Read The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Online
Authors: Michelle Lovric
It was true. The dolls were still a resounding success. The sales of the hair essence, slackening slightly during our absence in Venice, had tripled again when we returned to Dublin. We had regular slots in shop windows in Grafton Street, where we arranged ourselves in ‘attitudes’, or drank tea, advertising the latest china service from Mr Wedgwood as well as our own hair. We still gave our lectures on the history of hair, and we sang and danced, even at the Theatre Royal in Hawkins Street.
There was plenty of money, but the twins still made it a fighting contention for, every time a penny was spent on something Enda wanted, Berenice would take revenge, and vice versa. Finally came a day when Berenice discovered her pillow smouldering with a puddle of carbolic liquid, because she had demanded a new counterpane for her bed. And Darcy threw up her hands, and went to the bank, dragging Mr Rainfleury with her.
She came back with seven booklets, each bearing our names and a starting balance of 100 guineas. She announced, ‘Your share of the takings will be deposited in there. After expenses. An allowance of £5 a week.’
‘Is not £5 a week a trifling outrage compared with our great earnings?’ I asked.
‘Then you shall receive the £5 just once a month so you’ll be less outraged less often, you scrattock,’ Darcy replied.
My sisters stared at me with resentment. My tongue had cost them £15 a month. I acknowledged my stupidity with a muttered ‘Sorry’.
I wondered how I might mitigate what I’d done. I took my candle down to Darcy’s desk again. I found her bank book to contain some £154,000, a figure I tucked in my memory for whenever it would be needed, for it surely would. Very little new money appeared in our own bank books after that, in spite of the promised allowance. If any of us raised the matter, Darcy waved a sheaf of household accounts at us.
‘So do you want to be taking care of the dressmaker’s account and the butcher’s notes yourselves then?’
‘And who will give the groom his brown envelopes?’ asked Ida. ‘To take to the betting shop?’
‘She’s talking swill again,’ snorted Darcy. ‘Ida, you are so funny I can hardly stand it.’
She let such a laugh out of herself that I could see the tonsils dangling in her throat.
We were rich, even if only Darcy saw the real money. Our muskrat coats were almost too heavy to walk in. Mrs Sims, dubbed the Worth of Dublin, condescended to make our dresses. The Lord Lieutenant’s wife was the owner of a ‘Miss Berenice’ doll. Mr Parnell himself was rumoured to have been seen at one of our shows. We attended the Lord Lieutenant’s reception that began the Dublin Castle Season, and the assorted levees that followed, performing at the St Patrick’s Day Ball that ended it. Lady Nithervilles invited us to a Drawing Room; Lady King offered us tea. We now saluted the great personages of Fitzwilliam Square with ease and elegance, or a good semblance of it. We attended the Irish Grand National at Fairyhouse Racecourse, with Darcy openly sending our groom to lay a ‘small’ bet.
People stopped dead if they saw us walking down the street. The bolder ones besieged us for our signatures on their paper bags, shirt-cuffs, library books, even their bare skin. We kept a small printer in business, stamping out our trade cards, placards, billboards and setting the type for the advertisements in newspapers. We had three display carriages with glass frames on the outside for our latest posters.
Each ‘Miss Swiney’ doll had her own stack of miniature trade cards. Every sister had her personalised cards too. These were eagerly collected by our most loyal followers, especially after Mr Rainfleury hit upon the pleasant idea of dipping our trade cards in perfume.
There was a cartoon about us in
The Nation
. In a restaurant, a man pointed to a bowl occupied by a great nest that had pushed all the liquid out onto the tablecloth. He cried, ‘Waiter, there’s a Swiney hair in my soup!’
We received love letters and offers of marriage, and even a badly spelled page from some pretender who styled himself ‘Phelan Swiney, Mariner’, and claimed to be our father:
Having read of your great doings in the
Kildare Observer
, I have the honour to ask for an interview with my long-lost daughters. I hasten to add that the losing of you was my own fault entirely. I was a sad disappointment to your poor mother
[he wrote in a clear, large script].
When I joined the Fenians I was obliged to take up a secret existence, and could visit her only in the dead of night
.
‘Dead of night! That’s what Mam always said!’ cried Enda. ‘It must be true!’
‘Only a weak mind would think it true!’ retorted Berenice, and the matter instantly became grounds for new warfare between them.
Darcy picked up the letter with tongs and fed it into the blue belly of the fire.
Of course, I thought, Darcy was the one person who could be completely sure that this man was a pretender, as she was the only one who knew if our real father lay under crossed spoons in a clover field in Harristown.
The man was persistent. The next letter from ‘Phelan Swiney, Mariner’, brought Enda and Berenice to blows, and suffered the same fiery end.
After the first two letters, Darcy no longer even read them aloud to us before destroying them.
When Enda protested, she jeered, ‘What is the likelihood that this man has heard of our success and chases our money? He does not mention anywhere that he wishes to return to the bosom of his family and settle his fortune on us. And that must be because he has none. There is no address, even!’
‘If he is a Fenian then it would not be safe to supply one,’ Enda pointed out.
‘If he is a Fenian then let him go explode himself, as they are so talented in that direction. And don’t tell Tristan or Rainfleury about this. They’d not like us to be associated with charlatans or Fenians or pretending long-lost daddies.’
We had so many requests for locks of our hair, often enclosing guineas, that Mr Rainfleury formed a separate department in his doll factory to supply them. He had a former convent girl working cruel hours to compose tender replies from the Swiney Godivas. The missives were wrapped around the so-called silk hair that gave me so many misgivings.
Mr Rainfleury reassured me, ‘Absolutely no human hair! You know I would not damage your reputations for the world.’
In America, Tristan placed advertisements for Swiney Godiva Hair Essence in the
Pictorial Review, Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping
. The Swiney Godivas were reinvented as ‘
gently born ladies of delicate breeding
’. Tristan did not hesitate to add the usual endorsements from various princesses from obscure royal houses of small Continental states. When I drew Darcy’s attention to this travesty and the trouble that might come from it, she shrugged, ‘I don’t give a lash of a whip.’
We were so rich, I understood from this, that we didn’t have to care about the truth or fear that it would one day catch up with us.
The Swiney sisters, who had once been the recipients of Relief Committee alms, now performed charity benefits at the Rotunda of the New Lying-In Hospital, and for the Richmond Institution for the Industrious Blind at the Gaiety Theatre near St Stephen’s Green. But St Teresa’s rejected our offer of a benefit concert. The nun muttered to Enda and myself, ‘Young Ida is too come-at-able. It will not do. Your hair . . .’ – the nun gestured at my snood – ‘there is something ungodly and unwomanly about its . . . exaggeration and . . . fecundity, God forgive me for saying so.’
I wanted to tell her that I understood and agreed.
‘We have had a man here,’ the nun added. ‘A Phelan Swiney making enquiries about you.’
‘What did he look like?’ Enda asked eagerly. ‘Was he a man with a fine figure of hair?’
The nun’s face closed up. ‘We do not look at men.’
‘And we do not let conniving, lying men look at
us
,’ said Darcy when we reported the conversation. ‘And Enda, there is no real Phelan Swiney, don’t you understand?’
Thereafter Darcy insisted that we shun St Teresa’s again. We took up promiscuously with other Catholic churches on different Sundays, never observing more than one Sabbath a month in the same establishment.
Mr Rainfleury was happy with this division of our favours, for it gave us more opportunities to show ourselves to more members of the public, and to have them remark on the splendours of our hair.
We were so rich that Pertilly confected rich women’s hairstyles for us – the ornate, theatrical kind that were so time-consuming to create that we could do nothing but submit to her hands for hours on end; the kind that were so cumbrous and uncomfortable that we were fit for no useful work when got up in our capillary fortresses and weighed down with combs, feathers, jewels. Our heads became the compendium of our wealth – as if we carried rich houses, priceless galleries and whole department stores on our heads.
‘And what a waste it is,’ lamented Ida, her cheekbones stretched and her eyes narrowed by a heavy new creation, ‘when people love us best when the hair on us falls down.’
‘Phelan Swiney, Mariner’ still sent the occasional letter. His mistake was addressing his missives to Darcy, who waved them at us before throwing them into the fire unopened.
But Darcy could not always be there. While she was off on one of her mysterious errands, I filched an envelope from the salver in the hall. I managed to read a few paragraphs aloud to Enda before Darcy caught us.
He pleaded:
I can well imagine the reason for your everlasting silence, dear daughters. To be sure, you’re black offended with me. But please be assured I do not pursue you for your money. In fact, my own ship has come in to a rather wonderful extent and I wish only to share the bounty. I have long since desisted from my political activities, and indeed repent my pursuit of them, because they took me from my family. It shames me to think how I did not do well by your mother.
And for nothing it was too.
I was no more than a hot-head with a long hot tongue; I never committed any act of violence, but between voyages to and from America, I ran with the Irish tribes in Dublin and New York, our safe place – coward that I am – and talked the talk of the armchair revolutionary, speechifying in cafés and swearing all kinds of self-important oaths. I gave what money I had to the cause, and drank the rest, God forgive me. The Fenians’ ridiculous attack on Canada made me doubt. One long sea voyage and a near shipwreck cleared my head.
I apprenticed myself to a Philadelphian shipwright on dry land, and began to work in the hope of sending more money to the family I had abandoned, though I dared not show my face publicly in Harristown for fear of bringing down trouble on your mother. I will admit this much too – by then I had an American wife, no, two. But every quarter I put money in the La Touche Bank for the daughters I hoped to see grown one day. I prospered in the business and in the affections of my employer. I was made the shipwright’s heir. Now I—
I had reached this point when Darcy snatched the letter out of my hand. ‘His handwriting does not improve,’ she sniffed. ‘And lately he has changed tack and now he’s using his so-called fortune as bait to trap us, a well-known ploy in the swindling classes. He plans to win our confidence with this tall story, this mock-confession! Even your old Mr Dickens could not make up such a maudlin tale. We’d not have him in the house five minutes before all the silver would disappear. Though of course it’s hardly likely to be the same man all this time, but no doubt a whole tribe of thieves taking turns to try to have a bite of our purses with this sentimental claptrap.’
‘But the writing on the envelope is always the same,’ Enda pointed out. ‘Does he ever mention a seashell lamp? Or our names? Mam said he chose our names.’
‘I’ve no idea,’ snapped Darcy, ‘and even less interest. What do we need a father for, with Tristan and Rainfleury providing and providing?’
‘But they’re taking too,’ I said. ‘And the things they make us do—’
‘Would you have us stop being rich?’ Darcy rapped.
‘How rich are we?’ I asked, thinking of the difference between her bank book and ours. ‘The Swiney Godivas, all of us, I mean.’
‘I don’t believe I said.’ Darcy was pulling on her outdoors boots.
Two days later, I took myself to the La Touche Bank, braving its grandeur to enquire about a Phelan Swiney’s account, or one in the name of Annora.
‘There was such a thing,’ the clerk confirmed, his hands drumming with nerves on the counter. ‘But it was cleared.’
‘Cleared?’ I asked.
‘Emptied. Yesterday, it was. By a person of interest mentioned in the documents.’
‘Would that be a Darcy Swiney then?’ I asked.
‘I couldn’t possibly say, miss. And who is asking?’
I already had my answer. The clerk’s face was imprinted with the unmistakable punched look of one who had suffered a recent encounter with Darcy, and the pallor of a man bitten by a venomous snake.
And when I saw my own face in the hall mirror at Pembroke Street it too bore an expression of fear and wondering.