Ruby Flynn (30 page)

‘Put yer scarf over yer mouth while we are high up,’ shouted Jack. The smoke was stinging her eyes and burning her nostrils. She ripped her scarf from around her neck and handed it to Jack, then took the handkerchief from her pocket and held it across her own mouth.

Tears streamed down both of their faces. Jack took the corners at a breakneck speed. The goods they had so carefully loaded into the back of the van crashed and banged from one side to the other. For a second, Ruby pictured the flowers she had so carefully stacked upon the ice, broken and bruised, but the thought left her as quickly as it came. She didn’t care. They were hurtling towards the inferno.

‘God have mercy, Lord have mercy.’ Jack blessed himself as he drove.

‘It’s the nursery wing, it’s the nursery,’ cried Ruby. ‘It is the top floor, oh my goodness, no, no!’

‘Who was with her today? Who is looking after her?’ Jack almost screamed the words at Ruby.

Ruby froze, too terrified to tell Jack in case he ran the van off the road. Amy’s word’s came back to her,
I shall sit with her tonight
. He was already driving wildly, half the time missing the narrow road altogether and skidding along the grass.

‘Ruby, who is with her? Tell me, now.’ This time his voice was laced with panic. He knew, of course he knew, that was why Ruby wouldn’t answer him, but there was a chance, just a chance, he was wrong.

Jack knew.

Amy had volunteered to sit with Lady Isobel in the evening, to give Mrs McKinnon a break.

‘You will be behind, after spending your day with Mrs Barrett,’ said Amy. ‘I will come up and take over as soon as staff supper is served.’

Betsy had also offered but Amy was determined.

‘You have too many jobs to be doing Betsy and anyway, I cook her food, ’twill be nice for me to say hello and see how she’s looking now.’

‘Well, she’s definitely putting on weight, that’s for sure,’ Betsy replied, backing down gracefully. ‘You might like a change, spending a bit of time upstairs,’ she added. ‘I like getting down and into the kitchen.’

Ruby knew.

She fixed her gaze on the study window at the end of the corridor. The windows were aglow, but there was no sign of a fire directly behind them, not like in the nursery, where they could now see flames shooting out of the window and up towards the sky. The main bulk of the castle was in total darkness. Ruby could see a small light at the entrance to the front doors and a light on the driveway, at the bottom of the steps. The main castle windows were deep and black; reflecting the light of the flaming sky, they blinked down at the speeding van.

‘It was Amy, Jack.’ Ruby tore her gaze away from the castle and looked at Jack with an agonized expression of pity in her eyes. ‘It was Amy, but she will be all right, they both will.’

The van screeched to a standstill at the top of the drive and Ruby and Jack were both out of the door before the engine had stopped and running towards where they could see Mr McKinnon directing the tenants, with soaking wet bales of hay and straw, into the castle. Betsy saw Ruby and, dropping her wet bale of straw, ran to her and the two friends threw their arms around each other.

‘Thank God you are all right, is everyone out?’ asked Ruby. Betsy shook her head woefully.

‘Thank God you are here, ’tis awful. Mary went in after them, she was so brave, Ruby, you should have seen her. She wouldn’t listen to Mr McKinnon shouting her and she wouldn’t leave without Amy.’

Betsy was sobbing and Ruby could make little sense of what she was saying.

‘Where is Amy?’ Jack screamed at Mr McKinnon. ‘Where’s Amy?’

Barely able to speak, Mr McKinnon pointed towards the kitchen courtyard. Jack and Ruby now ran as fast as they could, with Betsy hot on their heels. Ruby was amazed at how, at the rear of the castle, all appeared to be still and quiet. Devoid of normal bustle, empty of people or dogs, the courtyard felt almost eerie.

The lights were off, the kitchen door stood open and the range fire was still lit, casting a red glow across the cavernous room. Mrs McKinnon was sat on the floor and alongside her was the priest. There was no Amy yelling for respect in her kitchen, or shouting at Jack about the mud on his shoes. No pans of broth bubbling on the stove. As he approached, Jack instinctively removed his cap and Mrs McKinnon put her hand up to grasp his. Mary lay across Mrs McKinnon’s lap, black with smoke and coughing. Her tear-stained face was filled with distress and on the floor in front of her and the priest, side by side, lay Amy and Lady Isobel. They were both, very obviously, quite dead.

The sky wept.

Or that was how it appeared to Ruby as the dawn broke and the heavens opened, providing a timely downpour of the heaviest rain they had ever witnessed. The steaming kitchen was crowded with tenants and staff, who had worked throughout the night and fought with every ounce of their strength. Now they had stepped indoors to catch their breath, as God lifted the burden from their exhausted hands, drenched the roof and finally controlled the fire.

No one spoke. The obvious words hung between them but were too raw to speak out loud.

The kitchen smelt overpoweringly of smoke and ash, wet bodies and despair. Jane took the hot teapot from the range and poured scalding tea into mugs as Betsy, who could not stop herself from sobbing, passed them around. Someone had put a mattress on the floor where Mary lay shaking like a leaf, and the only sound in the room was that of her pitiful sobs.

‘My throat burns,’ she whispered to Ruby and Ruby could do no more than scoop her into her own arms and rock her. Loyal and faithful Mary had been the bravest of the brave. She had risked her own life to try and save those of Amy and Lady Isobel.

One of the tenant farmers was the first to break the silence. His face and arms were covered in soot and his eyes shone brightly from his mask of charcoal. He had been one of last men to stop fighting the fire in the upper corridor.

‘’Tis a bad fecking night,’ he whispered.

No one answered. They had no way of expressing the horror they had just witnessed.

A piercing scream suddenly ripped through the air. Two of the boys had run to fetch Amy’s mother from the farm and as a sign of respect, she had been taken through the front door of the castle to the downstairs hall, where the bodies had been laid.

The nursery wing was entirely inaccessible. Piles of soaking bales were stacked along the end of the landing. The carpets were sodden, and pictures were stood against the gallery rails having been hurriedly dismounted for safety and moved away from the most damaging effects of the smoke.

Mercifully, the men had contained the worst of the fire and the main section of the castle had escaped major damage. It had been saved by its own skin, the thick granite stone walls and the fact that the nursery wing had been added as an appendage to the castle. The sturdy, studded double oak door at the end of the corridor, originally built to ensure that the noise of children did not disturb those in the main body of the castle, was almost twelve inches thick and had been slammed shut as soon as the alarm had been raised. Boys had run up and down the central staircase all night long, pouring water onto the hay bales, which Mr McKinnon had ordered to be stacked up against the doors. Now, the water ran along the floorboards, soaked the carpets and even began to seep through the ceilings and down the walls.

Mr McKinnon had been in search of Amy when he met Betsy, screaming and running down the main staircase.

‘What in heaven’s name are you doing?’ he shouted to Betsy, barely able to believe his eyes. Betsy wasted no time in telling him.

‘There’s a fire in the nursery and Mary has gone in.’

From that moment on, all hell broke loose.

‘Get down the stairs, Betsy, and tell the boys to fetch the fire tender from the stables and tell Mrs McKinnon what’s happening. I’m going to see what’s to be done.’

Betsy didn’t stay to argue with him as she flew down to the kitchen, screaming at the top of her voice as she ran, ‘Fire, fire!’

With a wet rag tied across his face, and his eyes streaming with tears from the smoke, Mr McKinnon had locked every door on his way along the study corridor. He thought that if he could seal the nursery wing he could prevent the fire from spreading. As he followed the sound of Mary’s shouts it seemed like only seconds before Jimmy and the rest of the lads were running behind him. But they were all too late.

On the ground floor, he organized the fire fighting effort with military efficiency.

‘Keep going, keep going, more, more,’ he shouted to every man, woman and child he saw with an empty bucket. The tenants had arrived at the castle, carrying their own metal pails. Children as young as seven stood at the well and the stable taps, filling pails and passing them along the line.

At the open end of the nursery wing, the tenants had entered through the orangery. The hose from the fire tender was connected to the carp pond outside the orangery and here Danny worked his own miracle. McKinnon told him to pile the bales of wet hay along the top of the steps outside the landing door. ‘I will, Mr McKinnon,’ shouted Danny, ‘I will, don’t you worry about me,’ and then he soaked them repeatedly with the hose.

They had all been stunned by the bravery of little Mary, who had run into the burning room to rescue her Amy, and she had almost done it. She had dragged her along the floor with a strength she had never known she had, until Jimmy reached her.

In the kitchen, the screams had given way to sobbing and murmured prayer.

‘That’s Amy’s mother,’ whispered Mrs McKinnon, only just able to contain her own distress. ‘Who is with her?’ She felt dizzy with exhaustion.
I’m too old for this
, she thought to herself.

‘Jack is,’ said one of the maids, sadly. ‘Jack and the priest.’

‘God help us all,’ said Mr McKinnon, walking into the kitchen. He was the last to return indoors from the calamity outside and was soaked through to the skin. ‘It’s raining stair rods,’ he said. ‘Whoever prayed for rain has been rewarded.’

It wasn’t just any old rain, but beating, wind-driven, fire-extinguishing rain.

They all heard the car coming up the drive at the same time.

‘’Tis the Garda,’ said a small boy, unable to comprehend the meaning of death and the need for stillness and reverence. He ran in noisily through the kitchen door. ‘Give us a drink then, I’m gasping, me mouth tastes of smoke.’

He grabbed the mug from his older brother and looked around the kitchen. He had never before been in a room with so many people, where not one person was speaking. It was not the Irish way.

‘How will you cope with all this, aren’t you exhausted?’ Mrs McKinnon asked her husband. He seemed to have aged ten years in as many hours.

Mr McKinnon squeezed her hand, his eyes on her face. ‘I will, because I have to. But right now, I have to drive to the station to collect Lord Charles from the train.’

‘Does he know?’

‘No, he knows about the fire, but not about Lady Isobel. I’ll tell him when I see him. That way he will have some time to gather his thoughts.’

Mrs McKinnon wanted to say to him,
You also are too old for this, this will break us, it is too much
, but now was not the time.

‘Danny, Jimmy, come with me,’ said Mr McKinnon. He had a list of jobs he needed done while he drove to the station, but with all his heart he wished he could stay and comfort his wife.

This is too much for her
,
he thought, watching her help Mary into the library with a tray of tea for Amy’s mother and Jack. She would have to organize for Amy to return to the cottages, and Lady Isobel to the castle chapel. In Amy’s cottage, two candles would be lit at the head of her bed and her room would be filled with the sound of women whispering, murmuring and grieving for their loss. For Lady Isobel, the cold castle chapel would be filled with the sound of silence.

*

Mrs McKinnon had sent one of the boys on a bike to Bangor Erris for Annie Shevlin to attend to the bodies.

Annie wore a long black skirt and shawl with a dark grey woollen scarf draped over her head like a judge’s wig. She could not have been more than four feet eleven inches tall and had toothless, sunken cheeks and bright black, pinprick eyes.

‘Ah, Annie.’ Mrs McKinnon hesitated as they entered the kitchen. She wanted to say, ‘It’s good to see you,’ but of course, it was anything but. ‘We will move Amy back home now and the lady upstairs and then you can begin.’

Mrs Shevlin had laid out every corpse in Bangor Erris and its neighbourhood for the past fifty years. Everyone wondered who would do it for her when it came to her turn.

She lived on the five shillings she earned for each corpse she tended. There had been talk of an undertaker establishing himself in the area. A notion which had been rapidly rejected. Only Annie knew how the corpse had once looked when enjoying life. Torn up rags were stuffed in cheeks to create a youthful appearance which the body may not have enjoyed for many years. Skin was scrubbed clean, dried heather posies placed in hands and each corpse was dressed in its Sunday best. Candles were lit and there they lay, in their own beds. In the west of Ireland, people looked after their own.

‘I’m thinking now that the fire was caused by a block of peat, which had fallen from the fire.’ The officer from the Garda held out his notepad and squinted slightly. He looked very self-important. ‘The coroner will be reaching the same conclusion on the basis of my thorough investigation.’

No one said a word in response, but Mrs McKinnon’s gaze fell upon the fireside. The grate was four feet from the edge of the hearth. Peat often fell, but well within the perimeter of the outer hearth.

Isobel had kept candles burning for each of the children daily. 

‘It could possibly have been one of the candles, as well, I’m thinking that now,’ the guard suggested as he caught Mrs McKinnon looking at a candle holder on the floor. ‘Maybe it toppled over in the draught, whilst the ladies were sleeping. But for the coroner’s report, I’m sticking with the peat.’