Tipperary (34 page)

As a boy on a summer night, I could hear from my distant bedroom window four miles away the swishing noise of this water flowing over the little wall, and it sounded most clear when the night was calm and the river high after rain. On a summer day, all is pleasant turmoil in the foaming waters; and there is tranquillity in the dark water where it pools before falling over the weir.

I have known much peace there.

When April Burke (very likely a de Burgo) left the O’Brien household on that October Monday morning, she took with her a letter of introduction from Bernard to a law office in Limerick city, thirty miles to the west.

In 1904, Stokes and Somerville was owned by a father and son, Henry and Stephen Somerville, with a partner, Richard Stokes. He was a government lawyer specializing in the new land negotiations.

The company can still be traced. On the death of Henry Somerville in 1917, the firm merged with Kavanagh and O'Keeffe, a practice with offices in Limerick and Kilmallock. Fifty years later, a young lawyer from Clare by name of Prunty, with plenty of money, bought Kavanagh, O'Keeffe, Stokes, and Somerville. He, naturally, put his name ahead of the four others, and the people of Limerick gave it the shorthand name of Prunty's. That is how law firms have traditionally proceeded in Ireland.

Liam Prunty gave it teeth; he loved to litigate. And, oddly for such a tiger, he also loved legal records, and this practice had an especially absorbing history. Back in the staid old days, it had once dealt principally in land registration, rights of way, and testacy.

In 1998, when he was sixty years old, Mr. Prunty announced that he had at last completed the formal cataloging and cross-referencing of his firm's entire archive. It reached back to 1790, when the first Stephen Somerville, freshly home from France, hung out a shingle in Limerick (and lured clients with tales of the guillotine).

Still on Catherine Street, the firm now owns three adjoining tall houses. Today, their clients come from European Union agribusiness, and from the American firms enjoying Ireland's tax holidays. Among the soldierly lines of filing cabinets, Mr. Prunty knows immediately where to find the Tipperary Castle case. He's a lanky man who lopes down the long room.

“Locally they called it the ‘April Fool's Case’ to begin with,” he says, “because her name was
April
Burke, and because everybody, Catholic and Protestant—the whole place—told her she was a fool to take it on. But take it on she did, and it lasted seven years. Seven years—1904 the first note was sent to the court, and the judgment came down in 1911. That was fairly typical. And like a lot of land cases, nobody got paid; they all said, Let the government pay for it. But some people did well out of it.”

The lawyers of the day placed newspaper cuttings in the files. Mr. Prunty, to preserve them, has had them photocopied.

“This case, this had all eyes on it. If it was today it'd be on the television twice a week and once a fortnight, as the saying goes. See? The newspapers were on to it from the start.”

On Wednesday, 25 October 1905,
The Irish Independent
carried a report:

The case has finally opened in the High Court to decide the ownership of one of Ireland's most renowned houses. Tipperary Castle, with its magnificent residence and four thousand acres of prime farming land, is being fought over by three contenders: an Englishman, Terence Burke, who alleges that he is the natural descendant of the last owner; Mr. Dermot Noonan, a barrister from County Tipperary, who claims that the estate was put together from stolen ancestral lands and that he knows the rightful historical owners of each acre; and the Crown, who wishes the land disposed of to the highest bidder under the Wyndham Act. It is expected that the case will last several years.

In each file that he hobby-archived, Mr. Prunty wrote a brief summary of the suit. He usually clipped his précis to the copy of the verdict, which he placed on the top of the case papers—judgments, contracts, all relevant documents. Since the Tipperary case remains one of the biggest events in the history of the firm, his notes run longer on it than on most of the other lawsuits. He wrote several pages, and included asterisked references to the evidence transcripts.

To anyone interested in the case—and in particular from the point of view of someone reading Charles O’Brien's “History”—Mr. Prunty's summary is thrilling. It's full of depth charges, which he detonates one by one.

“The likely outcome of April Burke in Chancery,” begins his note,

lay obscured in doubt and argument. Tipperary Castle had been vacant and the lands fallow since the sudden and intestate death in 1858 of its owner, Terence Hector Burke. Mr. Burke was the seventh successive inheritor of the Tipperary property, which he expanded.

He died of natural causes at the age of fifty-six. Colloquial evidence that he had been married to a lady of reported ill-repute was mentioned in the Judgment, but only for the purposes of discarding as irrelevant. An earlier claim had been made upon the house and lands in 1880, by a lawyer from Bristol, a David Birmingham, representing clients whom he refused to name. The claim fell, as the solicitor withdrew rather than uncloak his clients' identity.

A second claim followed from the same firm in 1904, and proceeded to the same conclusion for the same reasons; again, the firm of Birmingham and Bale told the court they required the protection of anonymity, and the learned judge denied it.

There go the first two detonations. The court heard an allegation that the mysterious and beautiful actress April Burke the First had been “a lady of reported ill-repute.” Mentioned in passing, and legally “only for the purposes of discarding as irrelevant,” that would explain Oscar Wilde's fleeting reference to Sarah Bernhardt: “Even though I do not wish to dwell upon this, she had something of Miss Bernhardt's background, or so it was said.”

This needs some caution. Many actresses were sometimes—and inaccurately—described in repressed Victoriana as “of ill-repute.” But the divine Sarah had indeed been a whore before she trod the boards. Had, also, April Burke the First?

Secondly, the applications from Bristol—who initiated those? Charles, on his early morning Somerset walk in June 1904, saw the Gambon woman who lived in the Brook House, Mr. Burke's Mater, as he called her, board a carriage for Bristol, dressed as though for an appointment. In short—who knew what about the Burkes and Tipperary Castle?

The next segment of Mr. Prunty's document opens up the train of events:

In January 1905, Terence Theobald Burke, of Alexander Street, Westminster, London, made an application for “the Grant of Possession of Tipperary Castle, Ireland.” The Courts of Chancery in London properly sent it to the Irish courts. Through his daughter, Mr. Burke engaged Mr. Henry Somerville of this firm. As solicitors are not allowed to plead before the High Court, Mr. Somerville instructed his son, the barrister Mr. Stephen Somerville.

Upon the receipt of the application in the Irish courts, the case opened (in October 1905) and preliminary arguments began; searches were commenced. In March 1906, the case was adjourned owing to the death of the original claimant; and in October 1906, his daughter, Miss April Burke, of the same London address, described as “an assistant in the British Diplomatic Corps and a junior Lady-in-Waiting to the King's daughter, Princess Maud,” was advertised to the court as the natural claimant-in-succession. She furnished in evidence her late father's Last Will and Testament.

Saturday, March the 17th 1906.

Dearest Kitty,

I have to tell you of sadness that I never before knew [wrote April to Mrs. Moore]. Two days ago my beloved papa departed this world; and I am writing this to you, my dear friend, knowing that I have no person to whom I may speak my grief
.

On Thursday, a messenger came to me in my office at Whitehall, bearing a note from our maid, Mary. Her note begged me to come home, as Papa had “become stricken.” I went to Alexander Street at once and found Dr. Fleask there. Papa sat in his chair, as he always does, but he could not speak; nor did he acknowledge me. Dr. Fleask gave it as his opinion that Papa had suffered an apoplexy. “Nature's stroke of ill-fortune,” as the doctor said.

We carried Father to the day-bed in the library and laid him there. His pallor frightened me; and with the purple around his mouth, which was sagging at one corner, I became afraid. At the same time, I saw his face as it must have been when he was a little boy, all tender and clear in the complexion.

Dr. Fleask tested Papa again and again with the question “Tell me your name, sir,” and when Papa made no reply, Dr. Fleask said, “Tell me who is this young lady?” but again Papa did not respond. He tried to keep his eyes open, but the eyelids drooped and fluttered.

There was nothing to be done at that moment, and Dr. Fleask departed. I sat there all afternoon, watching Papa. Each time he breathed differently, I started—in fear and in hope. Mary made some beef tea, and I attempted to get some between his lips; but he had not the capacity to draw it in. I talked to him all the time, and I told him of his own dearness to me. On his face came no sign, ever, that he heard me.

Now the night came in, and we brought as many lamps and candles into the room as Mary could find in the house. But they merely lit his passing—because at a few minutes before six o'clock, his poor body gave a great surge, as though he would rise from the bed. Mary shrieked, and I held Papa's hand tighter. He made a second surge, and then he sank back. His eyes opened for a moment, but they lacked direction; they closed again as he subsided.

I felt his hand grow cooler, and a breath whistled from him, and a tear formed at his eye and rolled down his cheek, and I knew that I had lost him.

My dearest Kitty, I ever reserved my warmth for Papa, and now I regret that I did not tell him how I loved him. This morning, the cobbler's boy came with Papa's repaired boot and I all but fell down with grief in the hallway.

On Tuesday we shall have the funeral; and I must prepare to comport myself in the way that he taught me. There will be Tennyson to read, and Shakespeare, and the Revd. Donne.

After that, I must take over the legal matters regarding Tipperary. I do not know what sort of face I must turn to the world. As you alone know, I am driven by fear; I fear everyone. We have talked before, you and I, about the brisk face that I show—but it is the only face I know. I tremble inside all the time, and Papa knew this—he kept me “up,” as he called it. Must my fears now take me over? My dearest Kitty, please forgive my distraught tones.

Your bereft but still affectionate friend,

April.

Mr. Prunty's files have been meticulously constructed. He put everything in linear order by date. Thus, his summary observes, “In October 1906, Mr. Stephen Somerville, K.C., made a successful application to the court for an interim “caretaking” order, so that the property might be protected from possible marauders, and so that a farm plan might be drawn up to prevent the fences and pastures from falling further into the weeds of disrepair.”