The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (15 page)

Mrs Hartigan ushered us back down to the parlour. ‘So, what do you think, my dears?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t this something like, now? You are powerfully quiet for such famous little singers of songs.’

‘But there’s a fireplace in every room so!’ breathed Ida. Finally, she let loose her grip on the goose-wing hearthbrush and laid it on the hearth. ‘We’ll be out all day in that square there collecting firewood! For there’s not a bit of turf to be dug down there in those gardens. And then we’ll get drove over by a carriage every time we cross that murdering road and turned into red rashers lying there!’

Mrs Hartigan pointed wordlessly to the pot-bellied brass scuttles brimming with peat and coal.

What did we think? Only that morning, we had woken up with the thin geese and a mother in a Harristown hovel. That night we’d be sleeping on goose down in Dublin, mothered by someone paid to do it. The hedges and copses that had delineated our world were gone – instead we were penned by red brick and slate with the sky available only in glimpses. Even the rain that now commenced to fall seemed more sophisticated than in Harristown: the grey shreds of it barely dampened the noisy confidence of the carriage-rattling city. The very geese in Dublin would be fat and prosperous, I guessed, and seen only on the roasting plate, and not just at Michaelmas. I suddenly felt a sharp longing for the keening of the slow crows and the sight of them rising from the sodden branches to perform their lovely dances over the pea-green fields of Harristown.

Worst of all, we were in the land of Rainfleury. Mrs Hartigan mentioned him in every second sentence. He had already been all over the house and even in our bedrooms. His very smell clung to the air of the parlour – cloying flowery cologne sullied the sweet notes of peat.

The coachman was carrying our possessions upstairs, directed by Darcy, who had already decided who would sleep where.

Enda and Berenice were safely separated by a floor. Naturally, Oona and I had rooms adjacent to that of our tribeswoman Enda, while Berenice’s party of Pertilly and Ida were to sleep either side of their heroine. Darcy and her black books occupied the grandest room on my own floor.

Before we could go and jump on the beds, we were introduced to the rest of the household: it was not just Mrs Hartigan to keep us fed and clean. Living out, but attending daily, were a maid to empty the chamber pots, dress the beds and scrub the steps, and an elderly houseboy, with a scut of a pipe hanging on his lip, to run the turf and coal. We had our own coachman to attend to our horse and carriage, both glinting with polished brass and accommodated in a stone pavilion at the end of the garden, and at our disposal for every excursion, complete with a carriage-warmer of hot coals kept ready at all times for our use. A sewing-woman, Darcy announced, was to call on us three times a week, to make clothes for our acts, reproducing them in miniature for our as-yet-unseen dolls. An accompanist would be paid by the hour to rehearse us. And there would be daily elocution lessons to deSwiney our tongues and make our vowels lie flat upon them.

When I asked, ‘What about schooling?’ Darcy replied, ‘Why are you asking and you almost fifteen, Manticory? The whole of Dublin is your school now, and haven’t Pertilly and Oona all their wise older sisters to ask any questions of so? Ida’s not going to be learning anything more anyway. Now watch this!’ She reached towards a wide, stiff ribbon of embroidered braid hanging from the ceiling and yanked it as if it were one of Ida’s plaits.

Mrs Hartigan came scurrying up from below, the keys jangling at her waist.

Ida rushed to hug her and was detached with difficulty.

‘Do you lock us up at night?’ Ida asked, fingering the keys.

‘Oh no, my dear, you are the mistresses here. These are the keys for the spice box, the tea chest, the wine locker, the silver press and the drawer with the accounts ledger.’

Darcy announced, ‘For supper, we shall want a pair of boiled fowl, sweetbreads, haddock and salmon patties and plum pudding with jelly.’

I stared at Darcy. Supper? How had she even heard of that kind of food? Then I remembered the magazines delivered to Harristown.

‘Thank you, madam,’ replied Mrs Hartigan. ‘Shall it be convenient for me to serve dinner at eight?’

‘What would prevent you?’ said Darcy carelessly, as if dining at that distant hour was her habit.

‘Eight?’ squealed Ida. ‘We shall starve to death in Dublin. We’ll have perished before then.’

‘No more you shall,’ smiled Mrs Hartigan, ‘for in the intervening time there’s to be a fine tea.’

And there was time for me to inspect the bookshelves. I found them full of dull agricultural affairs – not a single novel or volume of poetry. I guessed that the books had been bought for their handsome bindings.

Mr Rainfleury appeared at teatime to refresh the house with his scent. He frowned at Ida scraping broken pieces of cake and toast into her handkerchief ‘for later’.

‘You must bring her up,’ he told Darcy, ‘to put those starveling ways behind her.’

But Ida would not be brought up.

‘This,’ she declared, holding up a portion of Mrs Hartigan’s raised and ruched veal pie, ‘is food good enough to be kissed. But it is too good to be eaten.’

With each successive meal, Ida secreted more choice bits of food into her pockets and hoarded them inside her fireplace or under her bed. Pertilly crammed bread and meat into her mouth as if every supper was her last. Berenice and Enda competed for whatever was deemed the finest item on the table. I found myself reaching for cherries and plums I did not want, just because they were there. Only Darcy seemed to have shed the skin of poverty with ease and discarded it with easy pleasure.

Three breakfasts, two luncheons, two teas and two suppers later, Mr Rainfleury escorted Darcy to a grand bank in Dame Street, where our affairs were put in order with the clerks and lawyers. That evening I watched Darcy hide a large document, with plentiful stigmata of red wax, under the blotter of her desk. As a final touch, the ‘Swiney Godiva Corporation’ was furnished with stationery headed with our new address in flouncing copperplate. I started a letter to Annora on it, but soon put it on the fire, and asked Mrs Hartigan for some of the plain paper she used for kitchen orders.

I wondered about writing a small note to the Eileen O’Reilly, to say my overdue sorries to her about Darcy’s last insults, but feared to humiliate her with our new grandeur.

Perhaps, I thought, I’d find a way to send her a doll, secretly. Not a ‘Miss Manticory’, but a ‘Miss Darcy’, to do with as she wished, and as hard as she wished.

I pictured her forcing a greasy crubeen into the doll’s hard lips, smashing the bisque face in the process.

The design of the dolls was a drawn-out affair, entailing much conferencing and clashing between Darcy and Mr Rainfleury, particularly as to the fullness of the lips and the hardness of the jawline of her own doll’s bisque maquettes. The ‘Miss Darcy’ doll would be the first launched. Its original made sure that it cost Mr Rainfleury the most trouble. Meanwhile, the rest of us were shown our doll selves in various separate stages of their evolution: a glass eye was held up against our own in a strong light; a hair sample plaited into ours to see if it disappeared in a perfect match. Strangest of all, a pair of wet clay lips was briefly pressed on our own to trap the tender shape.

Whenever not needed at the factory, Mr Rainfleury pronounced himself incapable of renouncing the pleasure of our company. He was a regular fixture at Pembroke Street for suppers and luncheons. His smell was never out of the house. I tried without success to superimpose Annora’s face over his when he took the seat I thought of as hers at the head of the table, facing Darcy.

While Mr Rainfleury agonised pleasurably over our bisque features, we Swineys taught ourselves how to live in a house. At first we constantly roamed the floors, looking for our tribal sisters: we were not accustomed to being out of sight of one another. It was only after several weeks that I could sleep easily without Enda’s breaths to lull me. With much shrieking, we learned the uses of the commode chairs and mahogany bidets and grew to trust that the claw-footed bath would not walk away on those nimble-looking feet with our nakedness inside.

Enda loved to trail her delicate fingers down the mahogany banisters. Berenice took to waiting on the stairs for Mr Rainfleury’s visits.

Mrs Hartigan coaxed and coached us into corsets and crinoline cages, encouraging us to sleep in our stays with the promise that we could reduce our Famine-tidy waists to fairylike proportions in a year. Oona admitted to loving the breathless faintness brought on by each heart-stopping new constriction. I hated my corset for its uncomfortable intrusion on my thoughts. No longer was I able to read for hours: I had to rise from my chair, stretch and walk to avoid weals and worse.

Annora had laundered our clothes to thin threads, but we’d not known the luxury of multiplication. Ida never tired of counting that she had seven of everything. There were rainbows of flannel, taffeta, rep and quilted silk in our wardrobes. Every evening Mrs Hartigan laid out on our beds freshly laundered longcloth drawers with lace pointwork crisp and snowy as beaten egg white. We learned to remember to check in the petticoat mirror under the hall stand for incriminating glimpses of white, scarlet or violet.

We began to work, engaged to perform at the Antient Concert Rooms in Brunswick Street. The Royal Dublin Society requested us for a show at the Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin. I wrote our new scripts on Superfine Cream Laid, using a newfangled pen with its own reservoir of ink and an iridium-tipped gold nib, the only gift for which I would ever thank Mr Rainfleury with actual sincerity, even though suspecting that it was the new Swiney Godiva Corporation that had paid for it.

We set ourselves to learn Society as it was done in Dublin. The volume of our new skirts fortified us against the world, keeping its terrors an arm’s length away. We found ways to cross the roads, at first in an arrow formation of seven with Darcy at its tip, and later in our billowing tribes of three. We took tea and cakes at Mitchell’s in Grafton Street, alongside great ladies of the capital, who appeared unable to detect the stench of former poverty on the Swineys of Harristown, perhaps because so many of them were bent over the port cunningly concealed in their teacups. We made excursions further afield. While Darcy forced Ida, Pertilly and Berenice to accompany her to the races, Enda, Oona and I rode the wooden horses at Donnybrook Fair and strolled arm-in-arm past the caravans of Shakespearean players murdering the saddest scenes of
Othello
. We took carriage rides among the undulating acres of Phoenix Park and promenades around the pond in St Stephen’s Green, where Ida could not be stopped from picking up choice pieces of kindling and where Berenice and Enda threw stones at one another’s reflections in the water.

I made myself at ease in the bookshops. I attended literary readings on nights when we did not perform. I listened with an absorbent ear, taking in what functioned upon the audience’s wits and what did not. A trickle of warm courage stole into my heart. Dublin was an ants’ nest of writers and performers. Some were even in Society. Some were even women. I dared to think that it was in my own gift to tell my stories more finely than Darcy told me to.

She’d never be noticing, for it’d not appear on a ledger. Like Adam, I would name things in my garden and have power over them. The commercial imperatives of the Swiney Godiva routines need not rule my vocabulary. The rite of writing could be celebrated in other ways. Via incessant narratives of my own, I vowed – for was I not as Irish as any wordster – I’d write myself better and far better than I had been. One day the Eileen O’Reilly would hear of me not as Darcy Swiney’s sister, but as a writer.

Perhaps she would read me, and remember me with fondness and forgiveness, because reading was the one sole gift she’d had of me to keep.

We attended Mass at St Teresa’s Church of the Discalced Carmelites in Clarendon Street, a church chosen by Ida ‘because it has seven arches at the bottom like Harristown Bridge, so we can make our confessions here’. I looked at her sharply then. Had she too met with a gentleman on that bridge? She smiled glassily back at me, and I knew I’d never have the truth of her.

For Darcy, the better argument for St Teresa’s was that the church was near her favourite watering-spot, Mitchell’s.

St Teresa’s was an old granite brute of a building. Each of its plump stones seemed to thrust out its grey breast in the stubborn service of God. Iron railings protected it from the constant and irrational Dublin traffic. Inside, the painted green arches reminded me of Harristown’s close-knit hills.

We Swineys were a much pointed-out feature of the congregation and a picture of fashionable propriety in our new bonnets; that is, until Ida made a spectacle of us. I’ll not deny that we were all deeply fascinated by the life-size statue of Dead Christ lying under the altar in front of six gingerbread-coloured columns. I myself had certainly noticed the friendly shape of him, and the fact that there was nothing missing from the catalogue of masculine beauty in his face, limbs and naked torso. Our hymns seemed like love songs when we sang them to the beautiful Him under that altar, and no more so than to me, whose faith had been shattered by Father Maglinn’s siding against me and with the troll on Harristown Bridge. So I looked at Dead Christ with more frank pleasure than any of my sisters – except Ida.