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.
Signore Marchetti, I regret to say, had aged a great deal—he had suffered a heart attack one Sunday, in his lodgings. I could not be found, and Harney had acquired a doctor, who told Signore Marchetti that he must do no more lifting and very little straining labor. The prevention from exercising his craft had aged him, I believe, more than the heart condition. Whatever limitations he had encountered in his life, he had not allowed it to show in his work. He and his sons had almost completed the Grand Staircase, and I could scarcely believe that they had authored such beauty.
Marble presents difficulties; it is not what it seems. Neither as durable as it pretends to be nor as resistant to the world's stains and leaks, it also offers risks to its cutter. A misplaced blade may strike a vein and the slab has been lost; or a fault may appear which destroys the very feature of beauty for which the slab has been purchased in the first place.
Here, however, we had been given the best of all possible worlds by this remarkable family. They walked with us as Harney and I ran our fingers over every lip and baluster, across each banister and tread. We observed the grains in the marble, and how they ran to their greatest felicity; we could see that no edge remained rough; we could see more than anything else that the Grand Staircase glowed like the moon, with its white flat surfaces, and its columns of Kilkenny green and black marble.
At the top, I said to Harney, “I want to walk down and back up again.”
He, as ever, understood me, and we did so, lingering on both journeys, accompanied by the Marchettis. They seemed so anxious, until I said to them, as we stood on the landing that gives way to the upstairs of the house and the Gallery, “Perfetto. Moltissimo perfetto.”
The father and sons burst into tears and could look nowhere; Harney and I moved on, and for the next few hours, whenever we neared the staircase, we saw the Marchettis walking up and down, up and down the stairs, and talking to each other in great excitement.
Our stuccodores were deep in their task; the Lemms had uncovered and restored three-quarters of the Vien mural; I had said that I wished to look no more until all was ready to be revealed. And we spent the rest of that day marveling at the work of Mr. Mulberry. He attended every door and every floor, he had recovered, repaired, or replaced close to sixty doors, and we had long ago lost count of the planks in the floors. I believe that Harney, for his own amusement, extracted the figure from his records of the purchases, but I have forgotten what it was. Mr. Mulberry had also attended to the maple floor of the Ballroom, the paneling all over the house, the stage in the theater, and the wonderful racks for drying clothes in the eight laundry rooms. Now he walked with us as we asked him about everything.
He might have been teaching us. When answering a question as to how he had mended the dovetailing on a broken drawer in a bedroom armoire, he gave us a brief talk on the skills needed. Like Mr. Higgins with stone, he saw his materials, wood, in terms of other matter—in his case, he likened it to skin.
As he sent his hand along a table in the Gun Room, he said, “I wouldn't leave a wood surface rough any more than I'd shave myself poorly.”
He showed us door jambs where he had inlaid pieces of wood for balance and correction of leaning—even though nobody would ever see them. “I'll know that they're there,” he said.
And he'd repaired a table on which beams from a ceiling had fallen, cracking it clean across; we could not find the rift.
After Mr. Mulberry had ducked our shower of compliments we went to April. When we had finished our recital of what we had seen, she turned to me and said:
“So your time here is almost finished?”
Tipperary, December the 28th 1920.
My dear Kitty,
The warmest compliments of the Old Year and the best prospects of the New to you. What shall 1921 bring? By now you will have read about Lord and Lady Glendoran? The house is quite destroyed and everything in it burned to a cinder. How dreadful! I motored over there at once and saw an awful sight. Bartley stood amid the ruins in his dressing-gown, trying to find anything—any small thing, Kitty—that he could salvage.
He was quite demented; he took some minutes to remember me, and Louise said that he almost died of heart failure when the flames took over the roof. His stamp collection has been destroyed; he had it since a boy. He is heartbroken. It is a wonder that they did not die. They lost all their horses when the stables went up.
What shall we do? How many attacks have we had since summer? I have lost count, but it is more than a dozen. Perhaps you and Dan should get rid of the guns, as it seems to me that some of these attacks begin as a search for guns, and end in conflagration.
Here I believe that I am safe, and you know why. Kitty, my new love—he is a remarkable man. I may soon ask you to render me a great and lifelong service, but I shan't detail it in a letter. Indeed, it may come very soon, because I love such an impatient man! More informations anon.
The work proceeds apace, with many things almost completed. How beautiful we have made it.
Thank you for the geese. And the ham. And the meat pies! Were I to eat them all, I should be as fat as a fool—and that is something else on which I seek your urgent advice. Do you expect to be at home next Sunday?
As the works at Tipperary drew near completion, the labor army began to shrink. It had been immensely high. The Limerick Leader described the castle as “Tipperary's greatest employer after the Crown.”
Charles, in one comment, says that on a particular day in 1918, the day that he calls “the Apex,” Harney and he counted 371 people working on the castle restoration. He did not include April or Helen the housekeeper or Harney or himself.
No matter how much further money went in those days, that was an enormous payroll. Which raises a question: How wealthy was April?
The answer is: very! She paid for everything from her bank account. The estate generated no income until the first milk proceeds and cattle sales began, in mid-1918. How rich? According to Irish probate records, Stephen Somerville bequeathed to April, after deductions and lawyers' fees, a final sum of six and a half million pounds. A staggering fortune in today's terms, it could more than pay for anything she wanted to do.
Then, in 1917, her father-in-law, old Henry Somerville, died— stricken, it was said, by the death of his son. April must have smoothed him along very carefully too—he left her all his money. When everything had been liquidated, she received eight million from that bequest. In today's money, we can assume that she was a billionaire.
We can also assume that she had never known poverty. The borough of Westminster has always been residentially prime. April grew up among the well-to-do, went to an excellent (though now defunct) school, and her status as a young lady was defined by what she did next.
The British diplomatic service operated its own inner grace-and-favor systems. One obtained certain positions according to whom one knew rather than what one had learned.
To have been placed in the household of the doctor to the Paris embassy made a statement. Here was a girl from a good background who needed
a way forward in life. Her father held an excellent—white-collar—position in a brewing firm. She was close enough to the cloth to warrant upper-class care.
Which raises the matter of April's other ancestry—April the First. After all, that was how the story emerged in the first place. Charles knew of the Burke connection to Tipperary Castle only because Oscar Wilde had met the actress. By now, neon arrows flashed at me—pointing to this shady lady.
It seemed sensible to begin with her son, April's father. I knew where he had—allegedly—been born: in Tipperary Castle, if Oscar's story was true. And I knew where he had been raised—in the English county of Somerset.
Like Ireland, England documents itself well. Unlike Ireland, valuable gossip is more difficult to come by. Not only that, Irish chatter knows no time limits. Here in Clonmel, I can have a conversation about an event of seventy years ago as though it had taken place last week. The English moved house too often for intimate continuity.
Therefore I had problems. I was searching for people known to have lived in Somerset one hundred years ago—and some of them were elderly then. I took the ferry from Rosslare to Fishguard, drove across Wales and over the river Severn into North Somerset. Gambon was the name I was looking for—anywhere near Yeovil.
Old tennis saying: “The ball bounces to the winning player.” I struck gold (of a kind) on the second day—not on the name Gambon, but on a scrap of history from the house in which Terence Burke had been raised.
It hasn't changed since Charles first saw it, in June 1904—a stone house with its back to the world. The lane feels just as he described it: the steep hill and the view out to Glastonbury Tor and the Somerset Levels, where Coleridge walked. They've added some huge electrical pylons, which hiss and fizz sixty feet above the ground.
England being a land of gifted amateurs, the area has attracted excellent local histories. Trawling one tasty little volume (Tragedies in the West Country—a Chronology), I found a note that made me almost shout.
In 1878, an unnamed woman described as “an actress” jumped “spectacularly” off the beautiful Clifton Bridge, which spans the Avon Gorge in Bristol. Her address was given as the Brook House, near Shepton Mallet, in Somerset.
The public records and the newspapers gave me a little more. Her age was given as forty-seven, meaning that she was born in 1831. The newspapers carried a squib describing how two people had tried to stop her, but she, “excitable and inconsolable,” told them that she was being “blackmailed.” Coroner's records gave her name as “Avril Burke.”
To knit it together (somewhat): “April” became “Avril,” not an impossible error; Queen Boudicca has long been “Boadicea” due to a scribe's poor handwriting. If she was born in 1831, that would make her twenty-five when her son was born in 1856. (He was, remember, only four years older than Charles O'Brien.) The husband she abandoned, Terence Hector, died on the stage at Tipperary in 1858, leaving an infant son.
Oscar Wilde met the actress when she was older. He was in his twenties. Since he was born in 1854, he must have met her in her forties, in the year or so immediately preceding her death. It all fits.
Who was blackmailing her so fiercely that she jumped to her death? And what was the blackmail's leverage? That, like Sarah Bernhardt, she had been a tart? That she had—appalling disgrace to the Victorians— abandoned her child? And had now come back to “the stage”—i.e., still plying a whore's trade, as many still believed of actresses? An unscrupulous enemy could get mileage out of that.
My trail ran cold in Somerset. I didn't get to the rest of April the First's story for some time. But I did note that April Burke-Somerville's grandmother and mother had committed suicide. And in identical fashion, by jumping off bridges. That indeed must make for some rocky terrain in a person's psychological landscape.
Thursday, the 25th of March 1921.
My dearest Kitty,
Now I truly need your help. The “frights” of which we spoke in January have come home to roost! Be not alarmed—I am overjoyed. For double reasons—not only will I have the delight of a son or a daughter, but I shall be married to a man who loves me, and whom I love with all my heart. Nobody else knows but you and Dr. Costigan, who is quite, quite certain.
I believe that the matter must be handled very discreetly—it is so easy to get a bad name around here. But we have constraints owing to my dear man's current way of life and, shall we say, the unusual demands made upon him. Nevertheless, we shall make all haste.
My History, being also a personal matter, has permitted me much latitude. From time to time, a memory assails me so beautifully and so recurrently that I feel obliged to record it—as with my sojourns at Athassel Abbey (whose rushing waters I sometimes hear at night from here, if I walk out on the highest part of the gardens). In late March 1920, there was a morning in Tipperary that I shall never forget.
I rose before dawn. With spring promising to come early, I walked the immediate precincts of the walls, as I ever did, and watched for any unusual matters. That morning, I found one new cause for rejoicing: a great swan had come to the lake sometime since the previous night's dusk. We had wanted swans for some years now, and often talked about it; we made many inquiries as to where and how we might acquire swans; we had even corresponded with the Keeper of the King's Swans, who had not been helpful.
Now Tipperary Castle had its own swan, and I walked to the lake's edge, taking care to make no noise. The swan moved among the sedges some yards from me, as though seeking a resting-place; its serene gliding would calm the wildest heart. But I became anxious; swans require partners, I'd been told; if this swan did not find a partner, would he fly away? I have no explanation for the fact that I thought it male.
Up at the castle, I could scarcely wait to give the good news—but I breakfasted alone; no sign of Harney, which suggested some “activity” in the night; and for some weeks April had not been down to share breakfast. Indeed, I had scarcely seen her.
All day, I found myself walking over to the highest point of the terraces from where I could see the lake. I could not always glimpse the swan, but did see it often enough to ascertain its continuing presence. Of another swan I saw no sign—until near five o'clock.
The sun was beginning to set in a magnificent blaze, and long streaks of red cloud were setting the western skies on fire. I was in the gardens between the two pavilions, measuring with two of the gardeners how much ground we should need to break open for the planting of three hundred new rose-bushes. Suddenly a shadow darkened the air above our heads and there was a noise of wings. A huge swan, larger than the one I had seen, flew low over us in the direction of the lake.
I jumped back, in evident excitement.
“We're all right now,” said Jerry Kirby, the older of the two gardeners. “We've swans.”
All three of us made for a point from which we could see the lake below us. Sure enough, there on the waters, side by side, not touching but gliding close to each other, went two swans, white and calm as hope. My heart was filled with optimism.
Charles and I—we went through a fierce time. Think of what was going on. I was out every night with a gun in my hand, not knowing if I'd ever come back alive. By day I was helping to rebuild the beauty of the very empire we were hammering at. The man I depended on for my safety as a soldier, Dermot Noonan, was in the middle of a desperately passionate love affair.
And who was it with? With the woman who was the heart's desire of my dearest friend, Charles O'Brien.
And she was the owner of the estate that I had been working on for the past six or seven years and to which I was fiercely committed.
The war was raging across the country like a wildfire. Reprisals happened everywhere, and we hit back with counter-reprisals. What was typical was this: we'd hit a barracks or a troop convoy. In revenge, the Black and Tans or the regular army would attack the village or town, drag men and women out, and shoot them and burn their houses. And then we'd burn down a mansion where we thought the Br
itish were planning their campaign against us. Or where we thought—or often knew—the owners entertained the officers.
Now, through all of this, we hid men every night in the cellars at the castle. Charles O'Brien might not have carried a gun, or ever fired a shot in anger at a soldier—but he played his part. And he was one unhappy man. But he never pretended, he never changed his behavior from that civilized way he had. He had a good word for everybody. That work would have collapsed without him. And then, of course, in the spring of 1921—what beautiful weather we had that year—it was the worst time for Charles.
He knew—we all knew—without being told. I guessed very early, because I grew up in a houseful of women and by now my sisters were married and having their own babies. You can tell with a woman. The complexion changes. And she was old for having children. That's what my mother said—if she never had a child before, thirty-nine years old is no age to start.
Why do I dislike the word “melodrama”? Probably because there's nothing “mellow” about it—that's the joke I used to tell in class. I think I dislike it because whether you want to or not, it pulls you in. Now it was dragging me in.
I found myself telephoning a former pupil who works in the police forensics laboratories in Dublin. Could he test something from a century and longer ago for DNA? Of course he could. Feeling queasily melodramatic and more than a little foolish, I sent off some locks from the tresses of hair in the oak chest. And some hair from my own head. Why was I doing this? I had no idea. Instinct, again.
Tipperary: A Novel of Ireland Page 41
