Authors: Redemption
Tags: #Europe, #Ireland, #Literary Collections, #Historical Fiction, #Fiction, #Romance, #Sagas, #Historical, #Australian & Oceanian, #New Zealand, #General, #New Zealand Fiction, #History
Georgia became his chief assistant in the operating theatre and was duly impressed by the man’s skill. He also showed himself to be caring to his patients, a trait not often displayed. Georgia made a deliberate decision. Calvin Norman was a safe settlement and offered a comfortable life as far away from England as the planet afforded, as well as the family she craved. He was seduced and incredibly taken with her. Not the flaming love of her life, because that love was an illusion, but a gentle man who would not hurt her.
Well, old Calvin fooled her good and right, he did. He
turned out to be the deadliest in a line of vipers and louts, comparable only to her dear father, Oliver Merriman.
Back in Christchurch and reigning as chief surgeon in the South Island’s premier hospital, Calvin had a lot of settling up to do. Bit by bit her husband’s pimply, pale-faced, humiliating childhood eked out. He was buffeted by a weakling boyhood in a wild land filled with ruffians who demonized his most formative years.
His long and bitter haul to the physician’s oath now afforded him authority. The bully boys all needed him, and their wives were payment on account for his past torment. He was consumed by an insatiable urge to conquest, to prove and reprove his manhood.
From the onset, with her becoming chief matron at the hospital, their union was in trouble. He was recalled to the Medical Corps with the fine rank of major long before the war started, and this was good for him, to get a head start in a career that could well end up in London.
Because Christchurch kept its secrets locked, and open scandal meant ostracism, Norman pleaded with her to keep a lid on things and expressed the first regrets of his behavior. Georgia pledged silence until the war ended. He had only begun to realize the quality of woman he had married.
You’ve got the rest of your life, Georgia Norman, to dream about why you fell in love with this Larkin bloke…but why the hell did you risk this trip to Auckland and start to turn loose everything you’ve so far been able to hold inside?
Rory lad had at last broken her cycles of fear. He inflicted no harm, only grace. She had ridden the wild stallion and she knew she’d never have that ride again. Hot and wet and wild and you’re smarter than to put a collar on a young rover just as he begins his roving, she mused.
How many times, Georgia girl, have you sat on the edge of a wounded soldier boy’s cot and cooed at his faded brown, cracked photograph of a girl whose looks you could hardly make out? The soldier boy had all but
forgotten what she really looked like, just as you have forgotten what your dead soldier boy looked like.
Nice chipper lad, he was, Lieutenant Sidney…Sidney…Sidney Clarkeson. First man you weren’t frightened of. Through his innocent ways you learned the splendid skill of controlling a man. Face it, Georgia, you weren’t all that keen for the marriage. You were sorry he was blown up in battle and you wept sincerely over his remains. But the ache passed too quickly, and you realized it. It might not have been love at all, just a lack of fear.
As other chaps came along, four or five in all, you enjoyed the hell out of men, but the instant that look of possession came into their eyes you moved away quickly.
That look…
that look
…wasn’t your tour of service all about
that look
of Oliver Merriman’s? Your daddy had status, that’s what, a clerk and manager for five barristers in Lincoln Inn…as respectable as a middle-class Englishman could aspire to be.
Oh, that sotty bastard! In his cups, he had held her up by her long red hair when she was thirteen and spat on her and slapped her and hurled her against the wall screaming, “Whore!”
Her mom quivered nearby, saying nothing. Mom had taken Oliver Merriman’s rage a hundred times saying nothing. Her two older sisters had fled with early pregnancies into marriages in hell.
Oh, Mr. Merriman, the pastor gooed and gushed, and his lovely ladies…if only his flock had the character of that exemplary family!
By the age of fifteen, appearing advanced for her years, Georgia found refuge in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service and never looked back. She had strong hands, powerful drive, absolute nerve under bloody conditions, and a range of humor and kindness. Most of all, she was a model of perfect and absolute competence.
Despite Oliver Merriman’s shadow and the sickening experiences of her mother and sisters, Georgia wanted her
men—but no man’s cock would reduce her to bondage. She kept firmly in control, never too emotionally involved, and determined to be self-sustaining. No one would control her, not for a blink.
Georgia buddied with them all, from beer with the enlisted lads to elite waltzes at the officers’ club. And then she made her Faustian bargain with Calvin Norman.
Rory, still motionless, remained on the promenade deck. Like all captains and kings, colonels and maharajahs, sisters and sweethearts, wives and workwomen, Rory was going to spend the second half of his life trying to get over the first half. Some never do. Would she? How many elders had she met still battling their childhood and their parents? God Almighty, wait till the Irish lassies, let alone the girls of Paris and London, get their hands on that one.
If Georgia had one absolute answer, it was that she knew this night was the end between herself and Rory. Put it to him gently. He will soon forget what you look like, anyhow.
The
Taranaki
greeted a relentless dawn oozing through a permanent mist as she slid along the line of hills toward Auckland, each crowned with an impossible Maori name generally beginning with a W.
Georgia made a sudden decision to remain on the ship and return aboard her to Christchurch. Rory packed, dazed. The ashen lovers now hated each chug and groan of the ship’s engine, bringing them closer to their parting. For an instant, Rory wanted to be Rory and smash up things in frustration. He snapped his satchel shut and looked about. The pair of them were light-headed from the loss of sleep and functioning at whisper level from the final crazy hours of lovemaking.
Good nurse Georgia was now in complete control under duress. “It’s been a hell of a trip, all of it, Rory,” she said. “Try not to win the war by yourself.”
“You’ll write?”
“As long as our letters are good for a laugh or two. You’re not obligated.”
“Let’s fuck the nice talk, Georgia. Something’s happened.”
“I want you to listen to me, Rory.”
“Don’t talk me down, Sister Georgia. I’m not one of your bleeding corporals in need of a chat-up.”
“All right. We’ve been knocked gaga. There is something powerful between us. War speeds up feelings in a cockeyed way, you know.”
“I’m going to say one thing, Georgia, and I mean it. I cannot fathom how any woman is ever going to be like you again. Not in one year or ten years. If you and Calvin Norman do not make it, I’m coming back for you.”
“Rory, people get very sentimental at moments like this and make utterly sloppy promises.”
He unbuttoned his shirt, took her wrist, and placed her hand on his chest. Georgia fairly swooned. “Things may change,” he said, “and I’ll not lie to you when it happens. But at this moment I hope Calvin Norman never comes back.”
She winced and took her hand away.
“Wishing for a man’s death who doesn’t deserve to die is no good, Georgia, but that’s how much I want you.”
She drew him to her and opened her own blouse and lay his head against her breasts. “Close your eyes…listen…will you, now?”
“Aye.”
“We were never really on, you and me. An old girl getting over the anger of a feckless husband has all kinds of venom in her. Trying to make more out of what this has really been will make us fall down attempting to keep promises made in an unreal moment of parting. As the promises are broken, we dodge with little lies at first and the guilt grows. All of what you say is well meaning now, Rory, but it can’t hold over the long haul.”
“Georgia…”
“The military,” she continued, “has a number of agonies, you’ll learn. There is the day-to-day agony of soldiering—working like a dog, brutal discipline, rotten food, boredom,
mud, dysentery. There is the agony of battle. These agonies are very real. No soldier has ever been able to avoid them. Yet the most horrific of all agonies is the memory of home and the woman you left behind. This agony becomes a delusion, blown out of proportion. Although you won’t die from it, it is no less agonizing than the other agonies of soldiering.”
She felt his tears on her breast and took down her straps so he could smother himself freely.
“You can’t control the road you’ve taken. God knows where it will lead you. And if you get to Ireland—and you
will
get there—it could be endless. It is utterly unfair for either of us to make any promises. Understand me, Rory?”
“Aye.”
She let his kisses rove over what she had put before him until a steward called out that they would be in port soon.
From there on out it was stalwart stuff, wan smiles, misty eyes, stout embrace, and down the gangplank we go. He turned and waved and was gone.
Georgia held together until she was certain Rory was out of sight, then doubled over trying to get air to fight her nausea. The steward caught her wobbling and assisted her back to the suite and helped her onto the bed.
“Some tea, Mrs. Landers?” the steward offered.
“I’ll go with the cognac. It’s on the ship’s desk.”
As her color returned and she assured him she was better, he left.
Georgia was grateful she did not falter in the end. So now he was off to his war and she had done what life had brought her to do. The first of her secrets had been safely kept. The second of her secrets was more within her control.
Caroline’s departure from Hubble Manor had been preceded by a thunderclap of rage over Roger’s brutal squashing of Jeremy’s affair with Molly O’Rafferty. The manner in which he savaged the girl’s reputation, then condemned her and her unborn child to the garbage heap, was matched only by the way he transformed Jeremy into babbling submission.
Caroline and Roger had managed a week-long silence before the tinderbox exploded, spewing out a quarter of a century of pent-up rage.
Caroline unloaded on Roger his rotten fathership of Jeremy, his use of human fodder in his fields and industries, his bigoted Reformation mentality, and his dirty secrets.
Roger had a thing or two to say about her hypocrisy, her coddling of Jeremy, her obscene spending, which had required the continuous running of the shirt factory. In the hammer blow, he renounced her giving birth to Jeremy for the sake of her father and not for the earldom.
When Caroline left for Belfast, Sir Frederick’s private train carried so much of her luggage it indicated her plan to stay away from Londonderry for a long time.
Sir Frederick, recovering from his stroke, seeing his family structure going to a shambles, made a long overdue decision committing the future of Weed Ship & Iron
to Caroline. Caroline’s hand fit the glove to perfection. As for Sir Frederick, by Jaysus, Caroline would have to sort out the family quagmire.
The removal of Brigadier Maxwell Swan was a sticky proposition, but even Weed recognized that that way of doing business may have had its day. A close and loving relationship between Caroline and Uncle Max had faltered badly over the years and collapsed completely after the factory fire.
The bloody goons who beat off the unions and the Catholics, industrial spies who gleaned the future plans of steel mills and shipyards, and covert financial dealings all had an archaic bent.
The liberal wave could not be diverted and found its way over the Irish Sea to Ulster, bringing a greater consideration for the welfare of the working people. Union-busting was losing its urgency among the industrialists. Slowly, ever so slowly, it occurred to the upper class that happier working people were producing much finer products at far less cost.
It was nothing that would take place overnight, to be sure, but who better than Caroline Hubble to sense the changes and flow with them?
The problem at the yard was that Maxwell Swan and Frederick Weed were covered with enough of each other’s fleas to send the other to the hangman’s scaffold a hundred times over.
In the end the two old boys, scoundrels and killers though they were, were birds of a feather. Swan was of an age that he wanted to go off someplace faraway and do his sunset years in style. Weed’s stroke had shaken him up considerably. As Sir Frederick aged, Swan feared that Roger Hubble would try to pull him into Hubble’s personal service. Sir Frederick had always had a keen and jolly sense about him, what with his bouts with the bottle and the ballerinas and his rugby team and his bombastic energy for faster trains and ships.
Lord Roger, on the other hand, seemed keen to kill
with a sense of satisfaction. Except for Caroline, the man would have been an utter monster. And the last bloody job…spying on Lord Jeremy, promising to keep the results from Freddie and Caroline…feeling Roger’s hot breath on his neck to recruit him away from Belfast.
Sir Frederick Weed, in his most charming and generous manner, took it eye-to-eye with the Brigadier.
“Max,” Freddie said, “we’re going to have to trust each other.”
A sumptuous estate in Jamaica and a hefty pension were laid on the table. Here, he could be among dozens of cronies retired from the military. He could dress formally three or four times a week, complete with medals, and banquet into inebriated unconsciousness…and make those visits to certain well-maintained cabins.
Now here was where the trust came in. As part of the arrangement, Swan left a handwritten memoir of his black deals with Roger Hubble. The authorship was certified in the presence of an impeccable quorum of his peers who witnessed his signature but did not read the contents of the document.
The book was placed in the hands of Sir Frederick and Caroline Hubble. Swan’s risk was not all that great. After all, if either Caroline or Weed exposed the contents, Swan had a few hundred other pages on his exploits for Sir Frederick.
Trusting thieves will out. Caroline had her little nest egg, the biggest of all Orange cards, to assure that she alone would draw the final boundaries and settle the accounts favorably. Swan rotted away early in his retirement and was set down with stunning military honors but left behind him his little book of horrors, as if to say his pervasive spirit was still rankling around.
The disengagement of the Weed-Hubble combine was not a simple matter. They were welded together all over the province. Roger sat on the Weed Ship & Iron board and the two had numerous joint investments and partnerships,
supplied one another and, until Swan’s departure, attended to a lot of covert affairs together.
While Roger’s earldom was a thin ha’ penny alongside Sir Frederick’s worldwide enterprises, Roger’s ancient title had a mystical hold on Weed. Roger was still the master of Londonderry, endemic to a British Ulster. Londonderry had been Roger’s original Orange card. Now, he had two more of them, Christopher and Jeremy.
Jeremy was let go by his mother for his cowardly behavior toward Molly O’Rafferty and his unborn child. Although Freddie adored Jeremy as a harmless playboy, he had become resigned to the fact that Jeremy would not amount to much in the future of Weed Ship & Iron.
Sir Frederick had ceded Jeremy to Londonderry, to Hubble Manor, and to the Earldom of Foyle, where he could acquit himself as a functionary at charities, horse shows, and snoozing in the House of Lords. Jeremy was to be a ceremonial figurehead much as had been his grandfather, poor stuttering Arthur.
For the moment Jeremy was not up to even these most menial duties. After he had caved in and let her go, his joy and raffish behavior fled him.
Roger issued Jeremy orders. Caroline scarcely spoke to him, and then only in a perfunctory manner on public occasions. His grandfather, while still having a soft spot, grew weary of Jeremy’s lack of steel.
Roger tried energetically to push him into a marriage, but so long as Molly’s disappearance remained a mystery, he refused as though he were hanging on to his last shred of manhood and decency. Jeremy drank heavily, attended the races and horse shows, played rugby with Catholic thugs in the lower counties, and haunted the areas of Dublin around Trinity College and the river Liffey.
Now, Christopher Hubble was quite another matter. It seems that his first steps were out of the marching manual of the Coldstream Guards. Roger bemoaned the
bloody fate that would deny Christopher the earldom. Denied it by birth but showing exceptional business skills, one would have thought he was heading straight for the top at Weed Ship & Iron. Only problem was that Sir Frederick thought his second grandson was a stiffassed bore.
No doubt, Weed thought, Christopher had the inclination to run the earldom’s croppy labor with a whip hand in Londonderry’s archaic industries. However, and this was a tremendous
however
, between Christopher and his grandfather, Christopher did not have the gist of the Belfast atmosphere and the latitude and smarts to deal with ten thousand working people.
During his apprenticeships at the yard, Christopher behaved toward the proud shipwrights and steelmakers as an overlord to his serfs. Likewise, department managers and foremen found him frustratingly priggish and overbearing.
See now, the entrepreneurs of Belfast and particularly his grandfather were rough and tumble bully boys, not the fastidiously clipped, moustached, hands-behind-the-back, slapping-the-old-riding-crop-on-the-breeches guardians of the Crown.
So be it. Roger Hubble had both his sons.
As Roger felt the remoteness grow, he put on a few moves of his own. Jeremy was snatched off the racetrack and ordered into the family regiment. The Coleraine Rifles first went into business three centuries earlier hanging croppy heads on pikes for Oliver Cromwell.
Thus, the Viscount of Coleraine went into the Coleraines as a subaltern and would stay there until he agreed to take a wife. Jeremy, fearing his father’s tirades less all the time, showed little interest in rising above subaltern or anything other than amusing himself and making his forays into Dublin. Because of Lord Roger’s influence in the Rifles, Jeremy was kept in meaningless positions, lest he become an embarrassment.
Enter Christopher, his brother’s keeper. When Chris joined the Coleraines, Roger and Colonel Brodhead, an old Ulster hand, connived to allow Christopher to keep an eye on Jeremy.
Roger feared that Jeremy might bring some sort of humiliation to the earldom in one of his drunken stupors. Not that he cared for Jeremy very much, but Roger feared that if anything happened to Jeremy, Caroline and Freddie would take him out of the Belfast industries forever.
This charming family had splintered into a human patchwork of who was speaking to whom, how loudly, who was speaking behind whose back, and who was wishing whom well or unwell.
There was an absurd molecule in the family mix as Caroline and Freddie aligned against Roger and Christopher, with Jeremy dangling in limbo.
From the very beginning, Sir Frederick and Lord Roger were cemented together to defeat Irish Home Rule, each anchoring a geographical corner of the province. With all the splintering of family fortunes, the two were still cemented together on the Home Rule issue and remained bedfellows in illegally importing tens of thousands of weapons to the Ulster Militia.
Roger saw himself eased out of the Weed Ship & Iron as Sir Frederick made a remarkable recovery from his stroke and tutored his daughter on the company’s future. One always finds bits of undercurrents in Ulster. Everyone seems to get mixed up with everyone somehow—a Catholic midwife assists in the birth of an aristocrat, a Methodist deacon sits elbow-to-elbow at the pub with the paddies—so many signs of normalcy.
No matter who does what to whom, all good Protestants are utterly united on two matters: allegiance to the Crown and the belief that all good Catholics are republicans.
So Roger and Freddie, despite the crumbling of their houses, treated one another as blood brothers in Militia and Unionist party matters.
Roger was not blind to the way Caroline was taking dead aim at the helm of Weed Ship & Iron. Despite Jeremy’s watery obedience to his father, Roger could not shake the young man into a new marriage. It was as though Jeremy was caught up in some sort of Irish faerie’s web and could not let go of it. The echoed sound of “Molly” came to him twenty times a day. Sometimes it faded on its own. Sometimes it had to be cast out by drink. Whatever this last defiance be, Roger could not crack it, so Jeremy stayed out of everyone’s way in the Coleraine Rifles.
Lieutenant Christopher Hubble, amenable to all things good for the earldom, took one step, front and center, and set forth, forthrightly, on a short but sweeping courtship of Hester Glyn Gobbins, daughter of Baron and Baroness Hugh Gobbins. Roger was delighted.
Brother Jeremy, on exemplary behavior, whipped the saber from his scabbard to lead an archway of swords for the couple to sweep through on their way to the altar.
Chris and Hester were extremely close replicas of a fine English aristocratic pair and Gweedloe House’s hedges were as clipped, its roses aburst, bannered, and butlered, the show was as close to perfect as it would have been across the sea on the main island.
On the receiving line, Christopher’s lips parted and teeth revealed a kind smile as Hester offered her cheek to be bussed and said a sincere, “Mmmmugh” to all who kissed her. “Mmmmugh”…“mmmmugh.” The “mmmm” came on contact and the “ugh” on the break…“mmmmugh.”
Because Weed and Roger continued to appear often in public there was very little prattle about Caroline’s departure from Londonderry. Since neither lover nor mistress appeared, one was given to think that the Countess was taking particularly close care of her father.
After the lawn party, the crowd of guests dissolved and the lads of the brigade invaded the township’s pubs.
Caroline retired to her apartment at Gweedloe House only to find Roger already there.
“Sorry about this,” Roger said, “there’s a manservant’s room behind the pantry. It will do me quite well.”
“We’ll manage,” Caroline said. “Actually we have a number of things that have been on hold. This might be a good time for it.”
“Except for the chance rally or dinner, it’s been two years. I think you’ve done a remarkable job with old Freddie. I say, he appears to be pleased with the marriage.”
“Chris and Hester appear to be well suited to what they were bred and cultivated to do, like good horses. I hope Hester has the hips for it,” Caroline said.
Roger grunted. Humor, however dark, was welcomed. “Colonel Brodhead is very happy with Christopher’s progress in the Rifles.”
“Chris has been a splendid officer since he was three years old,” she retorted.
Roger contained his ire. Caroline lifted the phone and was put through to her father’s room. Good, he was taking his rest. For a moment she was afraid he might have tippled just a bit too much and could have been off to the races. “He’s like a little boy,” she said.
“Caroline,” Roger blurted. “I feel terribly awkward. Might I relax?”
“Yes, of course.”
He unbuttoned his vest, doffed his shoes, and settled into a chair near her. Roger was immersed in deep concern and his face showed some hurt, she thought. Or was Roger doing up a little game? They had waited for this encounter for a long time. It came suddenly, but certainly each had rehearsed the lines and also rehearsed the other’s answers…but the answers were never as one thought they ought to be.
“As soon as you realized,” she said, “that Jeremy was going to make Jeremy’s Last Stand, you drew up a short list, blindfolded Chris, and let him pick a name from a
hat—a Coleraine Rifle dress hat—and the winner is Hester Glyn Gobbins.”