The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  When I saw what Saverio Bon had done for us, I kneeled and kissed his graceful hand while the sweating porters lifting our trunks up to our floor deplored our parsimony with the tips, operatically calling us ‘Barbarian Dogs of the Virgin’, quite unaware that I understood them.

  Alexander appeared in their wake. ‘What do you think, ladies?’ he asked.

  He was scrupulously careful to let his glance rest equally on our flushed faces.

  He exchanged a glance with Signor Bon. I was surprised to see the animosity written on their faces. Of course Alexander was not happy to see me kneeling at the photographer’s feet, but there was more to it than that. I promised myself to ask Alexander about it later, but was forcefully distracted by my desire to explore our new home.

  We got a sight of palazzo for our lire: an entire vine-clad piano nobile in a Renaissance palazzo romantically situated on the Grand Canal.

  When we bought our piano nobile, we bought the right to linger in the great hall, where we might sit on benches with black­­­boards painted in chiaroscuro with cupids in a water-stippled space, lit at night by a ship’s lantern bulbous like the thorax of an ant and as large as two tall men stacked one on top of the other. We bought the right to enter the stairwell via marbled corniced doorways that the second man couldn’t even reach with his fingertips. We bought the right to open inner gates of such intricate iron filigree that they should have been worn by rich giants as belt buckles. There were seeming splinters of ruby in the windows to our grand staircase frescoed with pastel porticoes on which lounged blonde ladies and liveried monkeys. We had bought the right to clasp our hands around the heads of green lions whose duties were to hold silken ropes in their mouths by way of banisters. And when you finished mounting the stairs, lion by lion, you looked up to a fresco of a painted sky, with nothing more to say than Good morning, it’s a beautiful day – see here’s a hint of pink amid the azure to promise you a good heating-up later. I think that empty fresco was my favourite thing of all.

  We had bought gilded red damask that hung like flayed skins from the walls in a walnut library filled with books in Greek and Latin. A dense Austrian-looking crystal-drop chandelier gushed from the library ceiling. We bought a great salotto with yellowed painted beams and steps up to a pergola on which we might perch and own four bell towers with our eyes. And from which height the gondolas below were toy boats and the tourists were toy people, their eyes happily raised to the prospect of Rialto Bridge arching its back like a white cat in front of them.

  We had bought twelve-foot architraves, and door hinges cast with delicate acorn tips. We had bought bronze rococo door handles. We were set up with an abundance of scrolled gilt candlesticks, armchairs fancy as iced biscuits (and as friable with the worm). Our gilded consoles rubbed up against diseased mirrors so tall that the spiders dangling from the cornices might admire themselves without descending an inch.

  We’d bought acres of terrazzo flooring picked out in crests, and a mile at least of parquet stained with interesting formations.

  Two small palazzi had recently been torn down simply to create the elegance of a walled garden with a pool of emerald grass in front of the jade-tinted blue of the Grand Canal.

  We had bought an encrustation of amethyst wisteria in the garden and a view of water and marble through grates between nine stone columns.

  It did not bypass my thoughts that all this magnificence was created at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Swineys immemorial back in Ireland were living on oats and sleeping in windowless turf huts heated by roasted dried cow dung, only dreaming of the luxury of a thin goose at Michaelmas. And most of all, I realised that we sisters who had once owned nothing but the air we breathed had now bought air – air trapped in the gloomy heights of the ceilings, the length and breadth of the rooms that made us all look like small afterthoughts.

  There was an enfilade of bright bedrooms along the garden side; on the inner linings lurked secret passageways for the servants where perpetual twilight reigned.

  Back in Harristown our cottage had been so tight that you couldn’t lift your arms without bruising someone. Those same Swiney Godivas – now a little older – who had slept on straw pallets by a turf stove would that night lay themselves down on beds of antique splendour rustling with velvet and silk, made up for them by two servants, after being fed by a cook and served with ceremony and silver plate.

  Darcy of course took for herself the chamber on the Grand Canal with the oval ceiling fresco and the marble fireplace of dramatic zebra-striped marble, topped by a gilded mirror that rose up into the sky. Except where broken by gilded stucco work round the windows and doors, Darcy’s room was entirely panelled with squares of pocked and plaintive mirror, which refused to offer any semblance of your reflection but threw a dull shine into your eyes.

  Berenice demanded the next room, hung with gold-silk damask cutwork in which acanthus and flowers of dull red-gold floated in a gold glossy background. The ceiling was afrolic with satyrs and busy nymphs (one breast being fondled by a satyr, the other giving milk to a cupid), flowers, fat ears of wheat. The whole scene was thickly infested with cupids fluttering the wings of cabbage white butterflies. Curious and impossible architectural forms were rendered in a bilious green around the edges where the ceiling met the walls. But Berenice pronounced it ‘perfect’ for her. The remaining sisters were pushed through the door to the next room.

  ‘This is mine!’ I claimed it instantly. The room was warm as an apricot on an August branch, painted in sun-infused pastels and buttermilky golds. Chinoiserie panels showed impossible Oriental architectural forms rising out of limpid lakes and drooping with spindly trees and outsized convolvulus. Cone-hatted figures bearing delicate standards ran over bridges that led to nowhere, or they smoked hookahs on gnarled outcrops surrounded by water. Each panel was highly peopled, yet every individual was confined to his or her own tiny island, with no boats or rafts to carry them back and forth. The upper parts of painted pavilions were occupied by grand ladies with double pagoda umbrellas, but there were no stairs to convey them up there or down again. My ceiling was stucco strawberries and peaches beaten and ploughed roughly through thick yellowy cream, particularly rich food for the eyes in the vibrant afternoon light.

  ‘Oh no!’ cried Ida, pointing. Of course, it was Ida who detected a darker side to those frescoes of a floating world. A man in red stockings vigorously beat his dog with a reed switch. A bound servant raised the terrified whites of his eyes to a master who appeared to be ordering him to throw himself into the depths of the lake. Another dog was caught in the act of a suicidal leap into the infinite water. And who was that hunched man lying in wait for the beautiful lady ascending to the pavilion? How did those rotting branches hold up those towering pavilions? Into what mist-shrouded distance did those perspectives of tufted palms and misty cypresses disappear? Where, if anywhere, did the water end and true land begin?

  Then I discovered the best thing about my room – a secret passage behind it that led to the lobby and the stairs, which set me pleasantly speculating until I heard Oona’s chirrups and sighs of delight from next door.

  Oona’s room was so encrusted with stucco that it no longer had corners. It had undulating outcrops, like a bleached grotto. Mother-of-pearl glittered in the tiny tiles in the floor. Oona pronounced herself ‘in heaven’ with the white marble fireplace that was more ornate than mine, and with the arched anteroom where a bed was made up with brocade hangings. She admired herself in her two mirrored presses. Her ceiling cupids had doves’ wings, and the little plump ones sported with the birds, whose feathers were as pillowy and luminous as Oona’s own hair. Gilded eagles draped gold garlands of leaves and medallions of laurel-crowned poets.

  After Oona’s room came the bathroom we would all share and then, by default, Ida’s chamber – once a family chapel, still equipped with a kind of altar and painting of a friar in rapture being crowned with white lilies by a nymph. It looked over the back garden
that joined our palazzo to the teeming streets of San Polo.

  ‘For me,’ pronounced Ida.

  From Ida’s room, one reached a new wing at the back of the garden, tall chambers with painted ceilings looking down to the wisteria and the Grand Canal below. Enda and Mr Rainfleury took those rooms.

  I was almost sick with the excitement of the palazzo. Within a day, I was already afraid of leaving it. I wanted somehow to make it part of our act, so that even when forced to leave it, I might inhabit it onstage. ‘An image of it on canvas as our backdrop?’ I mused over dinner served under the lucent gush of a chandelier, with the gondoliers singing beneath us.

  But Mr Rainfleury ordered us to keep the palace a secret.

  ‘It wouldn’t do to boast, my darlings. A Venetian palace will attract envy. Envious people will want to hurt you. And if you are hurt, if they scent blood, that will excite the hack reporters and bring them swarming to you. Remember that you were not born respectable. You are raised to your current enviable position by my efforts and those of Tristan.’ He gestured at the damasked walls with his crystal goblet. He looked shabby in that room; disreputably shabby in contrast to its graces.

  ‘But even we cannot save you from the Grub Street hacks. Those men will bring down every good thing in this world with their busy black scribbles. They are the flies who feed on the wounded, simultaneously poisoning the weakened flesh by rubbing their filthy hands in it.’

  He set down his goblet and rubbed his hands in imitation. I looked away. He had succeeded in disgusting and frightening me.

  I felt hatred towards all journalists in that moment, that they might prevent me from taking joy in what I had earned.

  It came into my mind then, a new Swiney Godiva script about a sordid Grub Street hack who follows seven blameless sisters to Venice, seeks to bring them down with scandal. It is his especial pleasure to destroy their lives and their dreams. Aroused by the story he has invented in the darkness of his brain and the dirty fork of his groin, he pollutes Venice with his own lechery, persecuting a young hotel maid with his unwanted attentions. And therein lies his downfall.

  After supper, I sat on the balcony to sketch out the tale in ballad form, distracted from time to time by the waves that swarmed like rabbits in a field below me and the songs of the gondoliers that reminded me of the slow crows in Harristown.

  On my candlelit page, my villain met the picturesque, protracted death he deserved.

  As I knew from former perambulations with Alexander, every dawn a great whale of a laundry boat came to the dog-legged calle that fed foot traffic from the Grand Canal to the street door of the Hotel Squisito in Cannaregio. The laundry boat arrived at six, loaded with clean sheets in bales as rotund as sheep. We’d often dawdled to watch the men – their vigour seemed almost health-giving. They disappeared down the calle bearing two or three sheep on their shoulders.

  Shortly after, they returned, bearing even fatter sheep of used sheets, which they threw into the hollow bowels of the boat, sheep after sheep, until the boat was piled higher than a man standing on another’s shoulders. I remembered from the men’s chatter that the end of their rounds took them to Mestre, where the boat was unloaded. There laundresses soaped and rinsed and mangled. The afternoon sun emptied the damp out of the sheets and the women ironed into the night. By five in the morning, the bales of clean sheets were ready to return to Venice.

  In my ballad, I wrote of the women’s strong arms and their lusty voices singing at their work. I wrote of one old laundress, called Annora, who crossed herself over every joyfully stained sheet. And I wrote of how the villainous journalist is asked by the hotel maid to meet him at dawn at the end of the calle where the men loaded the boat with heavy bales of soiled sheets. He arrives at the assignation, ready to pounce. But the canny Venetian girl lures him down to the mossy step. Slight as she is, there’s a hammer in her pocket and she knows how to cling to the rusted rope-ring on the wall when her pursuer loses his footing on the slick green moss and falls into the boat. Her white shawl quickly covers the unconscious villain, and she is lightfoot down the street before the men return with the bales of sheets that will cover and suffocate the man, as if a building or a tower had collapsed on top of him, as if Nature herself had intervened in meting out the rightful end of his story, making sure he was smothered by the soft pages of the linen.

  It was the most vigorous writing I’d done since The Cruel Sister. The words flowed out of me like honey. There was dark humour, wit and poetry in my poetry again, at last.

  A few hours later Darcy found me asleep by the Hansen mechanical writing hedgehog, with eighteen verses beside me.

  ‘What’s this?’ she demanded, casting her eye down the page.

  ‘No, nothing, just another ballad, something maybe for our show, should we ever . . .’

  ‘Oh really,’ drawled Darcy, turning to the second page. Her face tightened with surprise. She saw what had happened to my writing. But she quickly masked her surprise with disparagement. ‘The part for the dark-haired sister. How does it work? Where is it? Stop wasting paper. I’m sure it’s a sight of a price in Venice.’

  ‘And how are the lottery tickets?’ I asked. ‘Moderate in cost?’

  In the middle of our second night Ida’s painted friar dropped out of his frame with an apocalyptic clap.

  ‘A small earthquake,’ we were told by a servant. ‘It happens in Venice.’

  ‘Not enough that the dreadful place floats – but it also shakes!’ growled Darcy.

  Ida insisted the friar be covered with a nailed sheet thereafter, ‘to stop him coming to get me’.

  Mr Rainfleury was gone the next day. Venice did not agree with him, he said. The pleading eyes of Berenice, and Enda’s searching looks, pleased him even less. We spent a month arranging our new, engorged doll’s house to our satisfaction, spending every last penny of our Venetian earnings on damasked linens, vases and ostentatious glass trinkets. Under the gushing chandelier, we dined on veal stewed with cherries, a bittersweet blackened chicory, liver the Venetian way. We were on nodding terms with the waiters at Florian, where we soaked our rolls in chocolate. Despite Darcy’s discouragement, I finished my script about the murderous bales of laundry, and smiled every time a boat laden with sheets passed us by.

  I saw Alexander for whole quarter-hours at a time alone. He appeared at the palazzo regularly to sketch us for the bronze busts.

  All too soon Mr Rainfleury called us home to Ireland. The dolls need you back at work on their behalf. And there’s a stack of letters here from some mad chap with very poor handwriting.

  ‘I’ll contrive a way to get to Dublin,’ Alexander promised me.

  The last thing I packed away was my finished ballad, knowing that by writing a Venetian story, by doing what I did there, by doing it properly again, I had married the place in the only sense that marriage was possible for me.

  In Dublin there awaited a frenetic programme of appearances in theatres, department stores and art exhibitions. Despite our tradeswomen’s labours, our insistent presence on the edge of Fitzwilliam Square gradually elevated us; we were now on nodding terms with our local lords and ladies. Eminences of the medical and legal profession also surrounded us in the square, and did not shun us. One of the glamorous Butcher girls, who had modelled for an Academy painting, waved to us in the street.

  ‘Don’t look so humble when she gives you good morning, Manticory! How is what she did so different from what we did with Signor Bon?’ demanded Darcy.

  Do you really want me to tell you? I wondered. Would you really like to have the difference between art and vulgar commerce laid out for you? Do you truly want to know the difference between a Butcher and a Swiney? Between a gentle education and Tristan’s training academy? In short, between an aristocrat’s artistic daughter and a Harristown girl who sells her body parts?

  Alexander wrote to say that he was detained in Venice by a lack of funds. And it seems that in my efforts to be near you, I have foolishly
painted Dublin Society to extinction. No one else needs a portrait.

  Darcy had refused to advance any more on the busts, and I had to acknowledge that there had been no progress of significance.

  Oona sometimes spoke of having a ball, or a soirée, though we still lacked the outright confidence to pull it off. We played at being Quality, experimenting by giving alms to the beggars of Sackville Street, and buying sugar-candy and burnt almonds for the flower girls with their withered blooms, by being rude to the servants and condescending to tradesmen. And I, constantly reworking and refining my Venetian ballad, allowed myself to privately gloat about our secret palace in Venice, imagining the looks on people’s faces if they only knew.

  Those delusions were quickly and violently extinguished.

  Even if Darcy didn’t see the difference between Eleanor Butcher and a Swiney, the criminal classes of Dublin knew us surely for low-life dissemblers, and they did not wait long before launching an attack.

  Chapter 32

  Pertilly was assaulted on her way home from the central post office. She was nearly at our door when a masked man threw vinegar in her eyes and hit her on the side of the head with a knobbed cudgel. Then, as she swayed, he used her hair as a handle to drag her to the mews at the back of our house, where he kneeled on her back while he shaved her scalp with a curved dry razor, none too carefully. Pertilly told us afterwards that she lay there a while, her eyes pressed to the cobbles, her faltering hands cradling the back of her blood-smeared, denuded head. Then she crawled out to Pembroke Street and collapsed again at the sight of our grand front door, for she did not feel she had the right of entrance any more.

  An elderly gentleman of the Royal Irish Constabulary found the bald Pertilly sobbing in the gutter. He dragged her into the house, her weight being too considerable to permit him a more heroic entrance. He laid her on the sofa in the dining room and took off his small cap and fanned her with it.