavern. It was still locked. He knocked vigorously on the door a couple of times. After a short while, the tavern keeper spoke from inside.

‘Who’s out?’ he demanded.

‘Open the door, you stallion,’ Walter barked. ‘It’s Walter Sly.’

The owner opened the door with a smirk on his face.

‘There are the world of stories about Walter Sly going the streets these days,’ he began.

‘And what kind of story, or stories, about me are in the old hags’ mouths?’ Sly demanded sourly.

‘That you are spending your time with a great lady … a widow with land and wealth along with it; that you are finished with drinking and carousing. Look, Walter,’ he said, ‘come in, in the name of God, before the police see you.’

Sly strode in angrily. He was able to make fun of other people but couldn’t take it himself.

‘Into the back room,’ Langstrom steered him. ‘You know that seven o’clock is closing time.’

Even so, Sly stood stubbornly at the counter.

‘Is there anybody in the back room,’ he demanded.

‘Six,’ Langstrom informed him.

‘Now,’ Sly turned on him, ‘tell me where you are getting your information because, as far as I am concerned, it doesn’t concern you at all.’

Langstrom understood that Sly was angry as there was fire in every word that came from his mouth.

‘Ah! Take it easy, Walter,’ he placated him. ‘I was only rising you.’

‘You know that mocking is catching. Keep your rumours to yourself if you please and to show you that there’s no truth in them put a glass of whiskey in front of me,’ Sly demanded.

The owner didn’t say another word but hurried behind the counter and poured the drink.

Walter Sly walked into the back room when he had paid for hisdrink. There were five men before him, sitting, as was their
custom
, around a table playing cards and a middle-aged woman
seated
on a stool by the wall with a drink in her hand keeping an eye on every card that hit the table.

After Sly had greeted them, and they him, he sat beside the woman. They knew each other well. Frances Campbell was her name and she was married to a bigwig who owned land in three counties not to mention the fact that he was a member of the House of Lords in Westminster. From the first day they married,
they never agreed. She married him so that she would have a fine, free life with money to spend as she pleased. She had a reputation for the men and, in those times, you would seldom see a woman in the back room or at the counter of a tavern. It wasn’t like that for Frances; she spent her time in the back rooms of taverns and hotels knocking back drink with the gentlemen, if that is the right word for them, and particularly in the company of her own kind who would need to have fat purses.

As soon as the five men had finished their game, they invited Walter and Frances to join them at the table but they declined. Sly said that he would be too busy quenching the week’s thirst to be watching five rogues reneging cards at every opportunity that came their way.

Like every woman in Carlow, Frances Campbell knew
everybody’s
business. Sly bought another drink for himself and one for her. Having discussed the state of the country and the way the poor were destroying the locality, Sly stood another drink. Frances didn’t refuse it.

After the two of them had downed four or five drinks, Frances moved closer to Sly and spoke softly to him:

‘Is it true what I hear, Walter?’ she began.

Sly knew what was bothering her but he had no intention of satisfying her curiosity.

‘Out with it, Frances, with whatever you want to know … that is if it is any of your business,’ Sly challenged her.

She stirred uneasily in her chair.

‘I always thought you were fond of me,’ she replied sadly.

‘I’d thank you to keep what happened between us under your hat,’ Sly retorted. ‘If your husband heard about it he would banish me to New South Wales with the criminals of Ireland.’

She elbowed him in his chest.

‘An old widow with a couple of acres of poor land who will turn her backside to you in bed as soon as she gets inside your front door,’ she taunted him. ‘I heard that she is almost sixty years old. I am not yet fifty. It is said that the well dries up in most women when they hit their mid fifties. Along with that you will have to be at home beside her every night for the rest of your life.’

She ordered a couple of drinks from the owner. That gave Walter time to consider what she had said.

‘Look Frances,’ Sly said, ‘this is my chance to get a cook for my kitchen, someone who will milk my cows for instance if I were at a horse fair in Galway … I’ll have to be beside her until she gets used to working on my farm. Don’t worry, Frances, I’ll be back to my old ways before I am six months married.’

Frances gave an ignorant grunt and slapped him on the back.

Then Sly began to list the widow’s virtues – that she did the finest churning in the district, that she could sew and knit and cook.

When Frances grew tired of listening to the praises of Lucinda Singleton, she turned on him sharply:

‘God Almighty!’ she exploded. ‘One would think you were buying a mare. And how is she under the bedcovers? Maybe she has gone past it. That happens to women don’t you know? You are rusty for lack of practice and she is worn out from the world and from the weather.’

‘Listen to me, my good woman,’ Sly turned on her, ‘don’t be
discouraging
me from what I have set before me. I have a plan in my head and, for the first time in my life, I’ll have a woman at home before me who will put food on the table for me after a hard day’s work.’

‘Or after a day and night carousing in Langstrom’s tavern,’ she replied sharply. ‘But then again, maybe it’s the back of the brush across your back you’ll get as soon as her feet get settled under your table.’

‘I don’t think that she is that kind of woman,’ Sly informed her, ‘and suppose she is, there is the width of the mountain to bring her to her senses. Now, if we have nothing further to discuss, I’ll be shortening the road home.’

In a fit of temper, Sly threw back the drink she had stood him, jumped out of his chair and told the owner of the tavern to have a look out at the street so that he could leave to go home. When he did, Frances stood up.

‘We’ll shorten the road home for each other,’ she said, standing drunkenly on her feet. ‘I heard that there are tinkers camped a mile outside the town.’

The card players looked at each other and then at the two who were walking towards the door.

While they were on the road home, Frances never stopped
trying
to seduce Sly to come to her house so that they might ‘stretch their thighs together’ as she put it, but, although Sly had drink in him he put that kind of carousing on the long finger. Indeed, he wasn’t about to spoil things when he was so close to getting a wife.

During the weeks and months that followed, Sly and Lucinda became more intimate as their courtship blossomed. Along with that, Sly was able to re-establish contact between Lucinda and her son. This was the quality Lucinda had been looking for in Sly’s character that proved he would make a good husband.

When they had been courting regularly for six months, Sly felt the time had come to show her his house and farm of land.

On the first Sunday of August, 1828, Lucinda guided her horse and cart through Carlow town in the direction of Oldleighlin. The sky was clear and her journey was pleasant in the heat of the sun. She followed the directions Walter Sly had given her during the week. She saw the luscious green fields on both sides of the road. Sly owned the land on both sides from the King’s road to the house and acre upon acre of bogland behind it on the other side if he was to be believed.

‘The farm is three hundred acres between rough and good land. I will have the most butter to sell at Carlow fair,’ Lucinda was thinking.

Walter was standing at the door happily waiting for her. He walked towards the gate of the haggard, took the left ring of the horse’s headstall and guided him into the barn at the side of the house.

‘Welcome to Oldleighlin, Lucinda,’ he greeted her.

She jumped out of the cart as supple as a woman half her age. They both unyoked the horse and let him out to grass in the field behind the house. Sly walked in the door ahead of her and
welcomed
her warmly to ‘Sly’s Manor’ as he called it.

Lucinda was very impressed with the cleanliness of the kitchen. It was fortunate that she had not seen it a few days earlier but, for the first time in his life, for this special occasion Sly spent two days cleaning and scrubbing.

‘Sit down by the fire, my dear. Take off your shoes and warm your feet after your journey.’ Sly began pleasantly putting the best sugawn chair in the house under her.

After they had been sitting for a few minutes, Lucinda couldn’t but comment on the fine smell of food that was steaming in the big pot hanging on the crane over the fire.

‘I’ll wager that it’s beef with white cabbage in the pot,’ she ventured, leaning her head towards the pot.

‘Better still,’ Walter informed her, ‘in the pot beside the beef and cabbage there are fine sweet turnips not to mention the stone of
Early Regent
potatoes in the pot in the embers. That is a new variety of potato that was brought here a few years ago. The soil in Ireland is very suitable for growing them. They are so dry and floury that one would need half a pound of butter with them in order to eat them.’

He lifted the cover of the pot and put it on the ground. Then he got a fork and stuck it up to the handle in the hunk of beef.

‘Put a couple of plates on the table, Lucinda,’ Sly said, ‘because if this beef is over the fire any longer it will melt into the cabbage.’

Sly laid the plate of beef in the centre of the table and then put a coarse bag beside it. He took the pot of potatoes and turned it upside down on the bag.

‘Ah, girl,’ he beamed, ‘look at those for potatoes. Every one of
them bursting out of its skin.’

Lucinda had never seen Walter in such good humour as he was that Sunday. Without a doubt, it was not without reason. He had visited Constable Thomas Singleton the previous night. He told Thomas that he was going to propose to Lucinda. Along with
giving
Sly his blessing, he intimated to him that Lucinda would not refuse him.

When they had eaten, Sly cleared his throat, letting Lucinda know that he was about to put an important question to her. Of course, he had practised this twenty times during the week when he was about his work.

‘Lucinda,’ he began, ‘It is more than six months since we became acquainted and we have been walking out together for about the same time. Neither of us is in the full bloom of youth and there is no chance that we will reach Tír na nÓg. You have been on your own for years and I have been too. I knew the evening when you gave out to me on the side of the street in Carlow that you were the woman for me. As the weeks and months went by and I was getting to know you, love for you
blossomed
in my heart. Look, without further ado, before I put my two feet in it and make a fool of myself, what I am trying to say is I would like you to marry me.’

Lucinda was like a shy young girl with her eyes fixed on the ground. She spent a minute thinking deeply. Sly was becoming restless waiting for a reply.

‘Look,’ he said in an attempt to put her at ease, ‘I know that we would have a lot to discuss; we will have to come to an agreement
about your house and land and many other matters …’

‘That’s exactly it,’ Lucinda replied. ‘I would be willing to marry you but, as you said, many arrangements will have to be made.’

‘Oh, I understand that,’ Sly assured her, ‘but we could do that on the day of the wedding or a week afterwards. We will walk around my farm soon and you will see that you will be getting the better of the bargain as regards land.’

Lucinda stood her ground.

‘I am too long on the road and too long in the tooth to buy a pig in a poke,’ she countered. ‘There is a long evening before us and we have nothing to do but settle things between us before
nightfall
. Then we can meet in Carlow town during the week and let an attorney make everything legal.’

By God, but Sly understood, on hearing this from Lucinda, that she was no fool. What she said took him unawares but that didn’t discourage him. He knew that if the marriage didn’t work out that a woman wouldn’t get much justice in the courts.