The Star of the Sea (12 page)

Mary Duane knew that look well. She had seen it on his face five thousand times as they grew up together in the fields around Kingscourt. Sometimes she saw it even now, as the flash of an after-image of something dark in sunlight. The look of a boy who needs something obvious explained.

Often his father was away at the war. There was always a war in some place or another. An aunt had come from London to help take care of him. She was a soft-hearted, widowed, funny old lady who had a thin moustache like a furry grey caterpillar and was often so
drunk that she couldn’t walk straight. She drank Three Crowns brandy ‘like a randy sailor’. That’s what Mary Duane’s father had said.

Admiral Nelson was coffined in brandy. The brandy stopped his body rotting. The rooks in the battlements kept her awake at night. Sometimes she was seen shooting pebbles at them with a catapult. Johnny deBurca groomed the ponies at Kingscourt. He had to stop her firing the catapult; she was shattering the upper windows. She was cracking the guttering. She was cracked in the head. ‘Aunt Eddie,’ she was called by David Merridith. (He said she was ‘a native of Barking, Madbury’.) Mary Duane’s mother said Aunt Eddie’s real name was the Dowager Lady Edwina.

David’s name was Thomas David but everyone called him David or Davey. His other names were ‘His Lordship’ or ‘The Viscount’ or ‘Viscount Roundstone’. All of David’s family had three names, at least. It must have made dinnertime confusing.

Spifflicated. Ossified. Under the influence. One over the eight. Three sheets in the wind.

Sometimes if his aunt was in bed, or drunk, her mother would bring him down to her own house for a few hours. He liked to play in the ash-pit or to wrestle with the dog. He liked the way her mother would empty the great black cauldron of potatoes straight on to the table. He loved to eat potatoes with his small, bare hands, licking the butter from his knuckles like a puppy. Some days he went out in the currach with her father and her brothers, out past Blue Island and Inishlackan, where the mackerel and sea salmon were fat as piglets. He’d come back to the house with the men at dusk, quivering with glee, riding on her father’s shoulders; brandishing a switch of blackthorn as a cutlass. ‘
Tan-tarah! Tan-tarah!
’ One night he wept bitterly when Mary Duane’s mother was bringing him back up to Kingscourt to put him to bed. He wanted to stay where he was, he said. He wanted to stay for ever and ever.

But it wouldn’t be right for him to sleep down here, her mother had told him. When he asked her why, she had quietly answered: ‘Just because it wouldn’t.’

Mary Duane thought her mother was cruel. Other children were sometimes allowed to stay, even though they had mothers of their own at home. Poor David Merridith had no mother to mind
him. Really he had no father either, because his father was always away at the war. He was all on his own in that big dark house, except for his drunken mustachioed aunt and the rooks. And there might be ghosts up there, when you thought about it.

‘There certainly might,’ her father remarked.

He had looked across at Mary Duane’s mother then, but she had given him that little head-shaking signal she used when she didn’t want something discussed in front of the children.

In the middle of the night they had woken to a frantic hammering on the back door. It was David Merridith, wailing tears of dread. He had run all the way down in his nightshirt and nightcap, even though the thunder was shaking the ground and the lightning was splitting the sky in two, and the rain was so torrential that November night that the lowlands of Galway were flooded for weeks afterwards. His feet and his calves were flittered with thorn-cuts, his abject face splattered with mud. ‘
Please let me in. Don’t send me away
.’ But her father had put a coat on him and taken him back up to the manor.

Her father was gone a long time and when he came back to the cabin he looked older. He gazed around the small, dim kitchen, like a man who was lost, or in the wrong house, or waking from a dream in which he had seen something frightful. The latch gave a rattle in the draughting wind. Mice were scuttling in the walls of the cottage. Her mother had gone to him but he had drawn away, as he always did when upset about something. He took a jug of ‘beestings’ milk from the press, the milk of a cow that has recently calved, and drank it down in six big gulps. Mary Duane had run at him and tried to bate him. He had held her closely and kissed her hair, and when she looked up she saw he was crying himself, and so was her mother, though Mary didn’t know why.

On Easter Sunday morning, 1819, Mary Duane was on her way to the well at Cloonisle Hill when she saw a beautiful lady in a sky-blue hooded cloak descending from a coach outside Kingscourt Manor. Her father explained. That was David Merridith’s mother. She must have come home from London to mind him.

He didn’t come down to her cottage quite so often now, but whenever he did he looked happy and well. He wore a white sailor suit she had fetched him from Greenwich. Sometimes he brought
soft little sweets called marshmallows. Greenwich was the place where time was invented. The King of England invented time. (‘I don’t know why the Jaysus he did that,’ said her father. ‘We’d all be a track happier if he hadn’t.’)

His mother was the most graceful human Mary Duane had ever seen. Immaculately dressed, willowy and poised, elegant as the blossom of an English Bramley, she seemed to Mary and her sisters to glide across ground. ‘Verity’ was her Christian name: an English word for truth. She was related to another Admiral: Francis Beaufort. He was the man who discovered the winds. Her shoes were always exquisitely made. Her eyes were the green of the Connemara marble on the steps of the pulpit in Carna church.

Lady Verity was beloved by the tenants of Kingscourt. When a woman on the estate gave birth for the first time, the Countess would call to the cabin with fruit and wheatcake. She would insist that the man of the house go out so she could sit and talk privately with the new mother for a while. She would leave a gold guinea to hansel the baby. She visited the sick, the older people especially. She set up a laundry for the use of the tenant women in an obsolete stable on the bank of the watercourse, so that even in bad weather they might have somewhere to wash clothes. Every year on her birthday, the seventh of April, she gave a party in the Lower Lock meadow for the children of the estate. It was known among the people as Verity Day. The servants and farmers sat down with the gentry.

When potato murrain struck Connemara in 1822, Lady Verity herself ran the Model Farm soup kitchen, ten-year-old Mary Duane and David Merridith helping to chop the turnips and pump the water. Tuppence a bushel of whin-tops she would pay Kingscourt’s children, who roamed the estate collecting them in baskets, mashing them up for His Lordship’s sows. David Merridith used to steal them out of the pigsty and smuggle them back to Mary Duane’s brothers, who would sell them again and give him a ha’penny. Lord Merridith’s tenants, the people of Kingscourt, were envied by those on the neighbouring demesne, that of Commander Blake of Tully. He didn’t give a devil’s damn for them, blight or not; that was what Mary Duane’s father had said. He was only a bloody devil himself: no better than any absentee rack-renter. He had scuttled up to Dublin as soon as the crop failed, the dirty cold-hearted whoremaster.
He’d steal the spittle from an orphan’s mouth. The Blakes were turncoats who’d changed from Catholic to Protestant. If he saw an Englishman walking the highway without britches, he’d walk it without underdrawers to go one better.

Ninety of his tenants had died already and his agents were evicting families who had fallen into arrears. Masked men would come, usually early in the mornings. They had to wear masks, these filthy traitors, for if they were recognised they would get what they deserved. They’d be captained by a ‘driver-out-man’, a bailiff or sheriff, who would order them which cabins to smash and which ones to spare. They would clamber onto the roofs of the doomed cottages and saw through the mainbeams until the walls collapsed. Sometimes they’d simply burn out the people. The families would have to live in the woods or in ‘scalpeens’ of turf-sods on the side of the road.

Lady Verity sent the men of Kingscourt into the woods to find them. They could come and be fed at the manor, she said. Nobody hungry would be refused. It was a time for all Galway to stand together.

Sometimes David Merridith wept with fear when he saw them approaching across the wheatfields, the battalion of white-faced, lurching phantoms, and he wanted to run away. But his mother wouldn’t let him. She always made him stay. She was never unkind but she was firm all the same.

One day Mary Duane heard her say to the little Viscount: ‘In the eyes of God that poor man is exactly the same as you or I. He has a wife and family. He has a little son. And he loves his little son just in the way that I love you.’

Another day, just as the blight was ending, Lady Verity and Mary and Mary Duane’s mother were cleaning the gigantic copper boiler from the soup kitchen when suddenly Lady Verity fell down on her bottom, as though she had been shoved by a bullying boy. Mary Duane laughed to see her on the ground. Her mother told her crossly not to be laughing but Lady Verity laughed too as she got back up, dusting off the skirt of her beautiful dress. Brushing the wisps of eelgrass off her bottom. She said she had a little headache and might go up to the house for a nap.

Later that day Dr Suffield from Clifden had called, remaining in
the house until well after dark. For six months nobody on the estate had seen Lady Verity. Her son was sent away to friends of his parents at a place named Powerscourt in County Wicklow. She didn’t go visiting the sick any more. Babies were born, and old people died, and still Lady Verity didn’t come out of the manor. The laundry on the riverbank fell back into disrepair. Snipegrass began to sprout in the thatch. It was said by some of the very old tenants who remembered the starvation of 1741 that Lady Verity must be struck by the death kiss now; that she must have inhaled the breath of someone suffering from blight fever, or looked too directly into his eyes. Mary’s mother told her those were only silly superstitions. You couldn’t get the fever from somebody looking at you.

One morning at dawn Mary Duane and her father and her youngest sister, Grace, were gathering mushrooms in the Lower Lock meadow when they heard a scream coming from Kingscourt Manor. A long moment passed. Wind buffeted the scutch-grass. A rabbit looked up from a clump of whins. Another scream came, then: louder than the first. So loud that it drove the blackbirds rocketing out of the Faerie Tree.

‘Is that the banshee?’ Grace Duane asked, frightened to stone by the terrible sound. Never before had she heard the banshee, but she knew what her wail was said to mean.

‘It’s nothing at all,’ her father said.

‘Is it the banshee calling out for Lady Verity?’

‘It’s only auld cats,’ Mary Duane said. ‘Isn’t that right, Dada?’

Her father turned around like a rusting weathervane. He stared, unblinking, into her eyes, the dew-soaked puffballs in his mud-stained fingers. It was the first time she had seen him appear afraid. ‘That’s right, my kitten. That’s it exactly. Now hurry along and we’ll all go in home.’

She dated her adulthood as having commenced at that moment. The first time she had donned a mask for reason other than play.

Physicians from Dublin arrived at the house. A famous surgeon travelled from London with a flock of nurses in crisp, cream uniforms. One midnight Lady Verity was seen by the gardener, passing an upper window with a candle in her hand. On St Patrick’s Day, 1823, at six o’clock in the morning, she died.

Her funeral was the largest ever known in Galway. Seven
thousand mourners crowded into the cemetery at Clifden and filled the streets half a mile around; Protestant and Catholic, planter and native, the rich and the ragged side by side in the rain.

Lord Merridith’s two daughters had been brought from London. Mary Duane could not remember seeing them before. One was tall as a beanpole, the other short and pudgy. Natasha Merridith. Emily Merridith. They looked like two sisters who had escaped from a nursery rhyme.

A rector from Sligo had recited the prayers. Reverend Pollexfen, a name Mary Duane had never heard. He was an angry looking, blond-haired, barrel-chested prophet with enormous hands and unpolished brogues, and when he spoke the sombre words of the Psalms, he trembled like an oak in a storm.

Lady Verity’s coffin had been lowered into the grave. The bell had rung. A cow uttered a bawl from a nearby field. A loose buckle was clinking on Lord Merridith’s belt. Drops of rain were spattering on the epaulettes of his uniform. The wind rustled quietly in the chestnut leaves.

And then another sound had begun.

A single voice, from the crowd behind her. An old woman’s voice. And then another.

Soft at first, but quickly loudening: spreading out around the crowd in twos and threes. Men, now: and small children. Rising as people took it up, as a new part of the crowd began to add itself to it. Growing in volume, swelling like a wave, echoing against the granite-stone walls of the church until it seemed to Mary Duane that the sound was coming up from the wet, black earth and might never be stopped.

The Hail Mary, spoken in Irish.

Till the moment of her own death, she would never forget it. David Merridith – her David – in his father’s raincoat, staring into the open grave, praying in Irish with his future tenants, mumbling the words as though speaking in his sleep, lifting his beautiful face upwards to the rain, and the terrifying sight of Lord Merridith weeping.

Anois, agus ar uair ár mbáis: Amen
.

Now, and at the hour of our death.