It all began on the night of the Big Wind. A wild and savage night in January 1839 when a storm struck Ireland, leaving such suffering and devastation in its path that a mark remained on the minds and hearts of Irishmen, and the land itself, ever after. It was the night Sterrin O’Carroll, ‘blossom of the storm’, was born in Kilsheelin Castle.
Growing up during Ireland’s darkest hours, Sterrin forms a bond with a household servant called Young Thomas that deepens over the years into a forbidden love – a love as fierce and relentless as the storm that ushered her into the world. But their paths are divided by devastating events that change the course of Ireland’s history. After the bitterness and the sorrow finally wane, Sterrin’s indomitable spirit never weakens because, Thomas, like her beloved land, will return to her.
Welcome Page
About The Big Wind
Dedication
Foreword
Part 1: 6th January, 1839
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part 2
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
About Beatrice Coogan
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
To the memory of my husband, Edward Coogan. To my children—Tim Pat who honoured me in the dedication of his own splendid book; my sweet daughter Aisling; and to Brian. To my brother Father Timothy Toal of South Australia who helped me so much; to my brother Father Martin Toal of Rome, and to my two loyal friends Edna and John Tate who would not let me give up.
By Tim Pat Coogan
The motif for many of my teenage years and early manhood was the sound of my mother tapping out innumerable drafts of The Big Wind on her old Underwood typewriter. Prior to the creation of that sound, she had had a privileged and, indeed, glittering existence – although it was not always the case, for she knew life’s hardships too.
When she was forty-nine, my father died, leaving her with no income while supporting three children: myself aged twelve, my brother Brian, aged ten and my sister Aisling, aged six. The level of state services may be gauged from the fact that the children’s allowance was two and sixpence for the third child and each successive child thereafter. Her mainstay during that time was the unfailing support of my saintly aunt Josephine, my mother’s elder sister. After all-night stints as a nurse she would often cycle out from St James’s Hospital in Dublin with bags of food on the handlebars, and spend a day cleaning our rambling four storey house, Tudor Hall in Monkstown, a leafy seaside suburb, populated by representatives of both the ancien régime and the new. A Protestant class on the way down, and a Catholic one on the way up.
While largely eschewing housework – except for cooking, which she was good at – my mother entered on a number of money-making activities, as her father did before her. Beatrice’s attempted business ventures included a bakery and the running of a farm, but our main income came from turning the rooms of our huge home into flats and bedsits. Over the years, the once-rich wallpaper peeled off the walls and water began seeping down through the balconies over the drawing and dining rooms because my brother Brian had made the discovery that a kindly Jewish trader in Dun Laoghaire would give him pocket money for the lead lying idle all over the roof.
Beatrice’s father, Patrick Toal, had been a well-doing Northern Irish Catholic, who was found by his boss one day in his civil service office with his nose, as usual, stuck in a book. The boss, who had returned to the office after a liquid lunch, was subsequently described wonderingly in the family as ‘a decent Freemason!’ When my grandfather told him he was reading a textbook ‘for his exams’, his boss told him bluntly that he was wasting his time studying as he was ‘the wrong sort’ – in other words, a Catholic. He advised my grandfather to, ‘Go away down south to your own kind and get a job for yourself down there’. My grandfather did as he was bidden, went to the predominantly Catholic south, joined the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), got promoted and retired with sufficient money to start a number of business enterprises in and around the village of Hazelhatch in County Kildare.
One of these enterprises was a post office. After the Anglo-Irish War of Independence (1919–21) had broken out, an IRA Active Service Unit called at his post office looking for the takings – which were, of course, refundable. By this time, my grandfather’s acquisitions included my formidable grandmother, Marianne, and a large family, which included two boys who were studying for the priesthood in Genoa. Marianne declared this fact with the IRA officer in charge of the ASU in unfortunate terms: ‘How well you come here call when my two fine sons are away – you bastard.’ One of the few IRA commanders of proven illegitimacy was the gentleman standing in front of my granny and, more importantly, in front of his men. The result was disastrous. The man lost his cool, ordered that the post office and the adjoining house be set fire to, and for good measure, doused the family’s pet dog with petrol and hurled it into the flames.
As was her wont my mother, away at boarding school at the time, enlarged somewhat on these precedings, saying it was her pony that was incinerated. But what is incontestable is the fact that my grandfather was now out of sync in two jurisdictions – with both orange and green. However, he took his revenge on Catholic, Protestant and dissenter by becoming a tax gatherer for the counties of Dublin and Wicklow. Hence it became possible for my mother to frequently quote a saying she attributed to him, ‘It’s a poor house that can’t afford one lady’. She certainly bore out this statement throughout the high-stepping days of her early career and marriage.
Amongst her high-profile, if not particularly well-paid, activities were acting roles in the Abbey Theatre and contributing regularly to the Evening Herald. In the latter role, she attended a fashionable event in Dublin’s Mansion House in the company of a well-off, but dull Dublin baker. The event had been staged as part of a conscious effort on the part of the new Free State government to further the growth of civic consciousness and spread a little gaiety at the same time, by choosing a Civic Queen of Beauty for Dublin.
My mother left the hall – not with the baker – but in the company of my father whom she had met for the first time that evening, and with the title, ‘Dublin’s Civic Queen of Beauty’. This title, as she would frequently point out, rested not merely on beauty but on cultural and intellectual attainment; ‘none of that bathing beauty nonsense’, she would say.
My father, Edward Coogan, was at the time one of the countries more eligible bachelors, a fine hurler who had taken law and commerce degrees while at university. He had abandoned both disciplines at the request of the country’s first President of the Executive Council, W.T. Cosgrave, who was in effect the prime minister. He told my father, ‘Ned, we are going to have to reorganise the guards and we have to put Eoin O’Duffy in charge because we can’t let him have his way and be put in charge of the army; he’s a wild man – would you go in there as deputy commissioner and keep things right?’ So, at twenty-four, Edward Coogan – Eamon, in the Irish form of his first name which he favoured – became the first deputy commissioner of An Garda Síochána and successfully set about the task of establishing an unarmed police force in the midst of a civil war. He had acquired a reputation during the War of Independence for his efficiency in setting up an underground administration for both the courts and local government services that hollowed out British authority. His work in the Gardaí also attracted praise.
Despite Cosgrove’s words, my father had got on well with O’Duffy, who in fact became his best man when he married my mother in 1928. Many regarded the ceremony as Dublin’s wedding of the year. But, as in the case of Patrick Toal, the wheel of political fortune turned against him and, unlike Patrick, it did not turn subsequently in his favour.
In 1932, Éamon de Valera climbed back into power, in large measure due to the support given to his Fianna Fáil party by the IRA. Those were the days when, in the wake of the civil war, Fianna Fáil branches by day became IRA companies by night. The young enthusiastic IRA men did not realise that behind his republican-sounding rhetoric, de Valera would in fact later intern and execute members of the IRA when the organisation became an embarrassment to his neutrality policy during World War II.
However, in his early days in power during the 1930s, de Valera did throw a sop to Cerberus by firing or demoting several of the Garda officers who aroused animosity through their activities against both the IRA and Fianna Fáil, inciting election-time violence.
Unfortunately, my father fell afoul of this policy. After a drink-fuelled incident that ironically involved the general manager of de Valera’s Irish Press newspaper, which I would one day come to edit, he received a demotion to chief superintendent, and for some years continued on in the force subject to a campaign of harassment. As a result, in 1941, he eventually resigned, without a pension, in what was in effect a constructive dismissal. This was not a good situation in wartime Ireland, wracked by poverty, unemployment and emigration. The latter drew off revolutionary tendencies, but with them went much of the energies and the hopes of a generation.
My mother in particular felt the change in their fortunes keenly. But with the help of her family, and a small nest egg from the sale of his own father’s estate, my father completed his law studies and won back W.T. Cosgrave’s old Dáil seat in Kilkenny. It was widely assumed that he would become minister for justice in a looming election that was clearly going to capitalise on widespread dissatisfaction with de Valera’s rule in January 1948. The result of the election was as forecast: de Valera did go out of office for the first time in sixteen years. However, the stresses of my father’s life took their toll and he died a matter of days before this happened. For Beatrice, it was to be a long widowhood. My father died in 1948. She followed him, at the age of ninety-three, in 1997.
As tenants came and went, the business ventures failed and delinquencies of my brother and me were coped with, my mother took to the typewriter and started tapping out The Big Wind. It took twelve years to complete, and then there were costly fallings out with agents and publishers, but my mother eventually fought through these obstacles and produced her monumental novel, which is often compared to an Irish Gone with the Wind.
The story – beginning on the night of a famous death-dealing hurricane that swept through Ireland on a January night in 1839 – follows the heroine, Sterrin (from stoirm, storm in Irish) through the tumultuous and horrific events of the Great Famine of the 1840s through to the Land War of 1879–82. Apart from the dramatic subject matter of the novel and its insight into female psychology, my mother’s writing style – which saw passages from the book included in the secondary school’s English curriculum for the Leaving Certificate – helped the book through many imprints and formats, and for years it was a stock item in Irish bookshops. It is my hope that this Head of Zeus edition will return it to that position and bring the searing events of The Big Wind to the attention of a new generation of readers, including my own grandchildren. Even in the era of the smartphone, a good tale, well-told, still generates affection and respect.
Another crash shook the long row of windows in the drawing-room. This time there was a rending and splitting that was unmistakable. The young man in the great winged chair by the fire laid down his book. It was useless trying to concentrate with that wind howling outside.
‘I’ll hold a crown that is one of the oaks near the house.’ He drew the heavy folds of Italian velvet from the window nearest the fireplace and unlatched the iron bars that held the shutters across the glass.
He peered out. In the three-quarters of an hour since the shutters had been barred the configuration of the near landscape had changed. Something blotted out the lawn. He had the impression that the lawn was no longer there. He rubbed the glass impatiently with his fingers and strained to pick out the two long rows of black shapes where the avenue ran between the trees. Here and there he discerned the tall outline of a tree, but the familiar form of the colonnade was not there. There were unfamiliar spaces and he knew that every space was a fallen tree.
His eyes travelled back to the centre front. Then he realised that the weird hulk that distorted the scene was the base of the giant oak tree standing up-ended, its torn-out roots in mid-air, its leafy branches down in a black cavity that had been a smooth velvet pleasance eight minutes ago.
As he looked, a great squalling gust of wind came screaming across the park and hurled itself against the glass. He was flung backwards against a table. The heavy silver candelabrum that stood there was overturned. At the same time there was a crashing sound of breaking glass and into the room came showers of leaves, sticks, stones and big lumps of clay. The green velvet hangings ballooned inward and tossed priceless bric-à-brac from tables and mantelpiece. Lighted candles were knocked from their sconces. The great five-foot chandelier of Waterford cut glass swung wildly from the ceiling. Hundreds of its dangling pieces swirled together making a musical swan-song before they crashed to destruction against walls and mirrors and the uncarpeted spaces of the floor.
When the frightened servants burst open the door the draught created a whirlwind that sent fresh destruction all through the elegant room. The green curtains lashed out in fury against the walls and their tasselled ends reaching to the mantelpiece sent shepherdesses and goddesses flying to the mosaic hearth tiles in smithereens. ‘’Tis the end of the world. Sir Roderick,’ cried the old butler. His master, cursing himself for his folly in opening the shutters, was now trying to close them.
‘Come and help me and stop talking nonsense,’ he cried. Another gust of wind sent the shutters flying into their faces and went roaring and whistling round the house and down the chimneys. ‘You there!’ Sir Roderick roared at the footman who was aimlessly picking up broken china and glass. ‘Drag in these big chairs from the hall and put them against these shutters. And you. Young Thomas,’ he called to the knife boy who was crouching in terror beside a curio cabinet, ‘go and help him.’ When they had succeeded in securing the bars across the shutters they had to hold their arms against the wood. Despite the strength of the iron bars, the wind hurling itself through the glassless window was straining the shutters inwards until they creaked aloud.
The footman and the boy came slowly across the room gasping with the effort of dragging one of the heavy Flemish choir stalls that were used as hall chairs. They placed it against the barred shutters and went back to the hall for the rest. Backwards and forwards they went, helped by the master and the butler, until there was a chair at every window and two at the one that was broken.
As the men were about to leave the room the door opened and the six-foot figure of Mrs. Stacey, the cook, came in followed by a group of servant girls. They all held rosary beads. The butler, leading the out-going procession, stood transfixed. Their audacity recalled him to his dignity as Commander-in-Chief of the staff. The kitchen had actually come unbidden to the drawing-room! It was as unheard-of and as horrifying as the storm that raged outside.
He looked up at the towering cook. ‘Is it mad you are?’ he hissed. But Mrs. Stacey for once ignored him. With hands still clasped as though in prayer and the rosary beads entwined about her fingers she went beseechingly towards her master, addressing her prayers to him instead of to her Maker.
‘Sir Roderick, acquanie, I ask your pardon for makin’ so bold. But don’t ask us to stay down there. The water is a foot deep on the kitchen floor...’
‘Water? Where is it coming from?’
‘I don’t know where it came from. Sir Roderick. It just appeared in the kitchen without sound or warning...’
An elderly housemaid pressed forward. ‘There was a roar like thunder and then, God between us and all harm, the door opened by itself and the water flowed in.’
Sir Roderick thrust through the press of jabbering servants. ‘Why was I not told of this before?’ The butler tried to explain to him that it was to tell him about the flooding in the kitchen that he came up in the first instance, but Mrs. Stacey’s voice drowned his. When she realised that she was expected to follow her master downstairs she became hysterical and screamed at the top of her voice about tombstones.
‘The yard is full of tombstones, your Honour,’ said a maid. ‘They are floatin’ about on the water.’
Mrs. Stacey reached out a restraining hand. ‘Sir Roderick, sure it wasn’t the water I was afraid of, an’ I’m not afeared of anything on two feet, or four neither, but the prophecies of Saint Columcille have come to pass this night. The graves have opened and the holy tombstones have travelled across near a hundred acres of land. The like was never known. The corpses that own them tombstones will be here next.’
Sir Roderick had turned from her impatiently and started down the passage towards the back stairs. From over his head a voice called to him quietly. Mrs. Mansfield, the housekeeper, was leaning over the banisters of the main staircase.
‘Sir Roderick, will you send for Dr. Mitchell for her Ladyship?’
‘Dr. Mitchell?’ In the sudden turmoil of the storm he had forgotten that Margaret had not been feeling too well after dinner. Her back had ached from bending over the big embroidery frame and she had gone up to rest for a while on the chaise-longue. ‘Is there anything amiss with her Ladyship?’ he cried as he rushed past the housekeeper two steps at a time.
‘It is her, her—’ the prim spinster, for all her housekeeper’s title of Mrs., stood groping to express herself delicately.
‘Speak up, woman!’ he yelled. She shrank back against the banisters. ‘It is her condition. Sir Roderick. The storm has started her confinement.’
In the bedroom, a tall, beautiful girl was clutching the corner of the mantelpiece. She came towards him, her eyes dilated with fear. ‘Oh, Roderick, what is happening outside? Is the world mad, or is it coming to an end?’
He put his arms around her and soothed her. ‘It is only a storm.’ There was a deafening roar outside and the room seemed to shake. The girl gave a low moan of pain. He held her from him and looked into her face. She was deathly pale. ‘Margaret, is this true what Mrs. Mansfield says? Surely it could not be for another month?’ The storm crashed again around the house and she fell against him.
‘Roderick, send for Dr. Mitchell and have him bring a nurse.’
‘But—the trained nurse from Dublin will be here on Monday.’
‘Monday will be too late. Hurry, Roderick, hurry.’
He kissed her. ‘Don’t worry, my darling. Dr. Mitchell and a nurse will be with you in no time.’ And while he reassured her he thought of the fallen trees and the floods and doubted in his heart that the elderly doctor would get through this storm of hell.
Downstairs in the servants’ regions he found men, women and children thronging the passages and back stairs and every pantry room that had a step above ground level. John Carmody, the gardener, came forward holding a wailing child in his arms. He looked like a man who had come face to face with the supernatural. His teeth chattered as he endeavoured to explain the presence of himself and his entire family in his master’s house.
‘The roof was lifted off, your Honour, like the lid of a box. It blew up in the sky like a loose hand-cock of hay and at the same time the back wall of the house crashed down an’ meself an’ the wife an’ two of the children were thrun’ out of the bed to the ground. This gossoon has his little leg crushed.’
Others were crowding round with their incredible accounts of havoc. Some had their roofs blown off. Others had awakened from exhausted sleep to find that their beds had turned into rafts that bore them hither and thither on a strange sea of water that had appeared like a ghostly visitation from another world.
All of them sought to draw close to the young man who was the mainstay of their lives, to draw comfort from his presence as well as shelter from his house. But their master could spare them no comfort.
‘Is John Dermody here?’ he called above the clamour. But John Dermody, the coachman, was the only employee who was not present. He slept over the coach house beside the stables in a sheltered corner of the yard. The waters had not reached him. Roderick sent a footman to fetch him.
No other mission but that of bringing aid to the lady of the house who was facing her trouble more than a month before her time would have induced the young footman out of doors to face the tombstones, and maybe their owners! As he waded knee deep in water across the yard, with head down against the murderous blast, a white object with the outline of a human body floated towards him and he was knocked face downward in the water. Shivering with fear and cold he struggled to his knees and recognised the object that had up-ended him. It was a white marble tombstone surmounted by a man’s head.
Before he could stand upright another white object, soft and clammy, floated towards him and knocked him sideways. He felt the hideous sensation of its dank hair on his cheeks and muffling his mouth. Holy Mother of God, Mrs. Stacey was right. The prophecies had come true! The corpses had come for their tombstones.
Screaming like a madman, he floundered to the coach house and hammered in a frenzy at its door. Big John Dermody was as calm as when he sat aloft on the driver’s seat of the fine carriage in gorgeous livery and cockaded hat, holding the reins with the dignified mien of a Roman charioteer.
Since the storm began he had moved continuously from box to box, soothing the frightened horses. Now he soothed the half-crazed footman who clung to him jabbering about a tombstone that had knocked him flat on his face. ‘And the corp’ that owned it came along next and hit me across the face.’
‘’Tis no corp’, avic, leastways not a human one. It’s only a poor drowned sheep. Look at it and let the fear go out of you.’ He forced the lad to look over his shoulder where even in the darkness he could discern the outlines of more sheep tossed hither and thither in the swirling waters.
‘Think of what their loss means to the master! All these fine ewes that would be lambin’ in two months more!’
Mention of his master recalled the footman to his errand. ‘Oh, Mr. Dermody, the tombstones and the corpses put it out of my head what I came for. The Sir bid me tell you yoke the best carriage and go at once for Dr. Mitchell. Ye’re to drive like mad. He’s in a terrible state.’
Big John held the footman at arms’ length. ‘Pull yourself together and give your message. Is the Sir hurt? And if so why should the carriage go for Dr. Mitchell. Isn’t it on horseback he’d come, or drive his own Back-to-back?’
‘’Tis for the convaynence of bringing the midwife and the doctor gettin’ a bit ould in himself for the night that’s in it.’
‘Midwife? What are ye ravin’ about? Amn’t I meetin’ the Dublin coach for her on Monday?’
‘Monday will be too late for her Ladyship. The poor Lady craythur has come to her confinement with the dint of the storm.’ The coachman waited for no more. He bade him fetch Mike O’Driscoll, the head groom. The footman started to expostulate, but for once the coachman abandoned his calm and gave a roar that sent the footman floundering on his way.
A moment later Mike O’Driscoll was holding the frightened leaders as they reared and plunged, his own fear forgotten in his concern for the horses he loved. Big John, in the act of leading out two more horses, spied two people coming round the side of the house towards the back door. At the same moment the lanterns suspended from the overhanging roof of the stables swung wildly in a great roaring blast of wind and crashed to the floor, leaving them all in complete darkness. The horses screamed and plunged wildly. Other horses trembling in their stalls heard the screams and their hooves could be heard above the storm as they lashed them in terror against walls and doors.
Big John called towards the two figures to come and help with the horses. They were the gate lodge-keeper and his wife. The man held a whimpering puppy under one arm and a picture under the other. The woman held a basket containing a hen and chicks in one hand and in the other she clutched a big china teapot. They had come to join the homeless at the Big House. Their snug lodge was levelled to the ground and their tale of havoc chilled in Big John’s stout heart the hope of bringing help to his young mistress. The huge trees that stood on either side of the entrance gates were uprooted and lay, one above the other, across the entrance. It was the same, they said, all along the avenue. It was blocked every few yards with fallen trees. No vehicle could get past.
He considered the possibility of getting out by the back avenue to the bye-road but abandoned the idea. The artificial pond for driving the carriage through to wash the mud from the wheels was in that part of the stable yard. It was now a lake. The back drive followed the course of the land where the river seemed to have burst its banks near the graveyard. Big John led the horses back to their stalls then waded towards the house to hold counsel with his master.
Sir Roderick, returning from reassuring his wife that help would soon be on its way, was feeling more competent to cope with the plight of his helpless employees. Mrs. Stacey, after hearing the lodge-keepers’ report, had gone into wilder flights of hysteria. The child with the crushed leg was wailing unceasingly. Other children, hungry, sleepy and rain-sodden, joined in a chorus of wails. Hannah Riorden, the elderly housemaid who had spoken to Sir Roderick about the flooding in the kitchen, was on her knees giving out the Rosary at the top of her voice. The sight of Big John Dermody towering above the throng, when he should be well out on the high road, pulled Sir Roderick up in dismay.
‘Did you not receive my orders to take the carriage for the doctor and midwife?’ Disappointment lashed his anger to fury. Never before had he spoken in anger to his coachman. And even as he spoke, he sensed that his orders were beyond obedience. Big John Dermody was not readily deterred.
‘If it would be agreeable to you, Sir Roderick,’ he said when he explained their tree-beleaguered plight, ‘I thought to saddle the Rajah and ride to Templetown. I’d reach the road by taking the fields.’
‘The Rajah is too heavy. If you must ride, take the new sorrel. It has speed.’
‘Beggin’ your pardon. Sir Roderick. It’s not speed that counts tonight. It is strength.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Roderick shouted, ‘don’t stand there arguing with me, get on a horse and fetch the doctor. It is life or death, man!’ Big John strode down the passage to the back door. As he opened it a gust of wind sent him staggering backwards, and his weight brought down the lithe body of his master who had followed him on an impulse. ‘John,’ he said as he rose, and there was no anger now, only appeal, ‘do you think you can make it?’
For a brief moment the two men looked out into the wild darkness. Sleet drove through the open door and saturated their garments. But the horror of the night was in its sound. Down the long slopes from the graveyard came a screaming wind that ended in a kind of mad laughter as it whirled in and out through the treetops. There were whining creaks as heavy branches were torn from the trunks and sent whirling through the air, while from below came the agonised protests of the great deep roots that were being dragged from the earth that had held them for over a hundred years.
As the two men stood there helpless and awed, the master for the first time in his life felt his own unimportance. It seemed so absurd for one to assert authority over the other. The servant sensed his master’s abasement. He turned towards him. ‘Have no fear. Sir Roderick, I’ll make it all right.’
The moment of revelation passed, master and man fitted back into perspective.
‘God carry you safely,’ said Sir Roderick. He turned to his demoralised workfolk.
Fear had dredged the soul of Young Thomas, the knife boy and courier-drudge of Mrs. Stacey and the butler. He accepted unquestioningly their pronouncement that the world would end tonight. How else could it be? Had he not seen the black clouds, blacker than the eyes of man had ever seen before, as he ran back across the short cut through the bog this evening; after he had delivered the mistress’s message to old Lady Cullen at Crannagh Hall? Now here was the great castle that had withstood the might of Cromwell, shaking like the hairy skeough grass that grows on top of the bog. And, God be praised, the graves had opened and the Dead were out there in the yard, waiting to be judged!
Suddenly he was exalted by a strange, new courage. There was no need to have to die now and have to go through all the grimness of funeral and the dreaded grave. He would be judged in life, right here in Kilsheelin Castle, and then go on straight up to Heaven. Not even a delay for a while in Purgatory, because Purgatory would be done away with after the Last Judgment. Of course there would still be Hell. But sure he hadn’t a sin on his soul. Or hadn’t he? His mind quailed at the recollection of the audacious act he had committed about a fortnight ago, only a day after his foster-mother had brought him here before she left for America. He had come upon the Sir’s ‘necessary’ built out of sight down the garden. He had often heard about the hole in a board that gentlemen used and the temptation had proved too much. He had actually tiptoed inside and—behaved like a gentleman!
The Sir was returning from the back door. The lad braced himself. Any moment now he would stand in the Presence of the Lord of Creation! For the first time he raised his voice unbidden to the Lord of the castle.
‘Sir—yer Honour!’ The haughty face looking down at him brought back servitude to his fear-purged soul. He backed and gulped. Pity stirred his master. ‘What is it, lad?’
Thomas gulped again. ‘Will the judgment be here, yer Honour? Sure we’d never get to the Valley of Jostlers tonight?’
‘Jostlers? What is the boy talking about?’
Mrs. Stacey rose from her knees. ‘He means the Valley of Jehosaphus where we’ll all be judged this night, your Honour, asthore.’ His Honour gave a roar that sent Mrs. Stacey down on her knees again, and reduced the voices and the wailings to silence; all but the injured child. ‘If I hear another word of that kind of talk from you, I’ll have you locked outside with the tombstones. Their owners will direct you to the Valley of Jehosaphus!’ Mrs. Stacey made the sign of the cross in speechless dread.
‘Patrick claimed from the Almighty three favours...’ The voice came to them on a rush of icy wind. Struggling through the open door was the wild figure of an old man, dragging a harp. His white hair was wet on his shoulders, his bardic cloak lashed out behind. ‘The Bard!’ gasped Young Thomas, rushing across to close the door and help with the harp. ‘Aye,’ said the old man grimly, ‘the Bard of the O’Carrolls left to drown alone, forgotten.’ They had all forgotten the family Bard outside in his own special quarters at the extreme end of the east wing. ‘—that in the seventh year before the Day of Judgment,’ continued the old man, regardless of Mrs. Stacey’s fresh outcry, ‘the land of Ireland would be engulfed in a mighty tidal wave so that no man of Ireland might know the terrors of the Last Day—’
The assurance brought no comfort to the assembly. It was showing signs of hysteria. Sir Roderick broke in impatiently on the prophetic utterances, ‘For Heaven’s sake, Bard, stop talking nonsense and—’ He was at a loss what to suggest the old man should do. He mustn’t leave him here; the Bard was too sensitive about his position in the household. ‘Come upstairs,’ he finished. The Bard shook his wet locks. ‘It was ever the duty of the Bard to inspire and give courage. I will stay with the helpless.’ Sir Roderick felt something like a smile. The dignified minstrel was in dread of going from the company of the serving staff to sit alone in bardic state. ‘Have no fear, woman!’ he said to the cook. ‘This is not the final floodwater—the storm that comes in its fury between the day of the Sun’s death—the twenty-second day of December—and Twelfth Night is but the Wild Huntsman, rushing by on his eight-footed steed.’
His master turned to leave, then stopped and raised his voice above the intoning of the Bard’s mysticisms. ‘Look at that fire!’ he roared.
Of the eight fires that burned in separate heaps of turf along the great hearth, a pot or kettle swinging from a crane over each pile, only two were smoking. Not a red spark in the great furnace of fires that had burned night and day, unquenched through the generations. Rain and sleet and stones were pouring down the chimney.
He bade them light the fires and hold themselves in readiness for their mistress’s requirements. To the butler he gave instructions for food and drink for the homeless. As he passed the man who held the suffering child, he placed a hand upon his shoulder. ‘The doctor will be here soon,’ he said gently. ‘He will see to the little one.’ The man looked at him with grateful eyes. ‘God bless your Honour.’
Mrs. Mansfield removed Margaret’s gown of blue brocade. Even in this moment of stress she let her hand linger lovingly over the raised embroidery of coral and gold bullion fringing. One by one she removed the silken petticoats flounced with Brussels lace that the young bride had brought from her Belgian home. From in front of the fire, where it was airing, she took a nightgown of finest silk and the wrapper of white cashmere, all ruffles and ribbons.
As the girl reached out her arms to place them in the sleeves, the housekeeper thought how helpless she looked, standing there ill and lonely, far from her native land. For a moment she was tempted to take her in her arms and give her comfort. But tradition prevailed.
Service in Kilsheelin Castle was not casual or slapdash. The young Sir, for all his books and paintings and music-playing, was formal and exacted a correct disposition from his servants. And her Ladyship was very foreign even though her father, an officer in the French army, had been Irish, and her mother was half Irish. She had a funny accent and she did not seem to understand Ireland or the Irish.
As lovingly as a caress Mrs. Mansfield tied the wrapper loosely round the girl and made a pretty bow under her chin with the ribbons of the dainty nightcap. Then she drew the mounting steps to the bedside. ‘Let you go up these now and lie down,’ she coaxed, ‘and your trouble will be over before it has time to start.’
Just as Margaret put her foot on the first step to make the ascent of the bed, a thunderous crash shook the castle. The room vibrated. Margaret pitched forward, clutching one of the bedposts. It moved and something came away in her hand. A shriek escaped her. She thought the great bed was crushing down upon her.
Candle sconces were thrown on the floor. Down the chimney came a deafening noise like a bombardment from Heaven. Something fell on the stone hearth with a resounding crash. A black cloud of smoke blew across the room. Candles were blown out and from somewhere near she heard a low moan. ‘Mrs. Mansfield,’ she called. There was no answer.
She struggled to rise and in the light of one broken candle hanging loosely in the brass arm of a big walnut sconce lying on the carpet, its candles quenched, she saw the prostrate body of Mrs. Mansfield. The housekeeper’s head was in the shadow of the open door of the wardrobe where she had turned to put away the blue gown. The girl could not see the blood.
She rose to her feet, terrified to hold on to anything lest it give way and bring her down again. The whole castle was an inferno of roaring winds. Every blast was followed by crashes from roof to cellar as if the wind were carrying out a systematic dismantling of the castle and all its proud possessions.
She stood there alone in the smoke-darkened room and suddenly her calm broke. ‘Rodereeck,’ she screamed, ‘Rod-er-ee-eek!’ She dragged out the last syllable in a thin, long-drawn pleading. But the sound was not thin enough to pierce the massive door that was voicing its own groans against the merciless battering.
At last he came. For a moment he stood aghast. Like the lawn outside, the contours of the room had changed since he last saw it. It had lost its familiar outline. The furniture that, for him, had represented form and symmetry since his earliest recollections, had somehow vanished.
Heavy objects loomed in disorder from the floor. The only object that was upright was the tall four-poster bed, its white canopies and curtains gleaming ghostly in the darkness.
He moved towards it to his wife. Then he saw her standing motionless at the far side. She had ceased to cry out. She could feel her throat torn and a sensation like blood in her mouth. Some fundamental instinct caused her to marshal her energy and emotion for the ordeal that was yet to come.
She raised her arms to him. As he drew her to him the thing she held fell from her hand. It was the fluted top of the bedpost with its gay carvings of acanthus leaves and bunches of grapes.
‘Rodereeck, do not ever leave me again,’ she whispered.
‘My poor little love. I won’t leave you and soon the doctor will be here.’ Dear God, he seemed to be repeating that assurance all night. He pressed his cheek to hers and then he became aware that Mrs. Mansfield was not in the room.
‘Where is Mrs. Mansfield? I cautioned her not to leave you.’
Margaret turned her head towards the housekeeper’s prostrate form. ‘She’s there,’ she whispered.
He looked over her shoulder. The broken candle gave a spurt of flame and this time Margaret saw the blood. It had almost covered Mrs. Mansfield’s gentle face. Margaret fell against Roderick in a dead faint.
He placed her on the bed and ran to the head of the stairs. Across the banisters he saw the servants in the hall below. A group of them surged up the stairs. He was almost relieved to see Mrs. Stacey in the vanguard. Was she not his own foster-mother? She had borne children. She would sustain Margaret. As they approached within two steps of him, a long thin whistle of wind came in an icy blast down the two open storeys of the hallway. A huge painting by Rubens—a Madonna and Child—swung from the wall and crashed at their feet.
The sound of Mrs. Stacey’s lamentations challenged the wind. ‘It’s a sign!’ she yelled. ‘When a picture falls there’ll be a death in the house. Oh! The poor young mistress!’
Roderick suppressed his urge to strangle her. There was no hope of help for Margaret from this quarter! Sternly he ordered the butler to have the cook battened downstairs and on no account to let her within sound of her Ladyship for the rest of the night.
In a few moments it seemed as if the omen was fulfilled. The servants shivered as Mrs. Mansfield’s lifeless body was borne past.
Hannah, the most responsible of the womenfolk, took over the vigil in her mistress’s room.
Sir Roderick strained his ears towards the windows that he did not dare to open. If only he could stand at a window and watch out for the doctor! The very motions of watching would be an outlet for this tension.
He kept on chafing Margaret’s wrists while Hannah dabbed vinegar on her forehead and held smelling-salts to her nose. ‘There must be something I can do,’ he told himself, but his confused brain offered no suggestion. He felt trapped. The roaring of the wind did not unnerve him, nor the crashes. But when it came in long thin screeches down the length of the denuded park and crashed against the windows with a wild laughing sound like the mocking of demons, he wanted to run and bury his ears.
Hannah had lit fresh candles and now he recognised the bulky mass that lay on the hearthstone and blocked up the entire fireplace. It was a section of the tessellated tower that had blown down the chimney, crushing the fireplace to rubble. For the first time he realised that the castle was in danger! It had stood up through the centuries against raids and wars and sieges. It had escaped the ravages of Cromwell. Now the elements had hurled themselves against its powerful battlements.
Roderick pulled desperately at the heavy masonry to free the chimney opening and clear the room of swirling smoke. From the bedside a sharp yelp of pain told him that Margaret had regained consciousness. He moved back to her.
‘Are you in pain?’ he asked her, and thought immediately what a stupid question to put to a woman in her condition!
‘It is not the pain that disturbs me. It is the shaking of the bed. I fear that I shall be thrown down and the child be killed before it is born.’
He reached out as if to steady the shaking of the huge mahogany bed that held his wife’s frail body. Oh, for the sound of hooves! But there was nothing to be heard above the fierce sound of thundering winds, the crashing of falling timber and a great wailing as though all the Banshees of the race of the Tuatha de Danaan were outside, keening, not for one soul, but for the souls of all the people in the world. Was it the end of an era? Or was the cook right? Was it the end of the world?
The bed rocked and Margaret moaned again. She thought longingly of the snug sleeping berths built into the wall, one above the other, in the room she had shared with her sister in the Belgian villa overlooking the Lake of Nightingales.
In lulls between storm and pain, she thought that Yvette was popping little hard objects like beads on to her face from the berth above. Yvette was always tossing things down at her! Margaret put up her hand and pushed away the pieces of flowers and fruit that so embellished the reeds and fluted columns of the bed. Mr. Chippendale had never envisaged a wind that could blow his carvings about like papier mâché.
A freakish wind blew round the room in all directions. With a weird whistling sound it scattered candles and ornaments again and with a long-drawn scream it loosened the carved crane from the great headboard—intended by its designer to be the emblem of care and watchfulness. It fell straight on Margaret.
It was more than she could bear. She threw herself into her husband’s arms and implored him to take her to some safe place. He held her to him and tried to think of some refuge. Some place where she could lie in safety to endure the pain and fear.
He thought of the flooded basement, the wrecked drawing-room, the bedrooms all around her, all shaking and shuddering and clanging. At last he thought of something. Because of the flooding, most of the household and refugees were now in the front hall, and the passages behind it. He called some of the men and had them remove the big Flanders tick and place it with all its bolsters and pillows on the floor in a corner of the room furthest from the window and fire. Whilst he directed the men he held Margaret in his arms and his heart contracted as he felt her agony.
Where was Big John?
*
In the tempest Big John thanked the good God that the master had allowed him to take the Rajah. No other horse in the castle stalls could have stood up to this storm: no other horse in Ireland!
Three times they made the road, only to be driven back to the fields by the barriers of uprooted trees. The fields were completely under water. Sometimes the seventeen-and-a-half hands horse sank to his shoulders. Big John spurred him, but feared to dismount lest he be sucked under. It went to his heart to add his weight to the struggle of the horse as he floundered to lift himself and his rider from the down-suck of bog. Once, when the powerful horse could struggle no longer and it looked as if itself and rider must perish in the morass, a wind came thundering across the earth like thousands of horsemen. A rick of turf stood near the submerged horse and rider. In an instant it was tossed in the air and a shower of black sods were scattered around them for hundreds of yards. A sod struck Big John on the side of the head and he felt stunned for a moment and dropped the reins. Instantly he felt the horse lifted bodily out of the swamp. It gave a whinnying cry that chilled his veins.
Somehow they found firm footing and rode forward. And now a faint glow rose in the darkness and lit the way before them. As he drew near he saw that it was Carney’s shebeen on fire. A group of men and women stood helplessly watching the flames. As they saw the horseman approach they ran to him. Carney recognised Big John and asked him to help with the flames.
‘The lads were playing Twenty-Five for a leg of mutton and all of a sudden a great wind blew down the chimney. There was a fire on the hearth that would roast an ox an’ Felix Downey had just banged the Five of Hearts on the table when the flames flew around the room and before we knew where we wor me house was on fire.’ Then he said simply, ‘I’ve no house now, Mr. Dermody.’
Big John felt the pathos of the simple statement. ‘God knows,’ he answered, ‘I’d like to give a hand but I must go for the doctor. Her Ladyship is in a bad way. The child is coming before its time and it has taken me an hour to get this far.’
John Carney forgot his own trouble in his sympathy for the sweet young Ladyship. ‘Go on your way and God be with you,’ he said. ‘There is nothing you can do here.’ His wife and two other women crowded round the horse’s head, full of concern for her Ladyship.
‘God carry you safely,’ they cried as he urged Rajah forward.
To right and left of him cabins were levelled to the ground or on fire. Once he passed a group of naked children shivering and crying in front of the ruins of a group of cabins. And once, as the horse took a fallen tree in a jump, he fell from the saddle and his shoulder gave him fierce pain. The side of his head was aching, too, where the sod of turf had struck him. He did not notice that blood poured over his ear on to his shoulder.
Templetown was close now but all he could see was a great red glow in the sky and clouds of smoke. The wind had shifted from southwest to sheer west and was blowing louder and wilder. Showers of stones and branches blew about him incessantly—once a brick hit Rajah on the head and it reared and plunged panic-stricken. Big John held on madly, the force of his hold torturing his injured shoulder.
Dr. Mitchell lived on the Mall. Big John never remembered how he got there. It hadn’t occurred to him that midst this havoc and disaster others would have need of the doctor. When a servant told him that the doctor was not at home, the utter dismay unmanned him. He suddenly felt the pain in the side of his head and for a moment his knees sagged with weakness and exhaustion.
The doctor had gone to the barracks near the Mall where a sentry box had been lifted from the ground and blown down the street with the sentry still inside.
When Big John came upon Dr. Mitchell, he was bending over a policeman who had been helping with the sentry and had got his leg and thigh broken. The wind-borne sentry, miraculously unhurt, was helping him. A group of frightened, wailing children were waiting by the road.
‘Is it mad you are,’ the doctor said, ‘to talk of going to a confinement on a night like this?’
‘Her Ladyship is bad,’ urged Big John. ‘It’s a month before her time an’ the midwife not due from Dublin till Monday. Night or no night, the child must be loosed.’