Cashelmara (30 page)

In March I heard from Francis. He wanted me to visit America so that I could recover from my grief among my own family. If I did not wish to travel unescorted, perhaps my stepson would be kind enough to accompany me. I was assured that the new Lord de Salis would be quite welcome at my old home on Fifth Avenue.

“Dearest Francis!” I wept, overcome by such magnanimity. I considered it most noble of him not to be prejudiced against Patrick when he had disliked Edward so intensely and thought it showed how unselfish he could be when my happiness was at stake. However, soon I realized that his benign attitude toward Patrick sprang not only from a desire to please me but from a desire to please Sarah too.

Patrick heard from Sarah on the same day that I received my letter from Francis. They had been corresponding for six months by this time, and to my great delight Patrick, never a willing correspondent, was anxious to answer each letter from Sarah as soon as it was received. Sarah wrote excellent letters. Patrick showed me each one because he admired them so much, and when she wrote to second her father’s proposal that we should visit New York he needed no encouragement from me to accept the invitation.

“Let’s go as soon as possible,” he said to me happily. “I’ll arrange estate matters with MacGowan here and Mason at Woodhammer and give the London lawyers the necessary powers to act for me in my absence. A journey abroad would do us so much good, Marguerite! Of course, I know you’re in mourning and should probably live a quiet secluded life for at least a year, but—”

“Oh no,” I said. “That wouldn’t be at all what Edward had in mind for me.” It felt strange to say his name. I wanted to cry but managed not to. “By all means let’s set out for America as soon as possible. I believe I want to go home again more than anything else in the world.”

We left at the end of May. We managed to acquire the necessary staterooms on the new Cunard liner
Russia,
which was already renowned for its comfort and luxury, and once the reservations had been made I felt well on the road to recovery. In fact by the time we reached Liverpool and boarded the ship I fancied the sea air had completed the restoration of my health, and after I had given unpacking instructions to my maid I left my stateroom and went on deck to join the rest of my family.

There was no sign of the boys, who were evidently exploring elsewhere with Nanny, but Patrick was staring intently at the crowded quayside. He was leaning forward, his elbows on the rail, but when I called his name he straightened his back and turned to me with a smile.

“You looked very preoccupied,” I said lightly to him. “What were you thinking about?”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” he said, “I was thinking about Sarah. Marguerite, I’m going to marry her, I’m sure of it. I know I shall fall in love with her, and then I’m going to get married, settle down, turn over a new leaf just as Papa would have wished—”

“I do hope you won’t be disappointed in Sarah,” I said nervously. “You should wait till you meet her, Patrick, before saying all those things.”

“But thanks to those marvelous letters of hers I already feel that I’ve known her for years! I’m so deuced excited—and grateful to you, Marguerite. You do realize how grateful I am, don’t you? You’ve had such an influence over my life. If it hadn’t been for you God alone knows where I’d be now, but you’ve influenced me for the better, you’ve made me what I am today, and …” He stopped. Below us in the milling crowds at the far end of the quay something had caught his attention. A second later I saw his face blaze with excitement as he leaned over the rail.

“At last!” he cried in delight. “I thought the boat would sail before he arrived!” As I stared at him blankly he added with a laugh, “I told him when we were sailing, and he said he’d cross over from Dublin to see us off. Wasn’t that nice of him?” And leaning even farther over the rail, he shouted the appallingly familiar name at the top of his voice.

I looked down upon Derry Stranahan.

When I looked back at the rail a second later Patrick had gone. He was racing to the head of the gangway, and Derry too started to run as he dodged feverishly through the crowds. He was some distance away from me, but I could see his black eyes blazing in his white, tense face.

They met at the foot of the gangway. Everyone stared as they embraced, and no one stared harder than I. They laughed, gestured, embraced again. For a long time I could not see Patrick’s face; I saw only the peculiarly naked joy smoothing all trace of sophistication from Derry’s expression, and then as Patrick finally turned back toward the gangway I looked upon his face and realized at last—too late—that of course he was exactly the sort of man who should never marry.

…UNFORTUNATELY EDWARD II WAS
weak and wilful. The king was expected to be the mainspring of government, and Edward had no head for business.… He took pleasure in music and in unaristocratic occupations such as rowing, play-acting, driving, racing, thatching and digging. But it was not so much the unkingly nature of these diversions which quickly alienated the magnates, as his inordinate affection for the young Gascon adventurer, Piers Gaveston.

England in the Late Middle Ages

—
A. R. MYERS

I MARRIED SARAH IN
New York in June of 1869, a year to the day after we had first met, and after a short honeymoon at her father’s country mansion I took her to Cashelmara. It was then that our troubles began in earnest.

Nothing good ever happened to me at Cashelmara.

However, until then I’d had no cause to moan about the way life had treated me, for I was fit as a fiddle and not bad-looking, and I had a title and a bit of money and all that sort of thing. I was young too, twenty-three when I first set foot on American soil, and so with my youth, health, looks and fortune I was hardly what you might call unlucky. Indeed my friend Derry Stranahan used to say that I was the luckiest bastard in the whole damned world, and I must admit that on my wedding day I had never felt more inclined to agree with him.

Derry always said that marriage was a very sorry end for a man who enjoyed his freedom, but I never enjoyed my freedom much, and while I was still in my teens I began to think how pleasant it would be not to feel obliged to cut a dash with the opposite sex on every social occasion and not feel compelled to give the required response when a lady of easy virtue offered to unlace her corsets. I didn’t dislike women, but I was shy when I was growing up and I found I could enjoy a woman’s company only when I knew she had no wish to pursue me to the altar or the bedchamber or both. This makes me sound deuced vain, chased by every female in sight, but you see, I was so damned lucky with all my advantages that I really did feel a trifle persecuted sometimes. But to tell the truth I was the very reverse of vain and found my good fortune such an embarrassment that I often wished I’d been born a pauper with a clubfoot.

“Never mind the clubfoot,” Derry would jeer. “If you’d been born a pauper as I was, you wouldn’t need any extra curse to help you savor the delights of misfortune.”

I would laugh when he said that, and he would laugh too, for he was a great one for joking about the unequal way fate had treated us. Derry joked about everything, you know, even about things no soul would dare joke about, and when I was with him nothing mattered, the world was bright and clear and sparkling, for nothing could ever upset me so long as I was with Derry Stranahan.

I suppose we were like brothers, but no two brothers could have been so different from each other. Yet because of that difference we complemented each other until sometimes it seemed we were like two sides of the same coin. When we were apart I believe he was as lost without me as I was without him—although of course he would never have admitted that. Derry hated sentimentality.

Soon after I arrived in New York Sarah said with curiosity, “Tell me more about Derry Stranahan.” So I talked and talked for an eternity, but even as I spoke I knew I was somehow failing to describe him. I heard myself reciting the prim facts of his life history, and all the time I wanted to say, “Look, this is one of the most exciting people you’ll ever meet. He’s had the devil of a life and all kinds of ghastly things have happened to him and he doesn’t give a damn for anyone or anything.”

“There’s only one thing I care about,” Derry had said long ago, “and that’s this: I never want to smell famine again. I never want to smell the potatoes rotting in the fields, I never want to smell the reek of putrefied potato pits, and never, never, never do I want to smell the stench of famine fever.”

I wanted to explain this to Sarah, but all I succeeded in saying was “His family all died of typhus in the epidemic that followed the famine. Derry caught it too, but he survived. He was six years old at the time.”

And at the back of my memory Derry was saying, “There was vomit everywhere and everyone’s eyes were open, but no one could see. The baby’s swollen stomach seemed to have burst, and my mother was as stiff as an iron pole and her tongue was hanging out and the lice were crawling out of her hair.”

“What a miracle that he lived!” exclaimed Sarah, marveling at the story.

“… and I lived,” said Derry’s voice from the past. “I should have died, but I lived, and thanks to your father’s charity I’ve been clothed and fed and educated. God must have chosen me, marked me out for fame and fortune, otherwise why didn’t He let me die with the others? There must be a reason for it. God wouldn’t have let me go through all that if He hadn’t had some purpose in mind.”

To say Derry was deeply religious would be an exaggeration, but he was fanatically superstitious about observing his religion, as if he thought God would look on him with disfavor if he did not go to Mass at least three times a week and make confession every Sunday. He treated God exactly as if God were some heathen idol which had to be regularly appeased in order that some terrible catastrophe might be averted. A crisis arose when Derry became old enough to confess certain unpalatable sins at confession, and for some time I watched with interest as his fear of God wrestled with his fancy for feminine flesh. I was rather sorry when feminine flesh triumphed, for I had been brought up on boys’ stories where the hero is always as chaste as Sir Galahad, but since Derry could do no wrong in my eyes I did my best to alter my idea of a hero from Galahad to Lancelot.

“Well, after all,” said Derry, justifying his behavior with his own brand of superstitious logic, “God must intend me to make women happy or to be sure he’d be delivering me from temptation instead of forever throwing it in my path.”

But to be certain not to give God offense, he went to Mass after each fornication and lighted all sorts of candles in the church for his dead family.

He didn’t talk about his family except when he was drunk, and then he would talk about them continuously. He would begin by saying how much he had loved them all and then gradually he would begin to abuse them. I could understand him abusing his father, who had obviously been an awful scoundrel, but I thought it was a bit unfair of him to abuse his mother. After all, it wasn’t her fault that she had died, but to hear him talk you’d think the poor woman had more or less wilfully abandoned him to starve.

“My mother too died when I was six,” I often pointed out, “but I don’t hold it against her.” In fact I could hardly remember my mother. I had been brought up by a thin tight-lipped Nanny who was always declaring morosely that “boys are more difficult than girls” and by my sister Nell, who was kind but distracted. I know now that she was worrying about how long she would have to keep house for our father and whether she would ever be free enough from family duties to get married, but at the time I had merely sensed she wasn’t happy trying to fill my mother’s place in the household, and I had always tried to keep out of her way as much as possible so as not to make her any unhappier.

“Poor little boy,” said Sarah mistily, her imagination giving my childhood an aura of tragedy it really didn’t possess. “You must have missed your mama very much.”

Well, I couldn’t exactly say I hadn’t missed her a scrap, could I? But the truth was I had felt nothing at all when Nanny had told me my mother was dead, and even to this day I think of my mother with neither love nor hate but with utter indifference. However, I always take care to conceal this because I know it’s shameful.

“And your father?” said Sarah sentimentally. “Tell me about your father, Patrick.”

This was much easier. I felt so relieved to escape from the subject of my mother and speak truthfully again.

“My father was a wonderful man,” I said, and as I spoke I could remember him so clearly, not as he had been at the end of his life when illness had enfeebled his magnificent physique but as he had been years earlier in my childhood, huge, powerful and Godlike, his footsteps making the nursery floor vibrate, his strength emanating from him in waves of awe-inspiring vitality. I remember once seeing him mount a horse merely by putting a hand on the saddle and leaping into it. When he smiled at me I felt as a soldier must feel when he receives a medal from his sovereign, and when later people began to say of me, “How like his father he looks!” my heart would almost burst with pride. I used to gaze in the looking glass and, marveling at the magic of heredity, tick off on my fingers one feature after another. Same blue eyes, same wide forehead, same hairline, which receded slightly above the temples, same firm straight nose, same—no, not the same mouth; my father had a thinner upper lip than I did. And not the same chin; his was more prominent than mine and he had a squarer jawline. My jaw was more fine-drawn and in fact, if considered dispassionately, matched my other features better than his did. Well, one can be an awful Narcissus when one’s young, there’s no doubt about that, and I mention all this now not to boast about my looks but to show what a striking man my father was and how grateful I felt to be at least a little like him.

“My father was devoted to me just as I was devoted to him,” I was saying proudly to Sarah. “Oh, I know I used to grumble because he was so strict, but he was only strict because he cared so much about what happened to me. He explained it all to me once. He beat me because he cared. Lots of fathers ignore their sons altogether, you know, and don’t give tuppence what tricks they get up to, but my father wasn’t like that one scrap. I was so lucky to have a father like that, but then I’ve always been so deuced lucky.” And I went on telling her how lucky I was, but all the while I was talking I was gazing at her in admiration and hoping against hope that one day I’d be luckier still.