Tipperary (60 page)

Dermot had, in a way, turned her into a kind of Irish freedom fighter—or that's what she thought. She was in love with the whole romantic notion of it. I mean—I saw them one day down in the Narrow Wood and Dermot showing her how to fire a Colt revolver, a gun with a kick to it that nearly knocked her down to the ground.

She loved Tipperary Castle, she loved the countryside. And now she was in love with this romantic, handsome, clever guerrilla leader, who was going to be an important man when the freedom was won. Perfect for her. Out of a novel or a storybook. And for Dermot—well, there's no need to spell out what was in it for him. By then, he and Charles no longer spoke to each other.

I said to Dermot one day, Listen, said I, shouldn't you be civil to him? Dermot just laughed. Naw, said he, he has no guts.

When I sat back and reflected, that trip to Trinity College would not let go of me. Twice I had gone back over the text, to try to make sense of April Burke's character. I knew that I must dissect her and her life, piece by piece. Difficult to do—she was long dead and her pathways had closed in. And when I asked questions locally—nobody seemed to know.

The footprints left by her and Charles were few and far between. Her traces had faded. Yet luck had been on my side many times since I began this exercise. So, I told myself that I might have some more luck—it usually runs in streaks.

My first step, as I've described, took me to the portrait. I think I went to view it as a kind of test, as a kind of question to myself: Is this worth doing? When the question had been answered—and in a dramatic way, with Henry Lisney's intervention—I had to find the next thing to do.

I began by dividing her life, or what I could divine of it, into sections: Ancestry, Birth and Childhood, Paris, London, Ireland and the Somervilles, and the other Anglo-Irish who knew her. My objective: to get as close to her as I possibly could. My method: to meet any and all of the people who knew her, and to track down every piece of paper that would tell me more.

Again, as when I began reading Charles's text, I didn't quite know why I was being so ignited. I put it down to instinct—and I was still amused that a stranger who'd looked at the painting with me had told me that I was her son. Before that, he'd said that she was my aunt.

There were, of course, other reasons. I had initially become fascinated with Charles, and although he irritated me from time to time, I found his story inspiring in some odd way. He had met my mother, and had even been helped by her to find accommodations in Dublin's most tumultuous week.

And it brought me back into a period of history in our own county when events took place that would have been powerfully interesting even on a world stage, let alone our locality. The contrasts caught my imagination—as a great building was being restored, it was housing the revolutionaries who were tearing down what the place represented.

And there was the intellectual reason: I liked teaching history because the past contains so many mysteries. Not as many as the future, perhaps, but more than enough to keep a retired teacher active in his mind and spirit. In short, I was enjoying this immensely.

The Ancestry gave me no problems. I accepted that April's father, Terence Theobald Burke, was born to the man who died of a stroke on the stage of the theater in Tipperary Castle, Terence Hector Burke. I then traced his lineage, and was able to draw a time line of the family in the estates at Tipperary.

The father of the apoplectic Terence Hector Burke was Luke, and his father, Henry Burke, had commenced the “building” of the castle in 1760—in other words, April was the fifth generation of these “modern” Burkes. I put the word “building” in quotation marks because there had already been a fortified house on the land.

Henry Burke comes across as the most powerful of the family—and the shrewdest. He was born in 1710, and I found a document (in the Bolton Library at Cashel) telling that “Henry Burke of Tipperary Hill, the same, did raise one thousands [
sic
] militia for His Majesty's use toward Scotland 1745 and became rewarded.”

Meaning that he sent soldiers to King George to hurl against Bonnie Prince Charlie, was rewarded with (I assume) a parcel of land, and then expanded on his fortified house. Well, that was one question answered; I had always been puzzled as to how a family with such a Catholic name and background came to own a huge farm. No trace could I find as to whether an earlier Burke had switched to Protestantism.

Next, Birth and Childhood—and so to London, and Somerset House, repository of England's cradle-to-grave records. On 1 June 1880, Terence Theobald Burke of Orme Terrace in Mayfair, London, married Sophia Holmes of Alexander Street, Westminster, and Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire.

Now the stew began to bubble. When April's father married April's mother, he moved into her home. According to Charles's text, April told Oscar Wilde that her mother had died when she, April, was “very young.”

True; Somerset House lists the death of a Sophia Burke, née Holmes, of Alexander Street, Westminster,
by drowning in March 1885—
three years after April's birth. Well, well!

Next I went to the British Library's newspaper archive in Colindale, North London, and endured hours of waiting—which proved worth it. From
The News of the World
for Sunday, 22 March 1885:

“Tragic scenes were observed at Westminster Embankment on Friday afternoon as the body of a young mother was retrieved from the river. Passers-by comforted the small daughter. The woman was seen by witnesses to have jumped from the bridge into the river, even as her child entreated her. The deceased, aged twenty-five, it was said, was later identified as the wife of Mr. Terence Burke, who lives in nearby Alexander Street and is a deputy brewer for Mr. Whitbread.”

In other words: as a small child, but entirely aware at the age of three, April saw her mother walk away from her, climb the parapet of Westminster Bridge, and drop into the Thames. That could explain some difficult matters of personality, I expect.

Now came the blank spaces. In my lowest times I took comfort from Thoreau's remark that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Given the almost total absence of record, I can only assume that April lived in the care of her father through most of her childhood.

The parish registers at Westminster record the death of a Mrs. Elizabeth Holmes, of Alexander Street, in 1886, at the age of fifty-one. We can tell that she was a widow (the use of her given first name, “Elizabeth”), and we can assume that she was April's grandmother, who lived with them.

Next, a school record places April in “Miss Campbell's for Young Ladies of all Ages” from 1887 to 1899—twelve years, after which she shows up with Dr. Tucker in Paris. And after that she becomes more visible as she begins to enter Charles O'Brien's text, marries Stephen Somerville, and wins the court case.

Now I had at least a pathway of her life, and amid all the Tipperary sources—Charles, Harney, Amelia, Mrs. Moore—I had assembled an idea of who she was and what she was like. But at that stage I had come no closer to finding any connection to me. I was beginning to wish that I had never seen that portrait, and to wonder what fantasy had taken hold of me. Once again, I turned to that most reliable of witnesses: Joe Harney's memory.

Talk about getting caught in the middle. Charles talked to me every day—every day—about April and Dermot Noonan. He looked as haggard as a ghost. His jaw was sagging, he was gray in the face. I kept saying to him, “Listen, do your job,” I'd say.

“But, Harney, I can't,” he'd say to me. “I'm not doing it for
him.
Why should I? I did that before, I did it for that drunk, Somerville—and look what happened to me.”

And I'd say back to him, “That's dishonest of you, Charles.”

We were able to speak to each other as frankly as that. I mean—I'd have done anything for him. And I'd say, “You always told me that you were doing it for her.”

And he'd say to me, “Yes. You're right. I'll try and remember that.” And he would. Then after a few days he'd collapse again into the terrible pain he was feeling.

Mind you, the two of them were very blatant. Dermot, for all his good points—he was always inclined to strut a bit. He'd walk into the Gallery or the Ballroom looking for April, and you'd think he owned the place. Charles would be there, talking to the plaster men—we had these four crazy Italians, they were brilliant but mad as hatters, and Charles was always calming them down.

And Dermot would ask Charles, “Where's milady?”

He'd pronounce it in the old-fashioned way, “mill-adie,” and Charles, cut to the quick, would give a polite answer—because that's what Charles was like. If he knew that Dermot was gaming him, he never said so. I tried to talk to Dermot too. Might as well have been talking to the wall.

I never tried to talk to her. It would have felt intrusive, and I liked her too much for that. And she never said a word to me about it. Anyway, she wouldn't have listened to me—she was too far gone for that; she was on clouds higher than I could reach up to.

What worried me, though, was the fact that we were building a tinderbox here—and I think that I was the only one who knew that. We had all these delicate works going on, with temperamental contractors, big decisions being taken every day, a red-hot love affair roaring like a fire in front of our eyes, and a cellarful of men with guns. I suppose it was what you might call an interesting time.

In the last weeks of 1920 and the first weeks of 1921, Harney and I made a thorough inspection and a deep, thoughtful assessment of all that had been completed at the castle, and all that had yet to be accomplished. We began with the house exterior, moved to examine the interior, agreed that it was too soon to assess all the furnishings and hangings repairs (we had established a great workshop in the stables), and then moved out again to inspect the gardens and the land. This inspection, we calculated, would require five days. Each of us, at my instigation, had distilled the castle works into a large notebook, and the final compilation amounted to the sum of all we had added, as one task uncovered another requirement.

Outside, and on top of the building, we checked every slate and (mindful of history) every leaden flashing, every chimney, every gutter and spout. All the roofing had been long completed, and had survived many rainstorms. When we descended, we scrutinized every external stone on the building. The great marches of the castle's facade now looked perfect; the buttresses and columns had a blue-gray gleam to them; all window reveres and all doorways and their arches had been repaired and cleaned; all “canvas, tweed, and silk” seemed perfect—and Mr. Higgins seemed not to have aged a day.

Inside, we peered at every inch of the Great Hall walls, and went down on our knees to feel the floors with our hands. Here, there had always been what seemed like an acre of stone flags, laid on the diagonal pattern, alternating between dark gray and white. Many had suffered in the long depredations, cracked, discolored, loosened; we'd replaced them, preserved what we could, and now the floor seemed like a geometer's plan.