by Sara Seale
“Castle Clooney,” she answered, and he straightened up abruptly.
“Castle Clooney?” he repeated on a rather odd inflection. “Were you expected?”
“Naturally. I was invited for a visit. It was a—a sort of proposal, really.”
“Was it, indeed?” There was a very odd note in his voice now, the same note which had been there when he had accused her of trying to break into his grounds, and she made a last, determined effort to assert her rights.
“Yes, it was,” she said, eyeing him coldly. “And if you live in these parts you must surely have heard of Castle Clooney and its owner, Mr. Lonnegan? He’s quite a figure hereabouts, I understand.” That, she thought, should put him in his place.
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard of them both,” he said at last, and strangely enough, there was now a queer little thread of amusement in his voice. “But shouldn’t I, if what you say is true, have heard some mention of your name? This is a sparsely populated stretch of country and we all know each other’s business.”
“My name is Harriet Jones, and I came into a little money which made this visit possible, so perhaps your grapevine is a bit behind with the news, since it all happened rather suddenly,” Harriet said, trying to sound haughty and gracious at the same time.
“I see. Well, Miss—er—Jones, it would seem to be advisable to get you dried out and more presentable before your prospective fiancé comes to claim you,” he said, and picked her up in one easy swoop and began carrying her towards the lighted windows of his house.
She had only a vague impression of the size of the house, wreathed as it was in mist, but the hall they entered seemed vast, its soaring roof lost in shadows, firelight and lamplight mingling to catch flickering reflections in polished wood and brass. It was not a hall at all, she thought, as she was deposited on some large couch or settle, but a cavernous chamber, for living-room seemed too homely a definition for such space and grandeur. She lay there while her unwilling host called peremptorily for whiskey to some unseen person in what was presumably the kitchen quarters, and was surprised when an old man appeared from the shadows, looking so exactly like the traditional venerable ancient retainer of a castle that she had to pinch herself to be sure she was awake.
The illusion was lost, however, as the old man observed sourly:
“You’ll not be askin’ for the craythur now, Mr. Duff, if you know what’s good for you, and Agnes’ temper spoiled entoirely with the vittles kept waiting this past hour. I’ll tell her she can rest aisy and dish up.”
“Ah, get away with your sulks, Jimsy, and bring the decanter. We have a refugee from the fog who needs attention before I can sit down to my meal,” his master replied with none of the sharpness Harriet would have expected at such familiarity, and with the first faint hint of an Irish inflection, and when the old servant shuffled across the hail to peer at her, she could see her first impressions were misleading. Jimsy, seen at close quarters, was neither venerable or clad in the tradition of old retainers. His grizzled hair, which had once been red, was sparse and unkempt, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and a green baize apron only seemed to accentuate the unorthodox clothing of his nether limbs.
“W-ell, now...” he remarked, observing her with the porter’s same suspicious eye, “and is this what the dogs has brought in? There’s no tellin’ what thim two will be finding next on the Plain of Clooney. Would she be one of thim gurrls from Casey’s new joint by the lough?”
“Not at all. She claims to be Miss Harriet Jones over from England on a visit to Castle Clooney with expectations of marriage, it seems.”
“Does she, so? Well now, that’s very interesting.”
They seemed, thought Harriet, to be sharing a private joke at her expense, or Jimsy, like his master, placed no great credence on her explanation.
“I think you are both rather rude,” she said, trying to be politely censorious, but only succeeding in sounding as wretched and confused as she felt, and the master of the house replied quickly and gravely:
“So we are, and you in no fit state to be teased. Jimsy—the whiskey at once, and tell someone to prepare a room and see the bath water’s hot. We don’t want pneumonia setting in to add to a damaged ankle.”
He had been standing back in the shadows, but as the old man hurried away, offering no further argument, he moved into the light and Harriet looked up curiously to see what manner of man he might be. Her first impression was one of disappointment, for she thought him the ugliest man she had ever seen; her second that his face matched his voice heard only in the darkness; a harsh, uncompromising face, dark-skinned and broad-featured, with a nose which looked as if it had once been broken, and forbidding eyebrows as black as his close-cropped hair; a tall, loosely-made man whose clothes hung carelessly upon him, he could, she thought, have been any age, for the flesh covering the bones of his face appeared taut and lined, whether prematurely or not it was difficult to say in the uncertain light.
She must have been staring with a regrettable lack of manners, for his mouth tightened and he observed with a return of the old irony:
“Well, do I qualify as one of these strange apparitions you were dreaming up in the fog? I’m no oil-painting, I know, but my face doesn’t as a rule frighten children.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to stare rudely. It’s just that—well, it’s been quite a day and I—I don’t think I feel very well.”
His smile was involuntary and brief, but it changed his face in an unexpected fashion and she smiled back a little tremulously. His was the sort of ugliness which might have an odd attraction when you knew him better, she thought with surprise, but after that was content to submit to his efficient ministrations without further speculation. Whiskey was poured down her throat, her ankle bandaged, and her wet clothes stripped from her with little regard to the conventions of decency. She huddled, unprotesting, in her scanty undergarments until somebody wrapped her up in a thick masculine dressing-gown several sizes too large, and the redoubtable Jimsy set a bowl of steaming broth in front of her and bade her drink it before the chill of the hereafter settled in her bones.
“Now, Miss Jones, if you feel equal to taking yourself off to bed I can get down to my long-delayed dinner which, by this time, is probably uneatable,” his master went on.
She felt reproved again for having upset his arrangements and scalded her throat gulping down the remaining spoonfuls of broth in guilty haste. When she had finished, he watched with faintly twitching lips her efforts to negotiate the vast expanse of floor hampered by her injured ankle and the trailing, voluminous folds of his dressing-gown.
“I’d better carry you, or you’ll likely break your neck going up the stairs,” he said then, and picked her up with the same careless ease he had displayed at his gates. He set her down at the end of a. corridor, and a fit of shivering took her as she waited while he flung more turfs on the fire in the room which had been allotted to her and turned up the lamp.
“I think I’ve caught a chill,” she said in a small voice, at the same time catching sight of her reflection in a mirror. She had never had illusions about her appearance, which Matron had been wont to complain looked more like the popular conception of an orphan than the real thing, but even she felt dismayed by the waif-like face which stared back at her. It seemed to have shrunk considerably or her eyes had grown abnormally large, her hair which, if undeniably straight, had pleased her because it was fashionably blonde, clung round her neck in dark rats’ tails of dampness, and the freckles she so much deplored stood out like a rash.
“Golly!” she exclaimed in such a heartfelt tone of horror that her host turned round to look in the mirror too.
“H’m ... you hadn’t realised how you might appear to a stranger when you stared so rudely at my ugly face, had you?” he observed with a hint of rather sardonic amusement. “Not, of course, that one would expect you to be looking your best after your unfortunate experiences. How old are you?”
�
��Eighteen.”
“Eighteen ... h’m ... and promised in marriage to the master of Castle Clooney, you say?”
“Well, not exactly promised—but encouraged, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure that I do. One doesn’t come belting across the Irish Channel on the strength of wishful thinking—or did you invent this swain of yours?”
“He’s not a swain, and I didn’t invent him,” she said, shivering, and near to tears again, and his cool, appraising gaze softened a little.
“You undoubtedly have caught a chill, young woman. You’d better nip into bed,” he said, and threw back the covers on the high, half-tester bed which looked enormous to Harriet’s unaccustomed eyes.
She moved towards the bed uncertainly, expecting him to bid her goodnight and hurry away to his long-delayed meal, but he merely waited, and when she still hesitated, wondering if anyone had thought to lend her a nightgown, he picked her up again and dumped her in the bed with impatient finality.
“Keep that dressing-gown on and sweat it out, with the aid of all those hot-water bottles you’ll find at the bottom,” he said. “We seem to have omitted your bath, thanks to a lot of idle chatter, but you’ll do as well between blankets. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” she answered meekly, then remembering with surprise that she had no idea whose roof she was to sleep under, added: “As this isn’t Clooney gaol, what place is it?”
“Castle Clooney,” he replied quite gently, his hand on the door.
“Castle Clooney! Then—then who are you?” she stammered, sounding more bemused than astonished.
“My name happens to be Lonnegan,” he said more gently still, and was gone.
CHAPTER TWO
THE night had passed in such a confusion of feverish dreams and fancies that when she wakened the next morning, Harriet thought she must have imagined the whole thing. Even if by an extraordinary chance this place was indeed Castle Clooney, her remembered impressions of the gay young Rory Lonnegan were nothing like the rather forbidding stranger of yesterday, neither could he have grown so old as that in the time.
She lay in the big tester bed, soon abandoning such riddles as a wave of lassitude lulled her in to a passive acceptance of the inexplicable. Then there was a knock on the door and a young girl came into the room carrying a breakfast tray.
“Good morning, miss,” she smiled cheerfully. “Me place is in the scullery, so Agnes tells me twenty times a day, but up she sends me with trays when there’s extra work to be done an’ she took grand to wait on the quality herself. Is it true you mistook the castle for the gaol, miss?”
“Quite true,” smiled Harriet.
“Is that so? An’ what poor divil of a felly would you have been tryin’ to call on? They’re a scummy lot get sent to Clooney, so they say, but you can’t pick your relations, can you, now?” she said with lively interest.
“I haven’t got relations in Clooney gaol or any other as far as I know,” Harriet answered rather crossly, for her head was beginning to ache.
“Is that so? Then why was you after visiting the place and the dogs misleading you here?”
“I wasn’t—it was all a mistake. I was trying to get to Castle Clooney.”
“Across the Plain of Clooney in the fog? You must be mazed!”
“No, of course not. I should have waited at the station, but I got lost.”
“Then you’d be waiting there yet, since nary a wan of us knew you was coming.”
“This really is Castle Clooney, then?” Harriet ventured a little timidly, but was rewarded with a look which plainly doubted the existence of her wits.
“Now you bide there and kape warrum till himself returns, for you surely have a fever,” the girl said, remembering belatedly to draw back the curtains and let in the morning light.
“Himself?”
“Mr. Lonnegan, who else? He’s away to the town, an’ he says for you stop where you are till he satisfies himself you’ve taken no harrum. Will I wet the pigs again for you?”
“Wet the pigs?”
“Fill the wather-bags to warrum the bed.”
“Oh, I see. No, thank you. I’m warm enough,” said Harriet a little faintly, but she wished when the girl had gone that she had thought to enquire what had happened to Rory.
No one came near her for the rest of the morning and she slept fitfully to the accompaniment of rain rattling gently on the windows. She woke hours later with a strange sensation of being watched, and opened her eyes to see her host standing by the bed looking down at her. She stared up at him without speaking and had the uneasy feeling that he had been there for some time. It must, she thought with surprise, be late afternoon, for the room had become shadowy and the sky beyond the rain-spattered windows was barely light.
“Well, let’s hope you’ve slept off any ill effects apart from a gammy foot. Open your mouth,” he said briskly, and sitting down on the side of the bed thrust a thermometer between her surprised lips.
She observed him mutely as he waited, his fingers on her pulse, trying to trace a likeness to the Lonnegan she remembered and finding none. He wore a thick, faded sweater that needed darning, but no coat, and had wound a scarf carelessly round his neck as if it had been too much trouble to put on a tie. He would, thought Harriet, still much confused as to his status at Clooney, most certainly not have measured up to Matron’s rigid conception of a correct country gentleman.
“Normal or near as makes no matter,” he observed “so I think we’ll do no harm in settling a few questions and answers.”
The remark had rather an ominous ring, but after that long, refreshing sleep she felt clear-headed again, and what, ever uncomfortable queries he might have lined up with which to embarrass her, she had a few of her own which required explanation.
“Now, first of all, how did you acquire this curious notion that I had invited you to Clooney, let alone held out hopes of marriage?” he asked, and she sat up abruptly in the bed, colour flushing her cheeks.
“You?” she gasped. “But of course it wasn’t you!”
“Well, that’s one weight off my conscience. I was in two minds as to your intentions, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that you could have been a cheap little adventuress hoping to get away with an attempt at blackmail, and I’m still not sure. There would have been indiscreet letters, one presumes, conjured from somewhere?”
Harriet had never been noted in the orphanage for losing her temper, but she lost it now. Both fear and horrified astonishment at such an accusation lent her fleeting courage and she bounced in the bed like an outraged child.
“I think you must be crazy—whoever you are!” she exclaimed. “I’m neither cheap nor an adventuress, and I do have letters, so there!”
“That was certainly more of a schoolgirl’s reaction than a brazen hussy’s,” he said, the corners of his mouth quivering with hastily suppressed amusement. “But you say you have letters, so presumably I was not so far out. Might I see them?”
“Certainly not, they aren’t yours—besides, my suitcase must still be on Slyne platform.”
“Oh, no, it’s here. I fetched it myself this morning.”
“Checking up, were you? Then perhaps you’ll allow I was speaking the truth!”
“Oh, certainly, as far as it went. Old Murphy had even informed the Garda when the Dublin train came and went and no one claimed a suitcase.
“Whatever impressions you may have formed, Mr. Lonnegan, you’ll admit, I hope, that my first introduction to your country is hardly a happy one,” she said, and saw the corners of his mouth twitch again.
“Very properly spoken,” he replied with gravity, “but hardly my fault if your journey has proved unnecessary, would you say?”
Her little spurt of anger died too soon, and orphanage training did not equip one for encounters such as this, she thought, and she felt suddenly homesick for the ordered, sheltered drabness of the only life she had known. Her
face crumpled with alarming suddenness into the shamed defencelessness of a defeated child and tears trickled ignominously under lashes which were, he noticed with unreasoning compunction, surprisingly dark and long, making two rather touchingly innocent crescents on her cheeks.
“You have,” he observed, whipping up impatience to cloak an unaccustomed flash of tenderness, “a rather exasperating tendency to cry. What did you mean when you said ‘whoever you are’ in such tones of repudiation? Don’t you know?”
“I know,” she replied, keeping her eyes shut, trying to squeeze away the betraying tears, “that you say you are Mr. Lonnegan and you seem to live here, but—but my Mr. Lonnegan is quite d-different, and I don’t understand it at all.”
There was a taut little silence broken only by the incessant sound of rain, then he asked, with an entirely different inflection in his clipped accents:
“Am I, by any chance, being confused with my young cousin Rory?”
Her eyes flew open.
“Rory’s your cousin!” she exclaimed. “But I thought—well, doesn’t he own this place?”
“No, I’m afraid I do. I’m Duff Lonnegan, of whom you evidently haven’t heard. Rory, I’ve always understood, likes to shoot a line about his connection with the castle when far enough away to make it safe. He makes his home here when it suits him, but he went off suddenly a couple of days ago with a very sudden offer of a job. Did he tell you he was an actor? I think,” he said, with a touch of grimness which she mistook for fresh displeasure, “that you had better tell me the whole story from the beginning.”
It was not easy, she found, to sound convincing with this dark stranger sitting on her bed in such unfamiliar intimacy, for even as her explanations were offered in growing hesitancy, it did not need his rather sceptical air of attention to convince her of the foolishness of her behaviour.
