Tyringham Park

by Rosemary McLoughlin

  “My sentiments exactly,” the inspector interrupted with satisfaction. “And who better to know that than you, her best friend? Good girl. Now tell me, what do you say to the idea that the little one drowned?”

  “More rubbish. The girls was never allowed near the river. They was warned often enough. I never stopped telling them about them children drowned in the deep Dark Waterhole fifty years ago and the man who went in to save them and was drowned with them. That gave Charlotte a proper fright. Even Victoria had it drummed into her and she were old enough to understand what I were saying.”

  “As the one who knew her best, what do you think happened to her?”

  “I think she wandered off and will still be found. She’s a great little walker for her age.”

  The constable took his chance to study Dixon while Christy Barry was questioning her. He had been expecting a grim matron with iron hair and a starched nurse’s hat and apron, so when this fine-looking, mysterious young woman the same age as himself came through the door he’d been nonplussed, and smitten in an instant.

  “May I ask for the sake of our official report . . .” and for my sake, he added in his thoughts, “what is your Christian name?”

  “I don’t have one that I know of. Not a real one. I were a foundling. They called me ‘Baby’” – it was really ‘Cry Baby’ but she saw no reason to disclose that – “until I were old enough to look after the new babies brought into the orphanage, and then they called me ‘Nursie’ and then ‘Nurse’.”

  The young man’s face was suffused with sympathy.

  Teresa Kelly’s brother, Séamus, even though he didn’t work on the estate, presented himself to the policemen to be questioned by order of Lady Blackshaw. According to him, Teresa asked as a special favour if she could stay in her old room for her last night for old time’s sake. He had no objection, of course. At eight o’clock in the morning the wife, checking to make sure Teresa hadn’t stolen anything, though he didn’t say that, found Teresa’s bed empty and a farewell note left on the pillow. He hadn’t laid eyes on her for the rest of the day and, as far as he knew, nor had their neighbours. He had no idea what mode of transport she was taking. Things hadn’t been good between them, as everyone well knew. The only thing he could tell them was that her bicycle was missing – his wife wasn’t too pleased about that as she’d had her eye on it, though he didn’t mention that either – and that he was upset the way things had turned out so unfriendly seeing he and she used to be so close. He didn’t know anything about her life at the Park or anything about the child that was missing.

  The constable’s gift for getting people to spill their life secrets in minutes was being wasted, and the inspector’s own method of questioning which consisted of finishing sentences and cutting long stories short – he’d been in the business longer and had become impatient – had produced no better results, simply because the servants had nothing to say. They hadn’t seen anything because they weren’t in a position to. The Park’s custom of giving everyone the same afternoon off, taken for granted by the staff as they were used to it, seemed unusual to the policemen, who had expected a rota system to be in place. At the time the child went missing, the majority of servants were in the garden with its enclosing eight-foot-high walls, while others were in the village, the shebeen or their own quarters. No wonder no one had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. The demesne, to all intents and purposes, was unstaffed.

  A timid little chambermaid, with the odd name of Peachy, third last on a list of twenty-eight, scuttled in, her eyes wide with apprehension. The inspector thought the constable would have his work cut out to get her to speak at all, but the young man’s spaniel eyes, and the patience he exercised to allow long periods of silence to elapse, finally had her saying that she had seen Teresa Kelly at the Park around the same time as the baby had disappeared.

  The inspector jerked upright. “Are you sure of that?”

  The chambermaid’s eyes widened. “She won’t get into trouble, will she?”

  “Of course not. Why would she?”

  A stubborn look came into her face. “Teresa didn’t take little Victoria,” she said. “Lady Blackshaw thinks she did – I know that because someone heard her and Dixon talking about Teresa.”

  “I didn’t think for one minute she did,” said Christy Barry. “I know her personally and I know she would never do a thing like that.”

  The maid breathed out with relief. “That’s exactly what I thought.”

  “But are you positive it was today you saw her?” Christy continued. “I thought she left the Park yesterday.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it were today.” She screwed up her face in concentration, trying to remember exactly. It hadn’t seemed important then. She was dying to join the others in the walled garden but had been delayed, as she had dropped and smashed a jar of Lady Blackshaw’s hand cream and it had taken ages to clean up the mess with all those bits of broken glass. Then, on her way to the walled garden she had seen Teresa wheeling her bicycle in a great hurry away from the servants’ door at the back of the house. Teresa had called over to her that she couldn’t stop, that she was late.

  “I thought she had left something in her room or had a message for Nurse Dixon. She’s a friend of Dixon’s. I called back ‘Good luck!’ and kept going, and that’s all I seen.”

  “Do you know what time that was?”

  “No, but it were only a little while later Miss East came to tell us the bad news and told us all to run off and start looking straight away, and we did.”

  “Have you told anyone else about seeing Teresa?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I was the only one who seen her here today. I didn’t want to get her into trouble.”

  “There’s no fear of that,” said the inspector. “Even if we suspected her of any wrongdoing, which we don’t, we wouldn’t know where to find her. Tell me, do you remember if she had any of her belongings with her?”

  “She did. One of those canvas bags with a drawstring that sailors use. You couldn’t miss it, strapped to the back of the bike.”

  “So she was on her way.” Christy thought for a minute before standing up and ushering the young woman to the door. “Many thanks. You’ve been a great help. Now off you go and don’t give it another thought, there’s a good girl.”

  That evening, the villagers, making their way home exhausted and heartsick, met Manus riding up the avenue. In the dying light they couldn’t see his face clearly and had to ask if he had found the child, and when he answered that he hadn’t even though he had followed the river all the way to the sea, there were moans of sorrow followed by whispered expressions of hope that she might not have gone anywhere near the river after all and might still be found alive.

  At the stables Manus handed Mandrake over to Archie, the eldest stable lad, who, glad of the opportunity to hide his brimming eyes, bent to examine the scratches on Mandrake’s chest and legs and look for stones in his hooves.

  Manus couldn’t bring himself to go up to the Big House, let alone cross its threshold, so, citing his wet and muddy clothes as an excuse for not reporting back personally to Lady Blackshaw, sent the second stable lad up instead to relay the message.

  5

  One of Inspector Christy Barry’s fishermen friends reckoned that with a body as small as Victoria’s, and the river as high as it was, she had in all probability been washed out to sea and her body would never be recovered. Despite believing him to be right, Christy elected to go through the usual police procedures for the sake of Lady Blackshaw.

  By the time he and his young colleague arrived back at the Park at nine the next morning to continue their questioning, the estate was even more crowded with searchers than it had been the previous day. The steward was gratified. With their help they would be able to do in two days what would take weeks if the Park residents alone were the only personnel available.

  Around mid-morning,
still waiting for a meeting with Lady Blackshaw, the constable suggested they question Charlotte. “Children are so observant,” he said. “They see things an adult would never notice.”

  “Imagine a young bachelor like you knowing that,” Christy smiled. “Why don’t we send for Nurse Dixon to escort her here?”

  The constable reddened and tried to look indifferent. “Yes, that’s a good idea.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Nurse Dixon was holding Charlotte’s hand and speaking to her in a soft, coaxing tone of voice. “Come on, Charlotte dear, answer the nice policeman. When did you last see Teresa?”

  Charlotte continued to stare at the two men with frightened eyes and didn’t attempt to open her mouth.

  “You’ve nothing to be afraid of, Miss Charlotte. We’re not bogeymen, you know. I have four children of my own, a lot older than you, of course, and this young fellow here has a crowd of brothers and sisters.”

  Charlotte wouldn’t be drawn.

  Nurse Dixon looked straight at the constable for the first time and visibly reacted to his admiring expression. It was as if she had been running at speed at the end of a rope and was snapped up short when she reached the end of it.

  “Excuse me a minute,” she said, standing up in a hurry and leading Charlotte out of the room and down to the end of the corridor where no one could hear her.

  “Just listen to me, young lady. And look at me while I’m talking to you.” She gripped the child’s chin and tilted up her head. Charlotte’s eyes swivelled, trying to look anywhere except at Nurse Dixon. “Them policemen in there aren’t the ones who punish naughty children. They’re different ones, do you understand? Good, kind ones.” Dixon squeezed Charlotte’s chin with every word she emphasised. “So will you answer their questions when you’re asked and stop making a show of yourself? Do you understand?”

  Charlotte’s eyes were smarting from the effort of avoiding Dixon’s stare.

  “Do you?”

  Charlotte nodded and Dixon released her grip.

  Returning to the room, Dixon placed herself directly opposite the young policeman, rather than at an angle as she had been earlier, with Charlotte on a chair close to her.

  “Now, Miss Charlotte, do you mind if we ask you again? Did you see Teresa Kelly yesterday? Or any strangers?”

  With pleading eyes, Charlotte looked up at the nanny and then at the two men.

  “Now, Charlotte, dear,” said Nurse Dixon, putting an arm around her and tucking her hair behind her ear and stroking it, “I’m with you, so you don’t have to be afraid of anything. Just tell these nice gentlemen what you seen yesterday and the day before.”

  Charlotte slumped, stared straight ahead and didn’t speak, even when the silence lengthened and the ticking of the clock on the wall became intrusive.

  Nurse Dixon let her hand slip from Charlotte’s shoulders, drew the child’s left arm behind her back, held it in a vice-like grip and dug in her nails. Charlotte’s face registered distress but she didn’t cry out.

  A servant entered without knocking to tell the policemen Her Ladyship would receive them now, this minute.

  Dixon dropped Charlotte’s arm and the child jumped up and ran out of the room. Nurse Dixon made eye contact with Declan Doyle (‘Look what I have to put up with’), smiled angelically, and left slowly with a slight sway of her hips.

  Lady Blackshaw, all in the space of two minutes, exploded with temper at the policemen for not telling her earlier what Peachy the chambermaid had said. She ordered them to circulate Teresa’s description to all police and army barracks in the country, and personally contacted her nearest neighbours to drive to Queenstown in their new motor car to see if the seamstress had set off from there.

  “We’ve lost over twelve hours,” she raged. “I should have called in the army in the first place.”

  “It’s not too late, ma’am,” said Declan with a feigned mildness in his tone. He had taken a dislike to her and resented being treated as her private investigating agent. Her accent grated on his ear and he found her reaction to the loss of her daughter, whose birth date he suspected she didn’t know, cold and unnatural. If a prize colt had been spirited away, she would have been much more upset than she was now, he believed. Above all that, he couldn’t forget the initial outrage he felt when he saw the magnificent castle with its tower overlooking acres of prime fertile land stretching in all directions as far as the eye could see, and realising that it all belonged to one man, and that man a coloniser. He had read about such places in his history books, but had never seen one at first hand before now, as they were always surrounded by walls and trees and set too far back from public roads to be viewed by ordinary people.

  The inspector made placatory noises. As far as he was concerned, Lady Blackshaw’s role as a bereaved mother excused her from all ordinary rules of good behaviour. She could rant and bully as much as she liked – that was her prerogative – and he wouldn’t bat an eye.

  “Why do you think she latched on to blaming Teresa Kelly so quickly?” the constable asked the inspector later, before proceeding to answer his own question. “Because she can’t bear the thought of being ridiculed for mislaying her own child the only time she gets to take her out, that’s why. Think of the rank stupidity of leaving the little one unattended beside a flooded river with the door wide open – though of course she didn’t admit that she was responsible for that. If she didn’t have Teresa Kelly to point the finger at she’d come up with some other poor unfortunate to deflect the blame away from herself.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” said Christy.

  Nurse Dixon closed the nursery door behind her and Charlotte backed away.

  “Are you happy now? Are you? Making a complete fool of me in front of those nice men?”

  Charlotte continued to move backwards until she came up against the end of her iron bedstead and couldn’t move any further.

  “Speak. Say something.” Nurse Dixon raised her arm. “Go on. You know you’re just putting it on. You always had plenty to say to Teresa when she were here, didn’t you, so what’s stopping you now? Eh?”

  Charlotte cowered against the bed.

  “I’m giving you one last chance. If you don’t speak by the time I count to three you’re going to cop it.”

  Charlotte braced herself.

  “One! Two! Three!”

  Dixon placed her hands on Charlotte’s shoulders and shoved with such force that Charlotte’s body arched backwards over the bed and the iron rail dug into her back. When Dixon let go Charlotte slid to the floor.

  “Let that be a lesson to you,” she said. “Just because you was born with a silver spoon in your mouth don’t give you the right to treat other people like rubbish! Don’t you ever make a fool of me again in front of other people. Is that clear?”

  Breathing heavily, she removed herself to her adjoining room without looking back, slamming the door behind her. From her bedside locker she took out a yellow-haired porcelain doll dressed in sapphire-blue satin. Charlotte’s expensive, beautiful doll. She felt like tearing out its yellow hair and smashing its face against the brass bed-knob and watching its marble eyes roll along the floor – serve Charlotte right, refusing to obey her in front of the policemen, making her look incompetent. She would have destroyed the doll, no question about it, if it hadn’t been a gift from the girls’ maternal grandparents. There was the fear that Lady Blackshaw could enquire about it at any time, especially if she wanted to show what Victoria’s matching red-headed one looked like. So far her ladyship hadn’t mentioned it – perhaps she had forgotten that Charlotte had ever owned one – but she would need to hold on to it, just in case.

  It was over a year since it had been confiscated as a punishment for not handing it over when she had been told. Dixon had been forced to wrestle it out of the incorrigible child’s arms. It hadn’t helped her temper when she saw a shocked housemaid in the distance looking on at the distraught Charlotte screaming “Give it back! It’s mine!” and then a
t the top of her voice “It’s not fair!” After Dixon had bundled the child indoors to silence her unobserved and to give her a lesson in fairness, she pronounced that Charlotte would never see the doll again after a display like that, and if she made so much as a whimper the doll would be smashed into a hundred pieces, and if she so much as touched Victoria’s matching one, there would be hell to pay.

  Now Dixon stood on a chair and shoved the doll to the back of the top shelf of her wardrobe where the sly Charlotte wouldn’t be able to reach if she happened to sneak in to search when there was no one about.

  Charlotte was never going to get the better of her. All that fuss over a doll when the house was stuffed with antique toys, while poor orphan children never had anything to call their own, not even a clothes-peg doll with wool for hair.

  6

  At the end of the second day, the inspector told the constable to go home and leave the written report to him. The young man was too hot-headed and inexperienced to know what to put in and what to leave out, so it was less complicated to do it himself – the last thing he wanted was a big chief from Dublin being drafted in, on account of Lord Waldron’s importance and notoriety, to take over the investigation, waking up sleeping dogs at the same time.

  No mention was made in his report of his friend’s son, Manus. Best not bring that name to the attention of Dublin Castle, whose British administration was eager to discredit any suspected member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Like many of his fellow countrymen, Christy worked for the Crown – he wished it were otherwise but he had to live and feed his family. However, he prided himself on acting as honourably as was possible to his own people under the weight of colonial rule. If he were ever questioned about the omission he would say, seeing as Manus and Lady Blackshaw were together when the child disappeared, there seemed little point in replicating her evidence.