Cashelmara (61 page)

“But surely Patrick can’t remain entranced with him indefinitely!”

“Perhaps not,” I said, and indeed this was the hope that sustained me during my worst moments of depression. Most love affairs didn’t last. Why should this one be any exception to the rule? I would watch them daily for any sign of friction, but the only disagreement I saw occurred when Thomas and David left and Patrick for some reason began to drink heavily.

“You’re a fool to start drinking before noon,” I heard MacGowan say to him.

“You only say that because of that damnable Presbyterian upbringing you had.”

“I say it because I care about your health,” said MacGowan, and this was clever of him, for Patrick was sentimental enough to be touched by this show of concern. Handling Patrick was child’s play to MacGowan, and for a while Patrick did restrict his drinking to the evenings.

February came. Edith was so busy putting the final touches to the interior of Clonagh Court that I seldom saw her, and the wedding date had been set for the middle of March.

“Marriage may be the making of poor Edith,” said Madeleine during one of her calls to Cashelmara. She had been calling more frequently because she had at last succeeded in finding a new doctor to help her in the dispensary. Her success was all the greater since Dr. Cahill was a young man and had been trained in London as well as Dublin. “Of course MacGowan is most unsuitable, but Annabel married beneath her when she married Smith and so both her girls were set a poor example. However, I have every intention of being charitable in the circumstances, and it will certainly be pleasant to see Clonagh Court occupied again. I remember so well when my dear grandmother was alive …”

My thoughts drifted away. Madeleine often spoke of her grandmother, and Marguerite had once said the old woman had been an unfortunate influence. If only Marguerite had lived …

“And did I really smell whisky on Patrick’s breath when he kissed me or was it my imagination?”

“I … don’t know, Madeleine. I didn’t notice it myself.”

“Is anything troubling him?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Is anything troubling you?”

“No, Madeleine. Nothing.”

“You’ve been looking a little strained these past few months. I wondered …”

“It’s just that I find the task of housekeeping so demanding. There’s always so much to do.”

“Now that Patrick’s situation has improved you should engage a housekeeper.”

“No, we must save as much money as we can. The children … the future …” And I talked on and on about the future, because it was so much easier than to talk of the present.

For we lived in troubled times. I had been so wrapped up in my personal worries that I had found it difficult to pay attention to the troubles around me, but now for the first time in years I was surrounded by newspapers and continual discussions of politics. MacGowan watched public events closely, and Edith, whether through natural inclination or because of a desire to impress him, followed them as intently as he did. MacGowan, of course, had an ulterior motive. He and his father, who still helped him on the estate, dealt daily with a hostile, truculent tenantry, and every inflammable word uttered by Parnell, Davitt and Dillon stoked the fires of discontent. MacGowan’s job made it vital for him to know what was happening, and because of this I found myself hearing all about the Land League, Parnell’s organization bent on reform of the Irish land system, and all about Parnell himself with his band of sixty Irish members of Parliament at Westminster clamoring for Home Rule. Parnell, Dillon, Sullivan and the other leaders of the Land League had all been arrested the previous year and charged with conspiring to prevent a payment of rents, but in November after a twenty-one-day hearing the jury had failed to agree.

“A black day for us agents,” said MacGowan grimly later, and began to talk of the Boycott case. Boycott, an agent who lived less than forty miles from Cashelmara on the shores of Lough Mask, refused to accept the rents his tenants were prepared to offer, but when he began his evictions, he found himself shunned by the community to such an extent that he had to bring in volunteers from the north to save his harvest for him. A military guard had to protect the volunteers, and the cost of the entire disaster amounted to ten times the value of the crop saved.

“My God!” exclaimed Patrick, much alarmed by this inability to control a united tenantry. “Supposing that should happen here!”

“Impossible,” said MacGowan shortly. “Can you imagine the O’Malleys ever uniting with the Joyces for more than five minutes at a time? Besides, the Land League in this valley consists of no one but that ridiculous old secret society the Blackbooters, headed by that oaf Maxwell Drummond.”

It gave me such a shock to hear Drummond’s name on his lips that I barely heard Patrick warn him to be careful.

“After all, remember what happened to Derry,” he concluded anxiously.

“Derry Stranahan lived by his wits, not his fists,” said MacGowan. “If he’d believed in the value of less talk and more action he’d be alive today.”

“But Drummond had him killed, Hugh!”

“Damn it, Patrick, I could knock the devil out of Maxwell Drummond with one hand tied behind my back! All I hope is that one day he’ll give me the opportunity to try.”

It was said that altogether, counting the police as well as the military, there were seven thousand men keeping the peace in County Mayo at that time, and Cashelmara was on Mayo’s doorstep, just south of the border which ran along the summit of the mountains behind the house. No wonder the Queen, opening Parliament in January, announced that the social condition of Ireland had assumed an alarming character. That was an understatement, and when in February the House of Commons sat for a record sitting of forty-one hours to discuss a new bill for the protection of life and property in Ireland, we knew even Westminster was echoing with the clamor of rebellion. My few remaining friends in London wrote begging me to return to England before I was murdered in my bed, and I wondered in alarm if I should take the children to stay at the house in St. James’s Square.

“What do you think, Hugh?” said Patrick.

“No, Sarah must stay here at present,” said MacGowan at once. “If you let your wife run away you’ll be telling the Irish that you’re frightened of them. She’s got to stay.”

“Very well, but maybe the children …”

“Patrick, if anyone’s going to get a bullet in the back it certainly won’t be the children. It’ll be me.”

I immediately began to pray for a timely assassination, but there was no bullet in the back, and on the twelfth of March MacGowan and Edith were married quietly in the chapel at Cashelmara and departed to live at Clonagh Court. As I had guessed, I was still far from free of them. Edith called every day. No watchdog could have been more tiresome, and she and Hugh continued to dine at Cashelmara at least twice a week. However, there was no denying that the situation had improved, and when in the spring Edith asked if she could accompany me on my few social calls I accepted the suggestion without protest. It was still impossible to entertain guests at Cashelmara, for our English friends shunned any idea of a visit to Ireland and our Irish neighbors were reluctant to travel after dark, but I did persist with the formality of calls. They provided a welcome change from the rigors of housekeeping, and once spring had arrived it was pleasant to escape from the house.

We traveled always with two armed footmen, and I never saw any of the peasants except at a distance. I never caught a glimpse of Drummond, but that didn’t matter because I seldom thought about Drummond now. For me he had died with Marguerite, and my friendship with his wife seemed as remote to me as those far-off times when I had journeyed every week to the dispensary in the hope of seeing him.

The summer passed. Ned’s governess gave notice, which pleased Ned very much, and Patrick advertised for a tutor for him. John celebrated his fourth birthday and blew out all the candles on his cake with pride. I still worried about his health, but there was no doubt that he had grown up very much in the past year. He could say real words now, not many, but he understood everything that was said to him. So did Eleanor. Even before her second birthday her chatter filled the nursery until I began to worry that she might be too precocious.

“We shall soon have to engage another governess specially for her,” said Patrick, laughing, and at such times when we shared our pride in the children I knew that all my struggles were worthwhile and that no sacrifice was too great to make. “I only hope I manage to find a good tutor for Ned.”

“Get a Scots tutor,” said MacGowan. “Scottish education is second to none.”

“I don’t want Ned to have a Scottish accent!” said Patrick, teasing him, but MacGowan, who had no sense of humor, merely remarked that the accent of an educated Scot was minimal.

“Your father has a marked accent.”

“My father is an uneducated man.”

I never quite understood MacGowan’s relationship with his father. They worked well together, the old man regarding his son with grudging deference, and MacGowan was certainly a dutiful son, calling every week at his father’s house; but I had seen too much of Hugh MacGowan not to wonder whether a deep-rooted contempt might lie beneath his faultless good manners. He seldom spoke of his father; his mother, who was still alive in Scotland, was never mentioned. The only hint he gave of his past life with his parents was when he remarked to Edith after she had said something to annoy him, “I hope you don’t intend to turn into a nagging wife, my dear, because I assure you I despise henpecked husbands.”

However, as Edith herself pointed out to him smartly, he was hardly the sort of person to become a henpecked husband.

I had no idea whether Edith was disappointed in her marriage, but she didn’t complain, so I supposed that for the time being she was satisfied. Yet I noticed that MacGowan paid very little attention to her, even when she talked so intelligently about politics, and if I had disliked Edith a little less I might have felt sorry for her.

At Westminster the Irish Land Bill was being discussed ceaselessly, and when Parliament rose in August, Thomas and David came to Cashelmara to bring us firsthand news of London. Thomas was studying medicine in London by this time, and David, who was to go up to Cambridge in October, was busy writing not librettos but a detective story.

“I like writing stories even better than writing librettos,” he confided to me. “Wouldn’t it be jolly if I could get it published?”

“‘Extraordinary’ is the word you want,” said Thomas, who thought all novels frivolous. “Not ‘jolly.’ Sarah, does Patrick usually drink as much as this or is he simply in a convivial mood to celebrate the start of our visit?”

“He must be celebrating your arrival,” I said, smiling at him, but my smile felt stiff and awkward.

“Well, I wish he wouldn’t celebrate quite so hard. The amount of port he drank after dinner last night horrified me. I cut up a liver recently that had belonged to a down-and-out who had died in the casual ward of the Marylebone workhouse, and if Patrick could have seen the state that liver was in I’m sure he’d never touch port again.”

“Don’t be revolting, Thomas,” said David severely. “You’ve developed such a nasty habit of telling everyone your corpse stories. Personally, I’m not in the least surprised that Patrick’s drinking so heavily. I’d take to drink myself if I had to tolerate MacGowan’s company as much as Patrick does. I’m sorry they’re still such bosom friends.”

“So am I,” agreed Thomas. “My God, if I didn’t know Patrick as well as I do I’d say the friendship bordered on the unnatural.”

“What a beastly thing to say!” exclaimed David, so embarrassed by my presence that he blushed pink. But I suspected the idea wasn’t new to him.

“Oh, for God’s sake, I didn’t say it
was
unnatural, did I? All I said was that if we didn’t know Patrick as well as we do know him …”

But they did know him so very well. Patrick drank and acted his part, and I found myself drinking too as I acted mine. I had little glasses of Madeira at odd times during the day and always took an extra glass of wine at dinner.

“Sarah,” said Thomas, finding me alone by the decanter in the dining room on the day before they were due to leave, “what
is
going on in this house?”

“Nothing,” I said. I looked at the decanter. “I’ve been having headaches lately and the wine seems to help.”

“Have you seen a doctor? There’s a marvelous new drug for headaches nowadays, and … Sarah, is something wrong?”

“No—no, I simply worry about things too much. I worry in case we can’t get a tutor to come here and I worry in case the servants decide to give notice and I worry in case Nanny decides she can’t bear to live in Ireland any longer.”

“I do see that the political situation must be very nerve-wracking. If you could come to London—”

“No, I can’t. It’s impossible. MacGowan said …” I stopped, but it was too late.

“MacGowan,” said Thomas. “MacGowan this, MacGowan that. Always MacGowan. He controls every single item in this house, doesn’t he?”

“It’s for the best, Thomas. Patrick needs someone strong to organize his affairs.”

“I can’t believe it’s for the best that MacGowan should walk into this house as if he owns it and tell you and Patrick what to do.”

“I can’t talk about that, Thomas. You must talk to Patrick.”

But Thomas hadn’t quite enough nerve for that. Patrick was sixteen years his senior and the idol of his childhood, and although Thomas had enough courage to ask certain questions he hadn’t at that time enough courage to want to hear the answers. So nothing was said, and soon he and David went away to London with the promise that they would return for Christmas.

But they didn’t come back. They made an excuse. They had had a very special invitation from Marguerite’s best friend … Christmas in Yorkshire … didn’t see how they could refuse … they did hope Patrick and I would understand.

Patrick did understand and got drunk. I had stopped my surreptitious drinking after the boys had left, but Patrick, to MacGowan’s fury, had gone on. After the boys’ letter had arrived Patrick had drunk two bottles of port and MacGowan had found him in a stupor in his room.