Cashelmara (53 page)

“I noticed as soon as you arrived that you were in a great gale,” remarked Marguerite, seating herself in her favorite chair and putting her tiny feet up on an embroidered footstool, “but I put it down to the fact that you were seeing London again after such a long absence. Sarah, you will be prudent, won’t you? About being in London, I mean. I do wish you and Patrick could have gone straight to the new house as we had originally planned, but Mr. Rathbone says conveyancing is always a very slow business, and—”

“Marguerite, have you ever met Maxwell Drummond?”

“Drummond? The farmer? Yes, I have. He was a protégé of Edward’s for a while.”

“What did you think of him?”

The expression changed in Marguerite’s eyes. “Why, I thought he was rather dangerous,” she said after a pause, “and altogether too big for his boots.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Why? Do you like him?”

“Not in the least,” I said rapidly. “I can’t endure him. But I can’t stop thinking about him either. It’s the most extraordinary and peculiar thing. It makes no sense at all, but whenever I meet him—”

“I see,” said Marguerite. She had smoothed all expression from her face. Her blue eyes regarded me with blank intelligence from behind her pince-nez.

“I mean, it’s not even as if he’s handsome. He’s really quite ugly and he’s dreadfully rude in his language. I’ve had only one conversation with him, but—”

“I see,” said Marguerite again. “Only one conversation.”

“It was the fifth time I’d seen him.” I described the first meeting at the dispensary, the two glimpses in Clonareen, the encounter at Father Donal’s cabin and finally the conversation in the drive at Cashelmara. I talked very fast, scarcely pausing for breath, and the word “Drummond” reverberated again and again until the very air seemed to hum with his name. “And each time I see him—”

“Quite,” said Marguerite.

“I simply can’t understand it. If he were good-looking …”

“Such things often have nothing to do with good looks.”

“If he were a man of my own class …”

“That would, of course, be much simpler,” said Marguerite. “You could have an affair with him and be on the road to recovery in no time at all.”

“Marguerite!”

“My dear Sarah, don’t bother to look so shocked! We both of us know what goes on in the world, and I see absolutely no reason why either of us should have to pretend to the other that we don’t.”

“But I couldn’t possibly even think of …”

“Couldn’t you?” said Marguerite. “Then perhaps you’re not so badly smitten as you think you are. Never mind, the discussion is quite irrelevant since you obviously can’t have an affair with a man who’s little more than a peasant. Even affairs, after all, have their conventions.”

“But what am I to do? I’ve been thinking of him continuously ever since I last saw him!”

“Try and see your infatuation for exactly what it is—an infatuation. You may think you can’t be infatuated with his appearance, but in fact his appearance must be exactly what you find so fascinating. You hardly know him well enough to be infatuated with his noble soul—if he has one, which I doubt”

“But—”

“Heavens, Sarah, you must have suffered from infatuations before! Didn’t you write and tell me once when you were fourteen that you were madly in love with your dancing master?”

“It’s not like that” was all I could say.

“My dear, I’m afraid it is.”

“No, you don’t understand.” I had never said that to her before. I could hear the stubborn edge to my voice and she heard it too, for she said quickly, “Oh, but I think I do understand! I’ve had my infatuations too, you know, and very troublesome they were at the time, but I did eventually recover. One simply has to be as patient as possible and wait for them to die a natural death.”

“It’s four years since I first saw Drummond,” I said. “If it’s an infatuation, shouldn’t it have died a natural death long since?”

“It’s lasted so long because you’ve seen him so seldom. Familiarity breeds contempt. If you saw him every day for a month you’d wonder soon enough what you could have seen in him. Sarah …”

“Yes?”

“Is he aware of your feelings?”

There was a silence.

“Lands’ sakes, Sarah, you haven’t knowingly given him any hint—”

“There was no need,” I said. “He’s always known, just as I have.”

“How can that possibly be so! You’re dramatizing the situation, Sarah, making a romance out of it.”

“I can’t help it if it’s true,” I said and suddenly found myself crying.

“There, there … I’m sorry.” Marguerite sounded both alarmed and upset. “I didn’t mean to be unkind, but … Sarah, you must be sensible about this, you really must. I know you’re not as happy with Patrick as you might be. I know it must be dreadfully tempting for you to look at other men, but Sarah, not at men like Drummond! It would be a disaster for you, can’t you see that? Patrick would leave you instantly. There would be no question, as there might be if you had an affair with a man of your own class, of Patrick being complaisant or even making the effort to cover up your indiscretions. You would be divorced, disgraced, a social outcast. The children …”

Far away in the hall we heard Patrick’s laughter and the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

“You’d never see the children,” said Marguerite. “Never.”

There was nothing else to say. I had no choice but to stop thinking of Drummond—and yet I went on thinking of him, and throughout the happy months that followed I found I was quite unable to rid myself of that terrible longing to see him again.

Marguerite must have said something to Patrick after our conversation, for he was very loving toward me, and for the first time in months we started sharing a bed again. By the time the new year came I suspected I might be pregnant. There had been a small but telling increase in my waistline, and I thought what a relief it would be if all temptation to buy a new wardrobe of fashionable clothes was removed by the promise of a ballooning figure. We were living a quiet life in London and seeing hardly any of our old friends, but I knew all the old temptations were there and so did Patrick. However, he avoided his gambling haunts, and I avoided extravagance, so perhaps we had finally learned a little wisdom after our disasters. Patrick was still mesmerized by his garden at Cashelmara and kept rearranging it on paper. He never carved wood now but browsed interminably among ancient gardening books and took Ned on a series of expeditions to the botanical gardens at Kew.

In January he was diverted by the garden of Marguerite’s new house at Mickleham, a tiny picturesque village in the Surrey Hills south of London. Marguerite had bought the Queen Anne mansion which lay beyond the inn, and the garden consisted only of untidy lawns and enormous cedar trees. Little could be done to improve the garden at that time when the ground was hard with frost, but Patrick lost no time drawing up plans for a rose garden, two shrubberies and a pair of matching fountains flanking a gazebo.

“But, Patrick, this would cost a fortune!” protested Marguerite when he began to talk of building the fountains in Italian marble.

“Yes, but think how beautiful it would be!” he exclaimed. “It would be a monument to you, Marguerite.”

“How awful—just like a graveyard! No, Patrick, I’ll have the shrubberies and as many flowers as you can manage but no fountains, no gazebo and absolutely not one square inch of Italian marble.”

As we began to settle down, I helped Marguerite with the delightful task of ordering the remainder of the furnishings. A visit to Brighton and the royal Pavilion had given me an entirely new attitude toward interior decoration, and to Marguerite’s horror I became enrapt with ornate furniture laden with serpent motifs. “Eye-catching but impractical,” she said hastily. “Comfort must come first.” And along came the lounging chairs, the conversation sofas, the footstools and the whatnots. However, we did agree on a series of delightful floral wallpapers for the reception rooms, and this choice satisfied Marguerite’s taste for modern furnishings as well as my passing fancy for the exotic.

The January days raced past. Thomas and David returned to their school at Harrow, and Ned, who had been enjoying their company during the Christmas holidays, began to mooch around glumly on his own.

“When are we going back to Cashelmara?” I heard him ask Patrick, but Patrick had no idea. He heard once a month from MacGowan, who reported that conditions had worsened on the estate, and occasionally we heard from Madeleine that people were flocking to the dispensary, while the workhouse at Letterturk was overflowing with the destitute. But in the spring she wrote, “Everyone is optimistic about the crops this year, and the potato fields are healthy. By autumn, God willing, it will be possible for you to return to Cashelmara.”

A day or two later MacGowan wrote to say he was still doing his best to extract rent from the tenants who could pay but had been obliged to evict three families who had been deliberately withholding their rent money. “It’s politics that’s to blame,” he added tersely. “So long as that rogue Parnell tells the peasants they have a moral right to refuse to pay rent there’ll be no peace either here or anywhere else in Ireland. The Blackbooters meet in Clonareen every Sunday and openly admit their alliance with the Brotherhood, except now the Brotherhood calls itself the Land League. The priest’s in it up to the neck, so it’s no use looking to him to give moral guidance. These are grievous times for a loyal hardworking agent, my lord, with abuse and rotten eggs hurled from all sides and my own servants afraid to work for me in case the Blackbooters take reprisals. Even Hayes and his wife have been told to leave Cashelmara, and Hayes is so scared I have no doubt but he will run at the first sign of trouble. If he goes I shall request the police to mount a guard on the house, but it will take extra money to keep them there, so I must warn your lordship of the expense in advance. Your lordship should also know that agents are fleeing their estates right and left except those that have been offered extra inducement to stay. I remain your lordship’s humble, obedient and loyal servant,
IAN MACGOWAN
.”

I sold a pair of diamond earrings so that Patrick could respond to this blackmail. I personally thought the letter was monstrously insolent, but Patrick said all would be lost if MacGowan left the estate, and so the money was sent. I didn’t dare object when Patrick hinted that we could sell some jewelry, for I was too afraid that if I refused he would resort to gambling to try to win the money he needed.

Apart from this disturbing letter from MacGowan the summer passed peacefully. Ned helped Patrick in the garden, all the local gentry beat a path to Marguerite’s door, and Thomas and David, when they returned from school, went on long riding expeditions up Box Hill or along the Mole Valley. Thomas was eighteen now. He had improved in looks, but he was still gauche in many ways and seemed either not to care to make sociable conversation or to have no gift for it. He was greatly interested in the study of medicine and fancied his talent for dissecting mice. In contrast David was sociable in the extreme, easygoing and easy to talk to. Of the two brothers it was he who took the greater interest in Ned. He would take him for walks across the meadows to the river or drive him in the pony trap to Dorking to explore the shops.

Ned was going to be six that December.

“Bright as a button,” said Nanny fondly.

“Ever so tall for his age,” said the nursemaid who was to help Nanny with the new baby.

“Dear little boy!” said Cook.

“We’re very lucky, Sarah,” said Patrick.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

I kept telling myself how lucky I was.

“Some people are born lucky,” said Patrick’s niece Edith, who had unfortunately returned from her sister Clara’s house in the spring. I could not bear Edith. She was twenty-six years old, unmarried and the sort of female who gave the word “spinster” a bad reputation.

“I can’t think how you tolerate her living with you,” I said to Marguerite in a great sulk soon after Edith’s return. “You must have the patience of a saint.”

“Well, one must make allowances,” said Marguerite mildly and talked about what a hard life poor Edith had had, neglected by her mother and overshadowed by her pretty older sister. “Poor Edith! I know exactly what she wants, but for the life of me I can’t see how she’s ever going to get it.”

“What she wants is a good box on the ears,” I said, “and she’ll get it too if she’s not careful.”

Fortunately Edith went up to town to stay with friends of Marguerite’s as soon as the Season began, and she remained in London until July.

In August, just as Edith was moaning that no one had invited her to the yachting at Cowes, my new baby arrived. She was a girl, very pretty, with a pink and white skin and perfect little features.

“You’re so lucky, Sarah!” said Marguerite, whose own daughter had died in infancy.

“How lucky we are, Sarah!” exclaimed Patrick, thrilled. “Two boys and now a girl. How well we’ve arranged things!”

He wanted the baby to be called Eleanor.

“After your mother, I suppose,” I said, considering the suggestion.

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of my mother,” he said—not surprisingly, for Patrick never did think of his mother. Despite his claim that he remembered her fondly, I had long ago realized that his attitude toward her was entirely negative. “I was thinking of my sister Nell, who brought me up.”

I thought Eleanor was a pretty name, and we were so astonished to find ourselves in agreement that we even had the energy to choose a second name, Marguerite, before the baby was christened.

It was the day after the christening that the grim letter arrived from MacGowan. “The rain never ceases,” he wrote tersely, “and it seems the oat crop will never ripen. The turf crop is all but lost. Despite all my earlier hopes this has been a bad summer, my lord.”

Grimmer news was to follow. We had written to Madeleine to tell her of Eleanor’s safe arrival, and her reply arrived soon after MacGowan’s letter. After congratulating us she wrote, “The potato has failed and the stench of the rotting potato plants is beyond belief. The people sit numbly looking at the blackened fields. This is one more terrible cross that God has sent the Irish to bear. Pray for us.”