The Fox's Walk

by Annabel Davis-Goff

  “What,” she said, relaxing as O’Neill successfully steered us between the Ballinamona gate posts and turned onto the Waterford road, “did—ah—Countess Debussy say to you?”

  “She just asked me my name and said I had a present and then something about a cigarette case, but that was to you.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No. Well, she said Alice in Wonderland after I said my name.”

  “I see,” said Aunt Katie.

  We did not speak again until we arrived at Ballydavid. We both had plenty to think about. When we got home I was sent into the kitchen to have my boots pulled off; Bridie had already put two cauldrons of water on the range to heat for my bath. I went upstairs to a bedroom where a fire had been lighted and towels were warming on the fireguard. The bath tub had been set on the mat in front of the fire—the temperature perfected by Bridie, who, sleeves rolled above her elbows, was ready to give me a bath.

  A more independent child might have felt that, since she was now a fully fledged member of the hunting community, she was old enough to wash herself, but I did not. A bath in front of the fire with Bridie squeezing hot water from a sponge over my back was the most sensuous pleasure I had ever experienced or could imagine. I lay back and allowed my tired muscles to relax. Afterward Bridie wrapped me in the warm towel from the spark guard. I remembered nothing more until I woke up in the dark; I was in bed, lazy and content, the curtains open to the now black sky.

  When I went downstairs I found Grandmother and Aunt Katie in the drawing room. The tea tray had already been taken away. Despite my midafternoon meal, I was hungry and hoped some alternative arrangement for me had been made. Since I went to bed early, I usually had only a glass of milk and an oatmeal biscuit between tea and the time I went upstairs.

  It appeared my needs had been anticipated; in response to my glance toward the table where the tea tray no longer sat, Grandmother said:

  “We thought, Alice, that, since you had an inadequate lunch and we let you sleep through tea, tonight you would stay down for dinner. Run along and tell Maggie you’ll be eating with us.”

  On the way to the kitchen I considered why Grandmother had not rung to summon Bridie, her normal way of conveying minor instructions. Evidently, I had interrupted a conversation not intended for my ears.

  Bridie was sitting at the table peeling potatoes, and Maggie was in front of the range, lifting boiled eggs out of a saucepan with a slotted spoon, when I came into the kitchen.

  “I’m to stay down for dinner—tonight,” I said, both proud and apologetic.

  “Potato and hard-boiled eggs gratin,” Maggie said. “There’s two extra boiled for the kedgeree for lunch tomorrow.”

  Bridie took another potato from the sack.

  “Look at your boots,” she said. When I was in the kitchen, I was in the habit of pronouncing the word your as “yer”—as Bridie just had—but I could not have attempted Maggie’s boiled; the i emphasized, the o more hinted at than pronounced.

  “Did you-?” I asked, wide-eyed with gratitude. My boots stood just inside the kitchen door, the polish even deeper than it had been when I had first taken them out of their box. Wooden trees held them proudly upright.

  “O’Neill did your boots. No one but himself is let do the hunting boots. He did a grand job of it altogether.”

  He had done a grand job of it. And of making me understand that the torch had been handed to me—temporarily, at least. If my mother decided to take up hunting again, I knew how quickly I would take second place. But she wasn’t going to come to Ireland and hunt. She was going to stay in London and look after her new baby.

  I changed my dress for dinner. I put on the pink and beige wool dress I wore at Christmas and when Uncle William came to lunch on Sundays, but I was careful to make sure that the rest of my appearance was plain and neat; I wanted to seem cognizant of the honor accorded me without seeming to dress up or show off. Grandmother looked at me searchingly when I returned to the drawing room; after a moment she gave me a small nod of approval.

  The heavy velvet curtains were drawn in the dark dining room when we sat down, the table lit by a pair of candelabra, each of which held three candles. Nothing else was changed, even the meal was one we might have been served for lunch, but the candlelight reflected on the wood of the table, as richly and deeply polished as my boots, made dinner seem dramatic, exciting, sophisticated.

  “Aunt Katie tells me you and she met the Russian woman who is staying with Mrs. Hitchcock.”

  “She said she comes from Manchuria.” As soon as I closed my mouth I realized that I had contradicted Grandmother. I had no reason to assume that Manchuria was not in Russia. My geography lessons so far had been limited to an intensive study of Ireland and a general impression of the pink on the map of the world that denoted the length and breadth of the British Empire. Russia and Manchuria seemed more the names of places in myth or story books.

  “What did you make of her?”

  I felt as though I had grown up five years during the course of the day. The change in O’Neill’s demeanor, staying down for dinner, now being asked for my opinion on an adult—I put it all down to my new status as a fox-hunting woman. At the same time, however flattering it was to have my opinion solicited, it raised an awkward question: Should I or should I not mention the startling resemblance the Countess bore to Mara? I could not help feeling they must be connected.

  “It felt,” I said slowly and a little reluctantly, “like I had seen her before.”

  “As though I had seen her before,” Grandmother said. She was in the habit of correcting not only my grammar but my way of expressing myself. But she said it automatically. She and Aunt Katie caught each other’s eye in a way not perceptible to anyone who had not studied their expressions and habits as carefully as I had.

  I had considered mentioning Mara but, after another hesitation, I thought I had said enough. Until I understood better the nervous excitement that lay just beneath the surface of every word and silence since we had met the Countess, a demeanor of innocence and a simulated lack of interest seemed prudent.

  I forget now what else we talked about or when I went to bed; not surprisingly, it is all a long time ago. The moments I describe are those that stand out either for their significance or for one of the invisible, seemingly arbitrary reasons that some moments of childhood remain with us forever.

  I do, however, clearly remember waking later with a start. I had the sense that I had not been asleep for long. I imagine I woke because I had gone to sleep with an unaccustomed and undigested meal in my stomach, but at the time it seemed that I had woken up because I remembered that my boots were still standing by the kitchen door. It suddenly seemed important that I should not leave them there for O’Neill to see in the morning. I thought it would appear ungrateful after the masterly job he had done of polishing them. It also seemed a casual way to treat a present of Grandmother’s. I did not like leaving my room after dark, but I had the sense that I was not the only one still awake.

  I lit my candle and climbed out of bed. There was an ever present fear of fire at Ballydavid and at all other houses of a certain age that depended on turf or wood fires for heat and on candles and oil lamps for light. The condition of the interiors of the chimneys, perhaps never repointed since the house had been built in a previous century—not necessarily the one before—was, like an overdraft or the political situation, one of the small-hours-of-the-morning terrors of an anxious or imaginative householder. Nevertheless, a candle and matches were left in my room—many rules, warnings, and injunctions surrounding them—in case I woke in the night and needed to go along the corridor to the WC.

  I put on my dressing gown and, steeling myself to look under my bed, the most likely and terrifying place for a monster to lurk, I found my bedroom slippers. If I met anyone on my way to the kitchen, I did not want to add the misdemeanor of not being warmly enough wrapped up to that of being found out of bed in the middle of the night. As I
put on my slippers, I remembered one of the rare moments when my father had concerned himself with a detail of my upbringing. “Why isn’t that child wearing bedroom slippers?” he had asked, interrupting my mother who was scolding me for some more serious offence.

  Shielding the flame of my candle as best I could from the draft, I put the box of matches in the pocket of my dressing gown and went downstairs. The back stairs would have provided a quicker and more discreet route to the kitchen, but they creaked and the stairwell was darker and there were corners and doorways from where some faceless horror could lean out and whisk me in, never to be seen again. Fortunately for my family, I thought, bitterly and not completely logically—I was halfway down the front stairs at the time of the self-pitying thought—my mother had a new baby to distract her, so my loss would not be a serious one.

  I now could see a waning moon through the fanlight above the front door as it emerged for a moment from behind night clouds. As I reached the foot of the stairs and started to cross the hall, I heard a sound and stopped in my tracks. Soon afterward I heard the tiny explosion of a spark from the remains of a charred log in the drawing-room fireplace. That seemed to explain the former, less identifiable, sound. The embers of the evening’s fire, safely behind a spark guard, were gradually settling into themselves, adding a small warmth to the chimney that rose behind the drawing-room wall to Grandmothers bedroom above.

  The candle flame protected by my hand, a necessity that reduced the available light, I pushed through the baize-covered door and went along the service passage into the kitchen. Oonagh was asleep in front of the range; she opened one eye and, seeing it was no one likely to feed her or put her out the back door into the night, closed it again. I paused, surprised by her presence, having thought that she slept on Grandmother’s bed, making her exits and entrances onto the dark gray slates of the veranda through a window kept open even in the coldest, wettest weather.

  My boots were no longer beside the kitchen door. I had come downstairs for nothing. Bridie had put them away with the other boots in the gun room, and, even if I had brought them upstairs, as I had intended, she would have taken them down to join those belonging to my mother, who no longer hunted, and to my grandmother, who had not worn hers during the past twenty-five years, perhaps for longer. It occurred to me that after I had grown out of my beautiful new boots, I would grow into my mother’s and, in time, Grandmother’s. There would, of course, be a couple of sizes between my boots and those of my mother’s, and another between hers and Grandmother’s: My grandmother was a tall woman.

  So I should go back to bed. I retraced my steps. All went well until I had almost regained the landing. Then I trod on the hem of my night dress, stumbled, and dropped the candle, which immediately went out.

  I sat in the dark on the top step, collecting myself and groping about for the candle. One of my bedroom slippers had come off as I lost my balance and was now out of range of my searching foot. Below I heard a door open and saw a very faint glimmer of light.

  “Don’t wait for me,” I heard Grandmother say.

  I thought she was going to the kitchen to look for Oonagh. I also thought my great-aunt would wait for her; the question was where she would do so. If she came to the foot of the stairs, her candle would, in all likelihood, provide enough light for her to see at least some movement as I crept away. I had three or four seconds to gather myself up, scurry around the corner, along the corridor, and back into my bedroom.

  But first I had to find the candle and the candlestick. They had separated when I dropped them. I felt along each carpeted step and the polished wood at either side—very carefully along the edge next to the banisters, since I didn’t want to knock either candle or candlestick through the railings and have it fall noisily on the stone flags below. I found the candlestick first; it had a square base and so had not rolled any distance. As my fingers searched further afield, they touched a patch of something smooth and soft. Candle grease. I wasted a moment scraping at it with my fingernails before I heard footsteps in the hall—Grandmother and Aunt Katie both walking in my direction. Desperately, I crawled down a step or two, found my slipper, groped around a little wider, and felt the candle. My hands full, I scrambled to the top of the stairs, got to my feet, and tiptoed around the corner. Once inside the door of my room, I waited for the old ladies to reach the top of the stairs; I wanted to hear if they had noticed me. As I waited, my heart thumping, I pushed the candle back into its stick; I still held one slipper in my hand. It took a little time for Grandmother and Aunt Katie to gain the landing. To my surprise, instead of turning right toward their rooms, I could hear their footsteps coming closer. I scampered back to my bed, kicked off my slippers, put the candle on my bedside table, flung my dressing gown at the foot of the bed—using a few seconds to take the box of matches out of my pocket and return it to its place—and scrambled into bed. I was lying still, eyes closed and trying to make my body appear relaxed when the old ladies paused in my doorway.

  I could hardly breathe; if they had seen me they must have known I wasn’t asleep, if they had not, what were they doing in the doorway? I was considering speaking and was trying to think of something more substantial than “Hello, Grandmother,” when Aunt Katie said, “You see. She’s fast asleep.”

  It seemed to me at that moment that Grandmother must have caught sight of me and that Aunt Katie had said that it was only her imagination. I lay quite still and waited for them to go.

  “Why do you think she does it?” Aunt Katie’s voice again, somewhat closer. She straightened my bedroom slippers and put my dressing gown neatly over the rail at the foot of my bed.

  “It’s probably seeing that woman today. She hasn’t done it for months.”

  “She’ll grow out of it, won’t she? Doctor Jacobs———”

  Dr. Jacobs? Dr. Jacobs was the family physician, frequently coming to the house to tend Grandmother and Aunt Katie. I had never had cause to meet him.

  “Yes, but suppose it’s part of the other thing———” Grandmother’s voice trailed off. She sounded unsure of herself for the first time since I had come to live at Ballydavid. I sensed that her unsureness did not pertain to my physical health, whether or not Dr. Jacobs had been called to diagnose me in absentia; it seemed as though some moral dilemma had presented itself and that I was somehow the cause.

  After they left, I lay awake for some time. I understood that I had avoided reproof for my misdemeanor because the old ladies had thought I was sleepwalking. And I had learned that I did sleepwalk; the discovery causing both pride that I was so interesting and an unsettling awareness that I was not quite in control of my own body.

  It took me much longer to consider the possible significance of several mysterious moments during the day. I understood only that my grandmother and great-aunt had looked at me differently, with almost a touch of deference, and that this change had nothing to do with anything I had done. I had an uneasy feeling, similar to that I had felt when I discovered that my place in Grandmother’s affections owed a good deal to some similarity in my features and coloring to those of her dead son. I suspected that she and Aunt Katie now mistakenly attributed some action—I could think of no origin for it other than the hunting field—or quality to me and that I was getting, and would get, special treatment as a result of their misapprehension.

  It seemed important that this misunderstanding, whatever it was, should not miscarry. I was determined to be strictly accurate if asked how I had done in any future riding lessons. I also determined that allowing my aunts to be deceived or to deceive themselves—as in the sleepwalking incident—would never happen again. I already had the feeling of being swept, probably to my advantage, into something I didn’t understand; when it became clear—as it would—that there had been a mistake, I did not want to seem to have knowingly taken advantage of it. At last I fell asleep.

  When I woke up the sounds from downstairs suggested it was a little later than I was usually encouraged to sleep
. I dressed quickly and hurried along the corridor toward the stairs. The wax I had spilled the night before had already been removed.

  April 1916

  Chapter 7

  IRISH HISTORY IS FULL of heroic gestures and blind incompetence. Bad luck also plays its role. Communication, or lack thereof, is frequently part of these disasters. Leading up to the Easter Rising and the tragedy and debacle of Casement’s last mission, the poor—in some cases, nonexistent—communication between the various arms of the revolutionary movement was in contrast to the efficient manner in which the British Admiralty, who had broken the German code, were intercepting wireless transmissions and deciphering their contents.

  It was already the afternoon of Friday, 14 April, when a message from the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhoods headquarters in Dublin was received in New York at the offices of the Gaelic American. In code, it read: “Arms must not be landed before midnight of Sunday 23rd. This is vital.” The twenty-third was Easter Sunday, nine days away.

  By the time the message was decoded, it was too late to deliver it that day to the Germany Embassy. On the fifteenth, the Embassy sent a message by wireless to Berlin and, unknowingly, to London. Although the wretched Casement in Berlin had been kept in ignorance, the same was not true of British Intelligence. The U.S. Secret Service had come across plans for the rising in the course of a raid on a German agent in New York and the information had been passed to London.

  By the fifteenth, the Aud, the trawler carrying the arms—obsolete, in poor condition, and far too few—was already well on her way to Ireland. Since she didn’t have a wireless, there was no way to communicate the change of plan to the captain.

  That it was too late to intercept the Aud was not, in turn, communicated back to New York (and thence to Ireland), and the committee in Dublin, believing the altered plan in place, prepared to meet the trawler and unload the arms on Easter Sunday.