The Star of the Sea (13 page)

I
N WHICH THE
D
RAWING OF
M
ISS
D
UANE’S EARLIER LIFE IS CONTINUED: THE DISCOVERY OF
GEOGRAPHY,
AND CERTAIN
M
ATTERS TOUCHING THE
E
NGLISH LANGUAGE
.

Lord Merridith began to neglect his appearance. His trim, white beard grew ragged and coarse, his fingernails dirty, his teeth discoloured: yellowed and blackened as antique piano keys. The blisters Mary Duane had seen on the backs of his hands now appeared on his face and his neck. They looked so painful. Sometimes they bled. She saw him walking the Lower Lock meadow one dawn, flailing his cane at the broken stones. He looked up and roared at her to get out of his sight. It was said by some that he smelt like a busted drain. Others reported that he had taken to drinking whiskey. His clothes were often dirty now.

Sometimes at night, in her family’s cabin, quarter of a mile across Cashel Bay from the manor, they could hear Lord Merridith bawling in the yard. Strange rumours about him began to go around the estate: that he beat his son until the boy screamed for him to stop; that he had made a pile of his late wife’s gowns and burned them. It was whispered by his stockmen that he was cruel to his animals; had whipped to its death a horse which had belonged to Lady Verity. Lord Merridith doing that was unimaginable to Mary Duane. He loved his horses.

‘More than his people,’ her father said.

As a magistrate he became feared all over Connemara. Once widely admired for being scrupulously fair in his judgments, for taking the side of right against influence, now he was dreaded from Spiddal to Leenaun. He would rage at the prisoners who came
before him. If a man addressed him as ‘Lord David’, or even ‘Lord Merridith’, as has always been the local custom, he would stand up and bellow: ‘My name is Kingscourt! Address me properly! Disrespect me again, I’ll have you flogged for contempt!’

On the fourth of May, 1826, he sentenced a local man to death. The prisoner, an evicted tenant of Commander Blake of Tully, had stolen a lamb from the Commander’s meadow and fatally stabbed the gamekeeper who had tried to arrest him. The case was closely watched in Connemara. The accused had five children; his wife was dead. Even the gamekeeper’s wife had pleaded for clemency. What the man had done was a terrible thing but one day his God would have to be faced. One day we would all have to face our God. There had been too much killing in Ireland already. She did not want to see more children made fatherless. But the man was hanged in Galway Barracks a week to the day after sentence was passed; his body dumped in a quicklime grave in the yard. His children were sent into the almshouse at Galway, as, within the month, were the gamekeeper’s children. And the seven children fathered by killer and victim were buried in the same pit-grave before the year was through.

A ballad was made about Lord Kingscourt’s cruelty. Mary Duane heard it one morning in Clifden market.

Come all true native Connaughtmen, and listen for a while,
Of the tyrant lord of Carna and his breed that blights our isle.
The maker of misfortunes and the breaker of our bones;
To keep him up, he keeps us down, and grinds us on the stones
.

She went up to the ballad-singer and told him to stop it. He was an ugly little man with one seeping eye. Lord Merridith was a man who’d had troubles of his own. There was nothing in the song about those, she said. And this shite and ‘
raiméis
’ about ‘true native Connaughtmen’? Wasn’t His Lordship born thirteen miles out the road, like his father and six generations of his people before?

‘Where in Hell were
you
born?’ she asked the ballad-singer.

But he scoffed and pushed her away with his elbow. ‘He can make his own bloody songs if he wants to, the murderer.’

That night she dreamed of the laundry on the riverbank. Women washing clothes and singing a hymn. Lady Verity rubbing
her bottom: laughing. While around her the white sheets fluttered like sails. Wet with water and stained with blood.

David Merridith was sent away to a boarding school in England. When he came back to Connemara for his half-term holidays he described the school in detail to Mary Duane. Its motto was ‘Manners Makyth Man’. It was near to a place called the Water Meadows. It was founded nearly five hundred years ago, in 1382, three centuries before Cromwell’s lieutenants ever came to Connemara. She liked saying the beautiful words of its name.

Winchester College, Hampshire.

Winchester.

Hampshire.

David Merridith goes to Winchester College, Hampshire.

It had eleven ‘houses’ and its own special rules for football. The village of Carna had eleven houses too, but the word ‘house’ meant something different in Hampshire. A house was a building where many boys lived, but no girls or ladies. The boys slept in dormitories, like soldiers or lunatics. They had ‘masters’ but not like a servant would have a master. If you lived in a house you hated all the other houses. You stuck up for the honour of your house to the end. But if it came to a fight you’d fight fair and manly. You never gave a chap a biffing when he was down or injured, and you never
ever
peached on him to his master. If you did you were a bladger, a croucher, a toady, Even under attack, there were rules.

Hampshire was a county on the south coast of England. She questioned her parents about it a couple of times – as a young man her father had gone to England in the summers to find farm work – but they didn’t have anything to tell. One day she sneaked up to Kingscourt Manor and asked Tommy Joyce, Lord Merridith’s valet, to show it to her on the atlas in the library, which had a gazetteer.

Hampshire was across the sea from France. It wasn’t just historic; it was ‘steeped in history’. It was widely valued for its chalky cliffs, the pleasant character of its charming people and its fascinating formations of fossiliferous rocks. (‘Mother of Christ,’ said Tommy Joyce. ‘You’d sprain your lips.’)

Winchester was the county town. King Alfred had died there and Henry III was born there. It was whispered by many in the world of letters that the authoress of the widely noted and delightful entertainments
Sense and Sensibility
and
Pride and Prejudice
(‘published under the mysterious note ‘by a lady”) resided within the county of Hampshire. The celebrated Mr Brunel, inventor of engines, resided nearby, at Portsmouth. Lord Palmerston, the Secretary at War, had his family seat at Romsey. King Arthur’s round table could be witnessed in Winchester. It hung on the eastern bastion of the city’s Great Hall, that noblest exemplar of magnificent construction whose mighty stones and oaken beams sang the stirring hymn of England’s glory; the genius of her people from commoner to king. (‘There’s a spake for you now,’ Tommy Joyce sighed dreamily.
‘The genius of her people from commoner to king.’
)

Nobody celebrated came from Connemara. There were no singing stones, no magnificent constructions. No literary whisperings. No tables hung on walls. No kings had been born there, or lived there, or died there; if they had, it was so long ago that nobody remembered their names. No inventors, no authors, no Secretaries at War. What a wonderful place Hampshire must be.

The rules of Winchester College Football were complicated. The teams had mysterious or indecipherable names. Scholastics versus Inferiors. Old Tutors versus The Worlds. Nobody had ever written down the rules, but you had to learn them anyway or the shags would biff you. They’d dig you; they’d prune you; they’d give you a pandying. (‘Shag’ was the English word for a cormorant; also a friendly name for an English boy.) A shag had to stand in the middle of a field and hold up the ball while shouting: ‘Worms!’ That, said David Merridith, was one of the rules. To know the rules was to know a language, though no book existed from which they might be gleaned.

The food at Winchester College was horrible. ‘Bloody ghastly’, according to David Merridith; a wonderful word Mary Duane had never heard before, yet one she thought sounded like its own meaning. (‘
Ghaarst
,’ you might groan, if you were being sick, for example.) But some of the fellows were decent chaps. There were a lot of other shags from Arland there, and they knocked about together no matter what happened. They weren’t ghastly. They were blooming bricks.

Stones sang in Hampshire. Bricks bloomed.

But David Merridith didn’t. Often he came back from Hampshire sickly and pale. He would take off his neatly pressed worsted trousers, his Winchester College blazer and schoolboy’s cap, and don the rough clothes he wore at home in Connemara: the peasant’s canvas britches, the bawneen ‘
bratt
’ or smock. He seemed to think they concealed his status but for some reason they tended only to underline it. A boy in a disguise nobody believed in, an actor playing a part he didn’t understand, he would trudge every rocky field and quaking bog, every pot-holed road and tortuous boreen, each of the thirteen villages on his father’s estate, speaking the Irish he had learned from his father’s servants.

The tenants found it difficult to attune to his changing accent; the exotic music of Connemara Gaelic spoken in the tones of the English public school.

‘Ellorn,’ he’d say, meaning
oileán
: an island. ‘Rark’ was his way of pronouncing
radharc
, a view. ‘Rark. Rark.’ He sounded like a shag. He
was
a shag. The shaggiest in Galway. Many of the people simply couldn’t understand him. Mary Duane was one of the few on the whole estate who could make out what on earth he was talking about. Even when speaking in his native English, his brogue was harder to decipher now. ‘Wistpawt’ had become his word for ‘Westport’. ‘Arland’ he’d say, when actually he meant Ireland. (Some of the people thought he was saying ‘
Our
land’ and thereby making some political point. They tended merely to nod and back away, smiling.)

He loved to speak in the Irish language. He would address her mother as ‘Woman of Duane’, her father as ‘Friend’ or ‘Esteemed Person’. As he entered their cabin he would grin and announce: ‘Christ between us and all harm!’ He’d say ‘the Lord bless all here’ in the Gaelic idiom, and ‘God and Mary be with you’ for hello or good morning. Her father found it strange and faintly annoying. ‘He’d give you an ache the way he carries on. And as for God-bless, he’s a God-blasted Protestant. He doesn’t even
believe
in God.’ Her mother had told him not to be blethering like a geck, but her father thought David Merridith’s behaviour suspicious. ‘He wants to be something he’s not,’ he’d say. ‘He’s fish, that gossoon, and he wants to be fowl.’

‘Just because they teach manners at Winchester College,’ said Mary.

‘Manners Makyth the Man,’ her mother said.

‘It was founded in 1382,’ said Mary.

‘So was my arse,’ her father said bleakly.

Seasons passed. He took up drawing. She would happen upon him sometimes on her way to the market or returning from the well at Cloonisle Hill, seated with a sketchpad and a box of charcoals. He had a talent for capturing the rocky landscape especially, its sense of implied drama and sudden changes of light. A few scrawls of his chalk and you’d see it materialise: marl, shale, sea-wrack, basalt, the marbling of pebbles like bullets in the fields. Buildings, too, he was able to draw, with an exactitude Mary Duane thought almost miraculous. His people were always a little too idealised; stronger and courtlier than they were in the flesh. But people were already his favourite subject, the tenants and servants and workers on the estate. It was as though he was drawing them as he wanted them to be: not quite as they were, or ever had been. Perhaps not even as they would have wanted to be themselves, for he never asked them that. He simply drew them.

For all his pallor and delicacy he was growing up handsome, not at all like his stony-faced father. People often said of David Merridith: ‘His mother will never be dead while that lad lives.’ The broth of your father. The spit of your mother. The cut of your sister. The ghost of your aunt. His manner was gentle, amiable to everyone; though only when drawing a portrait could he look anyone directly in the eyes. A small occasional stammer, and the blushes it caused him, made him appear more timorous and incapable than he was. Though oddly he never stammered while talking in Irish; perhaps, Mary thought, because he had to think more clearly before speaking a language not his own.