Cashelmara (3 page)

I remembered to straighten my back before I opened my eyes.

Marguerite was watching me from a chair by the window, and as I looked at her mutely I remembered that when I had first arrived at the house I had greeted her with almost as much enthusiasm as I had greeted Blanche.

I tried to speak, but to my horror I found that speech was beyond me, and it was instead Marguerite who rescued the situation. She said in a sympathetic but practical voice, “Can I help you, Cousin Edward?” And as she spoke I realized with a painful surge of gratitude that she had not forgotten my earlier kindness to her.

Marguerite had been sitting at a table crowded with chessmen, but now she stood up. She was small, no more than five feet tall, and her wiry, sandy hair was dragged back reluctantly into the fashionable chignon at the back of her neck. She had a sharp, pointed little face, with a long thin nose and an angular chin, and her blue eyes were narrow, as if she regarded the world with acute suspicion. I learned later that she was shortsighted. When she stood up from the chess table I saw the pince-nez dangling from a black ribbon around her neck, but it did not occur to me that her suspicious expression sprang merely from her efforts to perceive her surroundings.

“You don’t look at all well,” she said. “Please, won’t you sit down?” She was looking at me in concern. I managed to say, “Thank you. I’m not used to the heat. In England …” But I could say no more at that moment. I sat down in the chair that faced hers across the chess table and stared at the array of ivory figures on the familiar black and white squares.

“Do you play chess?” said Marguerite. She was examining a white pawn with scrupulous care. “This particular game is from a book that Francis gave me years ago. Francis used to be very good at chess, but he never plays nowadays because he’s too busy making money, so I play on my own. Amelia says girls aren’t supposed to play chess, but I’ve always thought that’s a very silly rule.”

I had recovered myself enough to say in a normal voice, “How strange! That’s exactly what my wife always said.”

“Your wife? Did she? How splendid! Did she play chess herself?”

“Yes. She too had an older brother who taught her.”

“And was she good at it?”

“She sometimes let me win, yes.”

Marguerite laughed, and it was only then that I remembered that I never spoke of Eleanor.

“Will you finish this game with me?” she asked.

“If you like. Yes, with pleasure.” All memory died, drowned in the fascinating abstractions of the chessboard. I turned to the familiar figures as if they were long-lost friends and groped yearningly for the moves that had once lain at the tip of my mental reflexes.

“You’re much too good for me!” exclaimed Marguerite in admiration after the last move had been played.

“On the contrary, you play very well, and I’m slow through lack of practice.”

“When was the last time you played?”

“Oh, that was fourteen years ago,” I said. “At Cashelmara.”

“Ah yes. Your Irish estate.” She began to rearrange the chessmen on the board. “Fourteen years is a very long time. Why is it that you remember so clearly when you last played chess?”

I opened my mouth to make some brief evasive answer, but instead my voice said, “Because I was in Ireland on the eve of the famine. Because my wife had been desperately ill after the birth of our last child, and the journey to Ireland was the first she had undertaken in months. Because we brought our son Louis to Ireland despite the fact that we always kept the children in England for fear of disease. Because the day after Eleanor and I played chess for the last time Louis fell ill with typhus and within a week he was dead.”

She was staring at me. I noticed there were freckles across the bridge of her nose.

“He was eleven years old,” I said.

“Did your wife herself die soon after that?”

The question took me aback. I had been expecting some meaningless platitude intended to express her sympathy.

“No,” I said after a pause. “My wife lived for another six years.”

“Yet you never played chess again. Why was that? Was she angry with you? Did she blame you for your son’s death?”

Startled by her sharpness, I said unevenly, “It was my fault in part. I shouldn’t have insisted on taking them both to Ireland with me, but I thought the change would benefit Eleanor, and Louis was growing up, anxious to see the estate which would one day be his.”

“Then why did she blame you?”

“She was already suffering from ill-health, and the shock of his death … disturbed her. When we returned from Ireland to Warwickshire she refused to see anyone and seldom ventured from the house.”

“She went into seclusion, you mean?”

“Yes. There was a complete nervous collapse—other reasons for our estrangement too, of course, but …” I began to wonder if I had taken leave of my senses. I had never spoken of the estrangement before. Perhaps the combination of heat and shock had affected me more seriously than I had supposed.

“How long was it before you went back to Cashelmara?”

I was struck again by the absence of sympathetic platitudes. “Four years.” I looked around the room. There was a Chinese screen along one wall and a Ming vase on a lacquered table. “Four years,” I repeated, my voice disbelieving, as if I still could not accept the enormity of what I had done. “The famine years. I turned my back for four years on Cashelmara, and when I returned my lands were ruined, my surviving tenants were living like animals and the whole valley was little better than a mass grave.”

She said nothing, but I was no longer aware of her. I could see the corpses by the wayside and the uncultivated fields and the stench of death clinging to the ruined cabins of Clonareen. I could remember going into the church in search of the priest and finding that all the candles had gone out.

“I behaved no better than the worst of the absentee landlords,” I said. “Hundreds of people who should have been in my care died of famine and pestilence.”

“But surely—”

“Oh, of course I’ve tried to make amends since then! I’ve reorganized my estate, I’ve resettled my tenants, I’ve poured money into my lands, I’ve interested myself in all the latest agricultural developments …” I stopped. At last I said in surprise, “I felt so guilty. That’s why I never talked about Cashelmara. And I never talked about Eleanor because I felt guilty about her too. It wasn’t simply Louis’s death. It was all those children and the last nearly killing her.”

I was by the window, though I could not remember having risen to my feet. Outside the brown lawn swam in a blur of brilliant light which heightened the pain behind my eyes. “I was devoted to Eleanor,” I said after a long time. “Our marriage shouldn’t have ended in estrangement. We didn’t deserve it. It was unjust”

A small hot hand touched my wrist. A small clear voice said with passion, “Life’s quite horrid sometimes, isn’t it? And so unfair! I know just how you feel.” And suddenly I realized that
this
was what I had wanted to hear ever since my daughter Nell had died—not the endless hushed sympathy, not the religious platitudes, not the unctuous reminders that I should count my blessings, but someone telling me that, yes, life was often brutal and fate was often unjust and I was entitled to grieve and be angry.

“I know just how you feel,” said Marguerite, and I knew that by some miracle she did indeed know and that in her knowledge lay the release from loneliness that I had sought so fruitlessly for so long.

I looked down at her. I no longer felt angry then. I no longer wanted to curse the injustice of death because I was simply grateful that I was still alive. And as I looked at Marguerite across all those years that separated us, I knew not only that I wanted her but that nothing on earth was going to stand in my way.

I HAD NO CHANCE
to pursue my interest in Marguerite immediately, for the next day I left New York for Washington to begin two months of travel in the interior of the United States. However, my departure seemed well timed. The thought of remaining a day longer beneath Francis’ roof was at that moment intolerable to me, and although I was anxious to see more of Marguerite, I knew I should take time to reconsider my feelings toward her. As so often happens after an outspoken conversation, I had already begun to regret my frankness, and although I was convinced that Marguerite would be discreet, I wanted her to prove to me by her silence that I could trust her.

It is not my purpose to recount in detail every step of my journey around America. If anyone should ever wish to write my biography I would refer him to the papers I later wrote for the Royal Agricultural Society, “Mutant Strains of Indian Corn in the State of Ohio” and “Mr. John F. Appleby’s Knotter—an Invention to Facilitate Reaping.” My letter to Lord Palmerston on the state of the Union may be preserved somewhere, although from my experience of Palmerston it is far more likely that he tore up the letter and jumped on it. For I advocated a policy of strict noninterference with the internal affairs of the United States, and advocating noninterference to Palmerston was worse than waving a red rag at a bull. However, I had my reasons. On American soil I saw clearly that Americans were touchy about their relationship with England, much as a grown child is often touchy about his relationship with his parents. The Americans believed—with some justification, perhaps—that their country was much misunderstood in England, and although the majority of Americans I met were friendly to me, I was conscious of a large well of anti-British sentiment.

“Imagine the disaster for Anglo-American relations,” I wrote to Palmerston, “if, in the event of a militant dissension here, England found she had backed the losing side. Better to back no side at all and wait to see which way the wind blows.”

That shaft was aimed at Gladstone and Lord John Russell, who insisted on believing naïvely that the Southern plantation owners were just a bunch of British gentlemen with American accents who should be allowed to go their own way.

I was not totally unsympathetic to the South. I thought a strong case could be made for a state’s right to secede, but despite that I did not believe the shame of slavery could ever be sloughed off by impassioned references to constitutional rights. I was continually assured by everyone that the division of opinion in America at that time arose from a purely constitutional issue, but it was clear to me, as an outsider, that while the burning issue of the day was supposed to be secession, people talked of little else except slavery.

“The talk here is all of Vicksburg,” I wrote to Palmerston, “where a commercial convention has recently urged the reopening of the African slave trade and the repeal of all laws restricting slavery. Meanwhile, everyone is looking to Kansas, which is due to decide soon whether or not slavery will have a place in its constitution. The dissent in the country is deepening all the time, and after my audience with President Buchanan this morning I was convinced that he has no idea how either he or any other man can hope to resolve the problems which face America today and the crisis which threatens her tomorrow. It is hard to say how the presidential election may fare next year. It seems the Democrats will be divided, the Southerners for slavery, the Northerners for noninterference. The Constitutional Unionists too will compromise with slavery, but they have no leader of note. The new Republican party, which did so well in the last election, may have a notable leader, but he is an idealist and a fanatic, and if by his eloquence he should be elected, there will without doubt be civil war.”

It was in Washington that I first heard Lincoln’s name. It seems strange now in retrospect that as late as 1859 he was not well known in the East, but it was not until the following February that he seized the attention of New York with his address at Cooper Union.

It was a relief to leave Washington. It was not that I disliked the place. On the contrary, the grand concept of the new city impressed me, but American politicians are a rough crowd compared with their English counterparts, and the political climate of the day was so fraught with crisis that the atmosphere in the capital was as exhausting as it was abrasive.

The cornfields of Ohio proved the perfect antidote. I stayed on a large farm near Cincinnati by arrangement of the Government, there is no federal department that deals exclusively with agriculture, but the Patent Office, which has charge of agricultural matters, was most obliging in its introductions, and my host in Ohio received me very warmly. American hospitality can be second to none, and I enjoyed my stay all the more after my encounters elsewhere with anti-British sentiment. However, the mutant strain of corn proved disappointing. I could only conclude gloomily that it was unsuitable for cultivation in Ireland, and after dictating some notes to this effect I withdrew to Wisconsin to inspect Mr. Appleby’s knotter.

Ohio had been uncomfortably hot but Wisconsin was cooler, and while I stayed at a small hotel in a simple country town, I congratulated myself that I was experiencing frontier life amidst the vast wilderness that was the true America. There was a Scandinavian flavor to the lakes and pine woods in the neighborhood, and I thought how much Eleanor would have enjoyed the scenery. We had traveled together widely at one time, but on our one expedition to America we had never visited anywhere so remote as Wisconsin.

Mr. Appleby’s knotter was, like most inventions, brilliant but impractical, and I suspected that it would be many years before it could be marketed cheaply on a large scale. However, I admired the boy’s achievement (he was only eighteen) and promised to send him a copy of my report to the Royal Agricultural Society. After that, my business completed, I set out by steamship eastward across the Great Lakes, and following a short but tedious land journey, I boarded another steamship, which took me down the Hudson River to New York.

To my dismay I found Manhattan as hot as a furnace. In the mansion on Fifth Avenue Francis’ wife Amelia was making preparations to remove the family to their country mansion in the Hudson Valley, but although I was invited to join them there I had no desire to prolong my stay in the household. Excusing myself as civilly as possible, I told my secretary to book a passage to England on a ship that sailed within the week, and once my departure had been arranged I felt free at last to turn my attentions to Marguerite.