‘Why would I care either way?’ replied Jane, with indifference. ‘She’s nothing to me.’ It took a lot more than an acerbic Jane to put Ruby off her track.
‘Imagine, she could be only yards away from me and not even know I was there. I couldn’t sleep last night thinking of the things I had to remember to tell her next time I see her, not knowing at the time that it would be today.’
Ruby had decided to entirely ignore Jane’s rudeness but she did wish that it was Betsy sitting next to her in the van. Despite her best efforts, Jane’s moods threatened to spoil the happiness of her day.
As the van turned onto the Belmullet Road, Ruby read the list Amy had given her. Amongst other things she wanted six ounces of two-ply baby pink wool, which had apparently arrived from England last week. Amy planned to knit a matinee coat for her niece in Chicago.
‘There will have been a run on it,’ said Jane gloomily as she led the way to the shop. ‘They will all be after it when the news gets out that it’s in. They haven’t had pink in for months. I thought that maybe Amy would have slipped away and bought it for herself but she’s in a right tizz because Lord FitzDeane is coming home sometime soon and she wants to make his favourite things to eat.’
‘Will I get to meet him?’ Ruby asked.
‘Well sure, why would ye not, stupid. He’s not invisible. We all work for him, don’t we?’
Ruby was still determined not to take offence.
‘Amy does love her cooking. She will be glad of the chance to make some nice things and with a bit of luck, maybe we will see some of the leftovers,’ Ruby said cheerfully.
‘It isn’t just Amy in a tizz,’ Jane continued. ‘The gardeners haven’t stopped cutting and pruning and Mrs McKinnon hasn’t stopped ordering us all about. Don’t ye have ears, Ruby? Have you not noticed how busy everyone is? If there wasn’t a list of things Amy and Mrs McKinnon needed, I think they might have cancelled our day out. The only person who isn’t bothered about Lord Charles coming home is Lady Isobel.’
As Jane spent barely a moment in Lady Isobel’s company, Ruby wondered how she had noticed this, but her loyalty towards Lady Isobel forbade her to reply. She sometimes confided in Betsy, who she knew she could trust, but never in Jane.
When at last Ruby and Lottie met, their squeals of joy could be heard outside the hotel and right down the main street in Belmullet.
‘What kind of commotion is that?’ said the barman Tony, , Amy’s cousin as he came up into the bar from the cellar. Tony knew Ballyford well, which was news to Lottie.
‘My giddy aunt, Lottie, would you look at the cut of you, you look grand,’ said Ruby admiringly.
‘Not at all, ’tis you who looks grand. Ye look just like Rita Hayworth, doesn’t she, Tony? If I hadn’t known it was you coming through that door, Ruby, I’d have thought she had checked into the hotel herself.’
‘Go on Lottie, take an hour in the town,’ said Tony, as he slammed a wooden crate onto the bar. ‘You and Rita Hayworth have some catching up to do and then ye can come back here and tell me all the news of our Amy, Ruby.’
Lottie had her apron off and her coat on almost before the words had left his mouth.
Later, in the café above the shop where Ruby had bought the wool, they looked out into the street and saw Jane and Jack, searching for Ruby.
‘Shall I tap on the window for her?’ asked Lottie.
‘God, no, she has a mouth on her so sour she would turn the milk. Let’s have a few minutes and I’ll say I never saw them. Lottie, we have to escape soon, you still want to, don’t you?’
Lottie looked sheepish. ‘Well, I do quite like it here, you know. Tony, he’s a nice man to work for and I’m making friends in Belmullet. At night, all the young ones, they hang about on the street and outside the pubs and the hotel and the craic is great. We are out there until it’s dark. And in the pub there’s a ceilidh at the weekend, with everyone dancing and the fiddlers playing and it’s just fantastic, so it is.’ Lottie’s face lit up, as Ruby’s fell.
‘Well, there will be that in Doohoma as well, but you could be a teacher, Lottie, you are so clever. You surely don’t want to stay here, do you?’
Lottie thought Ruby looked as if she was about to cry, so she said, ‘God, no, of course not, but let’s just wait a little while. Give me a few weeks, maybe a few months. I’m only getting five shillings a week, with my board and keep. How much are you getting?’
Ruby was ashamed to say she hadn’t asked and didn’t know. Lottie knew Ruby well enough to have guessed this was the case. ‘Well, get the cut of you with your big running away ideas and you don’t even know how much money you have!’
‘But we will be away from here before Christmas comes, won’t we?’
‘Of course we will,’ said Lottie, hugging Ruby, knowing deep down that she didn’t have Ruby’s burning desire to be free. Lottie was safe and she was having fun. Her existence was a million times better than it had ever been at the convent. Life, for the first time, was being good to Lottie and she was scared to move, to alter the direction of the wind that was blowing such fortune in her direction.
When it came time to say goodbye, Jack almost had to peel Ruby and Lottie apart. ‘Come on, little lady,’ he said. ‘You can come back soon, can’t she, Tony?’
‘Aye, she can that. We need another, if she wants to leave Ballyford and come and work for us. I doubt she could match Lottie though, she has been a great bonus to the hotel. Chats away to all the guests she does as bold as you like and they all love her.’
‘Eh, enough of that, this lady belongs at Ballyford, don’t you, miss?’ said Jack.
As Ruby climbed into the van with Jane, Jack’s words spun around in her brain. This lady belongs at Ballyford. It was true, she did feel as though she belonged there and with each day the feeling got stronger. She needed to escape sooner rather than later if the pull of Ballyford was to be resisted.
*
The servants were getting ready to go about their work when Mr McKinnon made his announcement. Ruby was in the process of untying a knot in the back of Betsy’s hair and the kitchen was filled with the noise of clattering oat bowls being loaded into the sink for washing.
‘Tomorrow, Lord Charles finally arrives at Ballyford.’
‘Thank the Holy Father, at last,’ said Amy.
‘It’s because of your constant chatter and complaints that he’s returning so soon, Amy,’ said Mr McKinnon, with a grin. ‘That and because you’re his favourite.’
Everyone giggled, but none more than Amy who turned crimson.
Mr McKinnon spoke over the laughter. ‘Apparently, he dreams of your chicken and leek pie with the savoury cream sauce when he’s in Liverpool and he only gets to eat it when he is at Ballyford. He is yet to meet anyone in Liverpool who even understands what he is talking about and the woman who cooks for him, well, if she wasn’t enough to drive a man to drink, I’m sure I don’t know what would be.’
‘Well, ’tis nice to be appreciated an’ all but I need to get to work,’ said Amy, with a flourish. ‘Lady Isobel eats less food than I throw out for the birds; I need to stock up. Get those bowls washed, Jane. Everyone else, out of here. I have work to do. And someone tell Jimmy I need more onions and to bring me two big birds.’
She threw the skinned rabbit back onto the platter and slid it under the cover. The evening stew abandoned, it was now to be chicken and leek pie.
Ruby had not joined in with the laughter and hung back from the other staff, who were gathered around Mr McKinnon in order to hear better. Her plan to escape was all worked out in her mind. Jack had told them that he was waiting for six bicycles to be shipped from Liverpool into Dublin and that he was away to collect them in the van. If Ruby could get hold of one of those bicycles, then she would have her own means of transport and could be gone.
But now she felt reluctant, and she didn’t know why. Though she felt so very sorry for Lady Isobel, now that Lord FitzDeane was coming back she supposed Lady
Isobel would not need her as much. This was her opportunity to escape. So why did she feel filled with dread? As though things were not going to work out the way she had planned?
8
Liverpool
‘Shoeshine, sir?’
Charles FitzDeane looked down at the boy standing on the corner of Exchange Flags. He knew the lad. He stood in the same place every day and often cleaned his shoes. It gave him some amusement that the boy he tipped by day failed to recognize him at night.
Charles had walked through bomb rubble on his way to get a cab to drive him into Liverpool from Sefton Park. His shoes were dirty and in need of a polish, but where he was heading clean shoes would be out of place. He walked through bombed-out wasteland every day in Liverpool. Nothing had altered, since VE Day. Liverpool had been torn and ravaged and the energy of the city’s residents had been focused on existing. On healing. On the making good of who and what was left. The rubble had remained, waiting for someone to notice. A miserable and unintended memorial, fashioned from towers of fire-blackened bricks, to the people who had lost their lives.
Tonight, Charles definitely did not want his shoes to be shone and his eyes avoided the boy’s expectant gaze. If he had been dressed in the clothes he had worn earlier that day, on his way to his solicitor’s office, the boy would have known him straight away and realized that he had already brushed his shoes once that morning.
Charles flicked a shilling his way as he passed and the boy leapt up to catch it.
‘Thanks mister,’ he shouted, with a look of amazement on his face. ‘Ta for the bob. Don’t you want yer shoes cleaned then?’
Charles held up his hand in recognition of the thanks and smiled at the boy’s enthusiasm as he walked away and disappeared into the fog.
Charles had fallen for Liverpool the moment he set foot on the dockside. The people and the vibrancy of the city, war-damaged but pushing slowly towards recovery, captivated his imagination. He could smell prosperity on the Mersey air, a means to increase the fortune he had been left for the benefit of his yet-to-be-born sons. He had even loved the humorous cheekiness of people like the shoeshine boys, always in the same place on Exchange Flags.
Tonight, the fog was everywhere. It rolled down the Mersey River like a bolt of unfurling grey chiffon and tumbled over the edge of the riverbank. It hung around on the decks of boats and crawled across the docks and up the streets into the city. It cowered in doorways and squatted on street lamps, dulling the yellow sulphur light to an eerie blur. It filled the air and the lungs of babies and children and it stalked the easy prey of the old into their badly heated homes.
‘It’s a right pea-souper tonight, sir,’ the boy shouted, even though Charles was lost to the fog.
Earlier that evening, Mrs Bat had almost delayed Charles by retiring much later than usual.
‘I will bring you your tea tray at six, then,’ she said, in her usual surly manner, as she deposited his dinner on the table with a thud so hard that the dinner plate leapt up from the tray and rattled as it landed, sending his watery gravy slopping over the edge.
‘And I will put your breakfast with it, although what any God-fearing person can eat before mass, I have no idea.’ She fussed and fiddled about the room, as though sensing his impatience and deliberately delaying her departure.
As soon as she had left, he bolted down his supper and made his way to his secret room on the top floor, the room to which only he and no one else held a key. There he changed his clothes for those he was now wearing. He sat on a wooden chest and waited until the housekeeper closed the scullery door and descended the rear steps. Once he had heard the latch fall on the wooden gate, he followed her out into the unlit back entry.
If Charles had simply needed company tonight, he could have taken himself to London and spent a few nights at his club. He would have met friends for dinner and found any number of young ladies willing to supply what he was looking for. It always amazed him how much easier it was to persuade the daughter of a duke to bend to his will than it was the daughter of a docker. The dockers’ daughters were riddled with guilt and the fear of shame. They went to church, believed the priest and trembled at the thought of confession.
‘I can’t,’ the last one had whispered. ‘Me mam says that if I darken our doorstep, me da will kill me.’ Charles knew she was referring to becoming pregnant.
Charles had considered taking a mistress and keeping her in London, but he realized that wasn’t for him. Charles adored the dockers’ daughters, these Liverpool girls most of all. He thought that they were more like Americans than any others he had ever met. Not so strange, given that Liverpool faced out across the Atlantic towards America, turning its back on England. He loved their irreverence, their soft skin and a willing lust for life to match his own, but mostly he loved the fact that they allowed him to release his pain.
He knew of no other way to cure the hurt, except by burying himself in the scent of an unknown woman. It worked. For a short time afterwards, he could concentrate, think and be free from the pain that haunted him and which without fail or warning, always returned. Not one of his Liverpool conquests knew his true identity and that was how it would remain. He genuinely loved the girls he met, for the time he was with them. He envied their simple, uncomplicated lives and the feeling of power and pleasure it gave him to hand them money, then watch their faces light up. Their lives were so unlike his own. They couldn’t ever know who he truly was. The lord of a castle. A man who detested his own life. His life was a lie and he knew it, but at least his Liverpool girls prevented him from falling into a pit of loneliness and despair.
But his thoughts tonight were full of one particular Liverpool lady, Stella. That he had remembered her name after their first night was a feat in itself. Usually he forgot a girl’s name before her French knickers returned to full mast. Stella made him laugh. To be fair, all Liverpool girls made him laugh. Brought about by a lack of a social filter, or an awareness that there are things one just shouldn’t say or do.
Stella had set her eye on Charles from the moment he walked into the bar. He knew instantly that bedding her would be dangerous. There was something about her that set alarm bells ringing and told him to be careful, but at the same time he wanted to know her more.
She was a virgin, and the discovery had come as a surprise to him. He remembered every second of the first time he had taken her. At the thought of her sweetness, of her desperate eagerness to please and accommodate him, his stomach clenched. He had hardly fumbled with her blouse before she reached up and undid it for him. His impression had been of one who was skilled, until he felt her violently tremble in his arms.
‘Is there something wrong,’ he had whispered thickly into her hair.
‘No not wrong, it’s just that it’s me first time and I want to get it right. Will it hurt?’
Charles was thrown: he wrapped his arms around her to stop the shaking, while he gathered his thoughts for a moment and wondered what to do.
She decided for him by placing her mouth over his and his hand inside the blouse she had opened. When he tried to pull away to speak, to make sure that this was what she really wanted, she put her hands around the back of his neck, pulling him to her, kissing him harder as he heard her first gentle moans.
He wished they were somewhere else. He didn’t want this girl to remember her first time in a back entry, but it was too late. She had won, he was lost and as he entered her, as gently as he could, she shuddered and contracted, drawing him in. He held his breath and steadied himself; savouring the moment, relishing the dizziness in his head and the oblivion it brought. He bent his head and kissed the curve of her breast, inhaling the scent of her, holding on. He took her nipple into his mouth. Instantly, he felt her respond once more as she rose against him. Stella was hungry for life. He could hold himself back no longer and succumbed to the pleasure of release she gave him.
It was not his usual style, but he waited with her and they shared a cigarette before h
e left.
Not one of the Liverpool girls he had met before had been as willing, as hungry or as exuberant as Stella. She amused him, pulled him into her world of optimism with her talkativeness and her funny accent. He knew where he could find her, if he wanted. He knew. And it nagged at him. As he walked through the back alleys he wondered what Stella, the Liverpool girl about town, would make of the Ballyford pigs.
‘I never knew that pig farming was such an attractive proposition to so many beautiful young women,’ a friend from university had said to Charles, with a hint of sarcasm, during the days when life was good.
Charles had laughed out loud as his friend continued. ‘No, indeed, it is a fact that every beautiful woman is fascinated by the price of wheat and bacon, adores fishing and has always wanted to visit rural Ireland. I wonder what it is that attracts them to the incredibly wealthy and landed Lord FitzDeane.’
That comment had hurt.
As Charles turned onto Tithebarn Street he thought about Rory, a man who knew all about pigs. He remembered how Rory had taken Charles under his wing at Ballyford during the long periods of loneliness when his parents were away. It was Rory who had always landed Charles in trouble with Mrs McKinnon when they were boys.
‘You spend too much time down at the cottages my boy, you need to keep away from that Rory. All the Doyles are a bad lot,’ she had often chided him when he was younger.
She was right. But he had hung around with the servants and Rory Doyle because he was a lonely boy in need of friends. His parents spent most of their time in London and he had been raised at Ballyford by Mr and Mrs McKinnon. As far as he could remember, he had never once sat on his mother’s knee and the only affection he could ever recall had come from the Ballyford servants. Sheets washed, floors scrubbed, brow kissed.
All in the line of duty, and Rory Doyle, well he was a hero in Charles’s eyes. Tall, older and with deep, dark Irish eyes, which flared with daring, it was Rory Doyle who taught Charles to ride and sat with him on the side of the river at Ballyford and told him tales of the people who lived in the cottages. But suddenly, without warning and when Charles still a boy, Rory had disappeared from Ballyford overnight and hadn’t returned until the morning of the wake for Charles’s father, years later.
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