Cashelmara (10 page)

I was so infuriated by this nauseating expression of filial piety that I immediately took the letter to Duneden and told him the whole story.

“Good God!” he exclaimed after he had read the letter. “Imagine a young girl having the courage to say all this to you, de Salis—and a young girl like Katherine too! I always remember her being such a quiet, shy little mouse! Well, well, well!”

This was not exactly what I had wanted to hear.

“But for God’s sake, Duneden, supposing one of your daughters had written to you in that fashion! You don’t approve of the letter, do you?”

He assured me he did not. “But, de Salis, are you sure it was wise to tell your family about this private understanding with Miss Marriott so far in advance of the time when your engagement is to be made public? After all, a great deal may happen between now and next spring.”

“Are you conceivably suggesting—”

“Young ladies of seventeen are notoriously changeable. De Salis, if you weren’t such a very dear friend of mine I wouldn’t say this to you, but—”

“You think I made a fool of myself in America.”

“I did not say that. But after all you were far from home amidst an alien society. I’m not suggesting that a man’s judgment may be impaired by such circumstances, but—”

“You think I was temporarily deranged when I proposed to her. Very well,” I said coldly, “we won’t discuss the subject further. I apologize for embarrassing you with my confidence.”

“But, my dear fellow—”

“We will not speak of it again,” I said strongly, and after that there was nothing more he dared say.

I was so upset by his attitude that I canceled my customary visit to Cashelmara for Christmas and went instead to London. I felt in no mood either for absorbing myself in estate affairs or for welcoming the hours of solitude that were an inevitable part of any visit to Cashelmara. Instead I spent time at my club discussing politics with others who had returned early to town, and in my library I prepared a lecture I had been invited to give in January at the Royal Agricultural College in Dublin. I also visited my mistress, since she was the only person who seemed to regard my engagement to Marguerite as both right and natural, but oddly enough the more I visited her the less interested I became in going to bed with her, and since we had nothing to talk about outside the bedroom there eventually seemed little point in making the tedious journey to Maida Vale.

“Great chunks of ice are already floating down the Hudson,” Marguerite wrote in a December letter, “and all the beggars in the streets are blue with cold. This is a dreadful climate! I can’t believe spring will ever come. However, I shall now stop moaning and tell you about Matters of Importance, since that is what I’m supposed to write about in accordance with all the books on letter writing! Well, John Brown was finally hanged. Isn’t it dreadful? It just proves how barbaric they are Down There, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t secede—good riddance, I’d say. There! So much for Matters of Importance and the books on letter writing! Now I shall tell you all the interesting things such as how cleverly you described the circle of your Warwickshire acquaintances and how much I wish I could be dining with you at Woodhammer under the stern eye of the Man with the Ruff. Talking of ruffs, I’m at present pretending to read the new book on Philip the Second of Spain, but in secret I’m halfway through
The Hidden Hand,
which is quite delicious, although Francis thinks novels like that are very low.”

And at the end of her letter she wrote again: “Do you ever feel sometimes as if spring will
never
come?”

I wrote back to say I did, although whenever I took up my pen to write to her the bleakness of winter faded until I no longer minded the rain and the fog beyond the library window. I was writing more frequently to her by this time, although in retrospect I wonder how I found the time to do so. I was very busy. In the new year I journeyed north with Patrick to Rugby, and after I had installed him at the school I hurried to Ireland to give my lecture at the Royal Agricultural College. I almost visited Cashelmara afterward but thought better of it, for the next session of Parliament was beginning and I was anxious as usual to take my seat in the Lords.

I found it increasingly important that I should keep myself occupied, and for a time I succeeded admirably. All through February I devoted myself to affairs at Westminster, and then early in March on the very day I received one of my precious letters from Marguerite the headmaster of Rugby sent a telegram to say that Patrick had run away from school.

IT WAS AWKWARD FOR
me to leave London at once, but I canceled all my engagements and took the first available train to the Midlands. I was so sure that Patrick would be at Woodhammer that I did not stop there first but went straight to Rugby to confront the headmaster.

It was not a pleasant confrontation. I was told bluntly that Patrick had not settled down at school; he had made no effort at his lessons and had been indifferent to attempts to discipline him. Since he was clearly unable to take advantage of the opportunities the school offered him, it seemed advisable for his sake to remove him from Rugby and engage a private tutor to continue his education.

“You mean he is expelled,” I said furiously.

“Not expelled, Lord de Salis. Advised to leave.”

“Don’t talk to me in euphemisms! You’re expelling my son because you’re unable to teach him! You’re making him take the blame for your own failure!”

“You are quite mistaken, I assure you, Lord de Salis.” Unlike me he did not lose his temper. “Nothing could be easier for me than to say that the son of such an eminent man as yourself would still be welcome at Rugby despite his refusal to study and despite the fact that he has run away. But if I took this line of least resistance in order to ensure your good will and avoid this distressing interview, I would be failing in my duty as a headmaster to do what is best for his pupils. Naturally we both wish to do our best for Patrick, and believe me, Lord de Salis, there can be no benefit to Patrick if he should return to Rugby.”

I left. I knew better than to persist in defending a lost cause, but I was still very angry, and by the time I reached Woodhammer I was angrier than ever.

“Tell my son I want to see him at once,” I said curtly to the butler as I strode into the hall.

“Your son, my lord?” said Pomfret, astonished, and all my anger faded as I realized that Patrick was not at Woodhammer after all.

I went to the smoking room, where Pomfret brought me brandy and water, and stared out of the window across the Elizabethan garden. Patrick must be in Ireland. He would be waiting at Cashelmara for Derry to return from his small Catholic boarding school in Galway at the end of the Easter term. I might have known that, despite all I had said to him on the subject, he would still seek Derry’s company at every available opportunity.

The next morning I left Woodhammer Hall for Holyhead on the first stage of my journey to Ireland.

I traveled as fast as I could, and when I found there was no private carriage available for hire in Galway I took the Bianconi car bound for Leenane. At the junction of the road which led to Cashelmara I borrowed a nag from one of my tenants to save myself a walk, but rain was falling from sodden skies by this time, and when I reached my home at last I felt chilled, tired and dispirited.

“Where’s my son?” I said abruptly to Hayes before he had a chance to begin a wordy Irish welcome.

“Your son, my lord?” said Hayes, echoing Pomfret at Woodhammer Hall.

“For God’s sake, Hayes, he’s here, isn’t he?”

“To be sure he was, my lord, but he and Derry Stranahan left in the middle of last night to visit your nephew Mr. George de Salis of Letterturk Grange.”

“What!” I began to wonder if I were losing my sanity. “Hayes, what you’ve said makes no sense at all. Why the devil should my son and Derry Stranahan, who’s supposed to be still at school in Galway, leave here in the middle of the night to call on my nephew?”

Hayes made a valiant effort to explain. “It’s trouble there’s been in the valley, my lord, so there has, and the two of them wanting to leave the valley as quietly as a pair of field mice with no living soul setting eyes on them.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Terrible trouble, my lord, may the Holy Mother of God protect us all.”

I was so exasperated that I nearly seized him by the facings of his coat and hurled him against the wall. “Hayes …” I began and then gave up. It was useless expecting a coherent explanation from him, and anyway I disliked questioning a servant about common gossip, particularly when it seemed that my son and my protégé had somehow behaved themselves so discreditably that they had had to flee the valley under cover of night. They must have been desperate indeed. Patrick detested my nephew George, who was twenty years his senior, and in normal circumstances would have sought Annabel’s company at Clonagh Court.

“I want a hot bath, Hayes, a meal and some brandy and water. After that I shall ride to Clonareen, so please see that my horse is ready for me by the time I wish to leave. Oh, and send the carriage, please, to the hotel at Leenane, where Pierce will be waiting with my bags, and ask one of the stable boys to take that hopeless mare outside back to Timothy Joyce on the Leenane road.”

It was obvious that I would have to talk to the priest to learn the exact cause and extent of the trouble in the valley.

The rain had faded to a fine drizzle by the time I came within hailing distance of Clonareen. It was still afternoon, but nobody seemed to be either working in the fields or gossiping with their neighbors. The silence disturbed me; the deserted homes reminded me of my return to the valley after the famine, and hurrying my horse I rode more quickly down the road to the village.

Clonareen is not a village in the English sense of the word, for there are no shops or post office, no village green or tavern or hotel for commercial travelers. Most of the inhabitants live at subsistence level; goods are exchanged by private barter or else are bought from passing tinkers. There are no pretty little cottages flanked with pretty little gardens either, only the cabins straggling by the roadside, a motley collection of mud walls and thatched roofs, and mingling with the stench of open drains float the pungent smell of burning peat and the pervasive odor of pig. The church stands on its own beyond the cabins, and the burial ground, vast and mysterious, stretches eerily up the mountainside toward the heavens.

I heard the fight as soon as I reached the corner that hid the church from my eyes. The air was rent with Irish curses, tribal shouts and the sickening crunch of wooden staves.

The sight of a faction fight always infuriates me. After devoting many years of my life to arguing at Westminster that the Irish peasant deserves a life superior to that of a medieval English serf, it plunges me into despair to see those peasants wallowing in their primitive condition like savages.

I stood up in my stirrups and shouted at the top of my lungs in Irish, “What in the name of God Almighty and all His saints is going on here?”

It is surprisingly easy when speaking Irish to lapse into the papist patois.

The nearest men stopped fighting and swung around to face me, their mouths gaping in astonishment Taking advantage of their surprise, I rode into their midst and bellowed at those still fighting. When everyone was still at last I counted three bodies in the road, about forty heavily breathing members of the O’Malley and Joyce families and God knows how many women and children peeping over walls and peering from doorways.

“You bloodthirsty, empty-headed Celtic fools!” I yelled at them, and seeing the black flap of a cassock, I shouted after the escaping priest, “Father Donal!”

The priest sidled back sheepishly. He was a young man, not more than thirty, and since he was usually capable of sensible behavior I suspected his furtiveness sprang from shame that I had witnessed his impotence to stop the fight.

“What are you doing running away from your flock?”

“I …”

“Don’t make excuses to me! Get those injured men out of the road and see how badly wounded they are. Where’s Sean Denis Joyce?”

“Here, my lord,” said the patriarch of the Joyce family, the blood still running from a welt on his forehead.

“And where’s Seamus O’Malley?”

There was a silence. They all stood there looking up at me, and beyond them as far as the eye could see nothing moved except the clouds shifting across the towering hulk of Devilsmother, the mountain at the far end of the lough. The drizzle had stopped. The air was cold and clear.

“Well, where is he?” I demanded. “Answer me, one of you!”

A young man stepped forward. His face was familiar to me, but at that moment I could not remember his name. He was very dark and very uncouth and looked every inch a troublemaker.

“Seamus O’Malley’s dead, Lord de Salis,” he said, and to my amazement he spoke in not only fluent but intelligible English. Most of the Irish can speak a little English if they want to nowadays and can certainly understand more than they speak, but to hear good English spoken in that remote section of Ireland, particularly when Irish would have sufficed, was extraordinary.

“What’s your name?” I demanded, so intrigued that I momentarily forgot the faction fight.

“Maxwell Drummond, my lord.”

That was a grandiose name for a peasant. I was just wondering if I could have heard correctly when the name Drummond struck a chord in my memory and I knew who he was. His father, one of my best tenants, had come from the north, and everyone knows the men of Ulster are a very different breed from the men of Connaught.

“Ah yes,” I said. “Drummond. You’ve grown since I last saw you. No wonder I didn’t remember who you were. What are you doing here?”

“My mother was an O’Malley, my lord.”

“So she was. Of course.” Mentally reproving myself for my second lapse of memory, I looked at the O’Malleys. They were silent, watching us.

“I want a spokesman from you,” I told them in Irish. “Who will speak for the O’Malleys?”