The Fox's Walk

by Annabel Davis-Goff

  “It’s the police, Your Ladyship.”

  “The police, Bridie?”

  Grandmother became a full inch taller. It was not clear to me whether she was expressing disapproval of the breach of etiquette in the time and place of this visit or if she were about to rephrase the question in the manner she would, in the future, expect Bridie to employ the next time she found a policeman on our doorstep.

  “I’ll deal with this, Verena,” Uncle William said, wiping his mouth and moustache with his napkin as he stood. Although Grandmother and Uncle William were not closely related, they were part of the same family—not only because her sister was Uncle William’s stepmother but because he was a distant cousin of her dead husband—and he occasionally addressed Grandmother by her Christian name. I’m not sure he was ever entirely comfortable doing so; at any rate, he didn’t do it often.

  “Really, William, I think I———”

  But Uncle William was already almost at the dining-room door. Grandmother expressed her disapproval of his high-handed manner with a sniff and by saying “really” once more.

  Again we waited. I thought, inconsequentially, that if we were to have the wind charger that Uncle William was advocating—repeating his arguments at each visit as though it were only Grandmother’s inability fully to grasp its benefits that prevented its immediate implementation—there could be, instead of the door knocker, an electric bell by the front door that rang in the kitchen. The idea seemed appealing, but I would have found it difficult to say in what way it would be an improvement over our present arrangement.

  I could hear male voices in the hall, but not clearly enough to have a sense of the tone of the conversation. Beside me Aunt Katie fidgeted nervously.

  “It’s not—it couldn’t be about—anything to do with those—those pheasants?” she said at last.

  “What are you talking about?” Grandmother said crossly.

  I think she knew as well as I did that Aunt Katie had a bad conscience about the pheasants she from time to time bought at the kitchen door, usually from my red-haired hero. Aunt Katie used to make an uncomfortable joke about their having been poached from the Ballydavid coverts; she was now, I think, considering the possibility that it wasn’t she who had been robbed but that she had instead been a receiver of stolen property.

  Grandmother was as well aware as I was that it had been some time since a pheasant had been bought at the kitchen door and that no local boy would offer us game after the end of the shooting season. But her irritation at having been treated as a child or an incompetent by her younger sister’s stepson rankled, and she felt no need to reassure that sister that she was unlikely to face arrest as an accessory after the fact to poaching.

  I listened and waited. There was the disquieting association of an unexpected knock at the front door with death and violence: the telegram that told us my uncle Sainthill was dead, the men with guns and petrol cans arriving at Mrs. Hitchcock’s house late at night. I did not think the policeman himself a threat, but I was afraid his arrival might mark another dramatic change in our lives in some not specified but unpleasant way. I knew his visit had nothing to do with pheasants.

  I thought also about how Grandmother’s seemingly boundless power had been checked—casually, in her own house, by one of her guests—because he was the eldest male member of the family. I had thought of Grandmother in the same way that I thought of Queen Victoria; it had not occurred to me there could be a limit to her power and moral authority. At Ballydavid she was Victoria, O’Neill her Melbourne.

  “He—your son—liked to shoot pheasants?” It was the first we had heard from Sonia for several days, her tone as much an observation as a question.

  As she spoke, she indicated Uncle Sainthill’s portrait with a movement of her head, looking from Grandmother to the painting. Her eyes did not return to Grandmother but remained thoughtfully looking at the man whose loss even I now felt. Grandmother did not reply but made a small nod.

  “He, ah, had a gun? He was a good shot.” Neither was quite a question, it was more as though she were leading Grandmother’s thought gently in some not specified direction.

  “Of course,” Grandmother said, and waited for Sonia to reveal her thoughts.

  Uncle William returned to the dining room, closing the door behind him and bringing his hands together in a gesture that told us he had dealt with the policeman in a satisfactory manner.

  “He came for the guns. I told O’Neill to take Saint’s and Hugh’s guns down to the police station—and his own shotgun; he’ll have to give the crows a temporary cease-fire—keep them safe until this all blows over.”

  My uncle then sat down and readdressed himself to his bread-and-butter pudding, apparently unaware of the chilly silence that greeted his words. Sonia nodded slightly and thoughtfully; Aunt Katie looked at her plate; Grandmother drew herself up another half inch and stared at Uncle William. I watched carefully while sitting quiet and still; it was a moment when I would have welcomed being excused from the table.

  “You told O’Neill to take the guns to the police station? Without consulting me?”

  “It’s dangerous to have guns in the house. You know that. It’s just asking for trouble. Much safer if everyone knows you don’t have any.”

  “And your Greeners? Are they at the police station?”

  Uncle William colored slightly. But he recovered himself.

  “They’ll be taken over this afternoon.”

  “So,” Sonia said thoughtfully, “all the guns will be in the same place.”

  Two nights later, four men in a stolen car, already well armed, raided the police station and met little resistance. They took away with them a good selection of sporting guns and ammunition. Grandmother, when she was told about it, did not comment, although one side of her mouth twitched in the beginning of an angry smile.

  UNCLE WILLIAM WAS NOW constantly at Ballydavid. He came every day for lunch, arriving in the late morning and staying until after tea. I wonder now if in this protective mode he had offered to stay overnight at Ballydavid or if he had suggested we should all move temporarily to Ballinamona. I think it unlikely that he did for a variety of reasons, among them an unwillingness to admit the possibility of danger as well as the greater vulnerability of a house whose occupant was away from home. He may also have felt a reluctance to show lack of confidence in the authorities, the social order, or the position of either householder in his respective community.

  In the meantime, it was necessary for everyday life to be carried on as though nothing were out of order. Some small changes in routine and a greater carefulness about how one talked and in front of whom were the only outward signs of watchfulness. The short Easter holidays were over, and on the Monday morning a week after the Rising, Clodagh and I were to resume lessons in the Glenbeg schoolroom.

  Grandmother did not usually concern herself with arrangements, and it was rare for her to issue instructions herself rather than delegating them to Aunt Katie. I was surprised when she announced a change in my daily routine while we were sitting in the drawing room, engaged in the minor pastimes that made up our daily lives. Sonia’s lack of handiwork during these stretches of time seemed to emphasize how temporary her status was within the household.

  “Tomorrow morning you’ll be riding over to Glenbeg. Patience will be ready for you at quarter to nine.”

  As with all changes at Ballydavid, particularly ones that entailed some aspect of privilege or promotion, a whole range of questions was raised, but I did not ask any of them.

  “O’Neill will accompany you,” Grandmother added.

  That answered my first question, and my feeling was one of relief. The prospect of riding a couple of miles along the road without an adult to intervene on my behalf if Patience took it into her mind to go her own way seemed better addressed in the future. I was also, most of the time, afraid—in an unspecified way—of revolutionaries. These fears were at their most extreme at night, while I was lying in t
he dark, the only person upstairs, listening to the old house settling on its timbers and to unidentified noises caused by the wind or small animals outside. The sound of a mouse in the attic overhead would leave me rigid with fear, imagining a troop of rough men armed with my uncles beautifully made guns, each carrying petrol and rags, waiting only for me to fall asleep before descending to kidnap me and burn down the house. It would have seemed almost willful to have given them the opportunity of scooping me up, and possibly Patience, too, as, conveniently alone, we trotted along the Woodstown road.

  “Times are uncertain, but there is nothing for you to be afraid of. I’d like you to be careful of what you say to O’Neill or in front of the maids.”

  This was an unnecessary instruction but, remembering my tactlessness on the subject of Roman Catholicism on the way to the graveyard at the Abbey Church, I blushed.

  “Yes, Grandmother.”

  I would have liked to have known how I was to be dressed when I came down to breakfast the following morning, but I thought I would ask Aunt Katie about that later. It was hard to imagine that I would spend the day at Glenbeg dressed much as I would for a day’s hunting, but it was equally hard to imagine hopping up on Patience in a neat skirt with woolen stockings and my new shoes that buttoned across the instep.

  “And it would be better to be seen and not heard if you eat lunch in the dining room at Glenbeg.” Grandmother’s tone was not the warning against bad or ignorant behavior that her words might have suggested. I understood her to be advising me about how to behave in the presence of people less worldly than she and, by implication, I were.

  Uncle William came in and all discussion of domestic arrangements stopped. I had come to dread his arrival since he was the one most likely to have some new and unsettling news, announcing it in a semi-humorous manner that only accentuated its horror and his anger. I had begun to think wistfully of the boredom of our recent uneventful lives. But that afternoon his amusement seemed, if not entirely good natured, genuine.

  “Strangman, at the club, told me that it took Mrs. Hitchcock three days to get back to Dublin from Fairyhouse.”

  “Three days? However did she———” Aunt Katie was shocked and confused, and slightly disapproving. I thought she might be imagining, as I was, Mrs. Hitchcock, fashionably dressed for the race meeting, making her way back to the city. And wondering how she had done it. I pictured her making her way along back roads over the Wicklow Mountains wearing her little slippers trimmed with swan’s-down.

  “It took most people four,” Uncle William said with a grin. “And of course when she got there—she’d been staying at the Shelbourne———”

  The Shelbourne Hotel was the tallest building on St. Stephen’s Green, and government troops had taken it over when the revolutionary unit, of which the Countess Markievicz was second-incommand, had occupied the nearby Royal College of Surgeons.

  “Revolutionary martyrs are a small enough group for a certain open-mindedness about the sanity of their recruits to be necessary,” Uncle William began. I tried not to listen. Countess Markievicz was in prison.

  When we first learned the Shelbourne had been occupied by the army, with shots fired and returned, we all thought of Mrs. Hitchcock. Then we thought of Sonia’s words and wondered, but we had said nothing. Looking back, I can see that this prediction, so quickly and dramatically fulfilled, bought Sonia a little more time at Ballydavid. Although the political situation itself would have made travel arrangements difficult—and where she would have gone I still cannot imagine.

  May 1916

  Chapter 10

  THE MONDAY FOLLOWING the Rising was one of the most beautiful days of the year, a “pet day,” Bridie said, as she put into a soft bag the skirt and shoes that I would change into at Glenbeg. I wore over my jodhpurs a navy blue jersey that my mother had knitted. It was short at the wrist: I had grown since I had come to live at Ballydavid. There were two badly retrieved dropped stitches on the front, and I hoped the jersey would soon be replaced by one from Aunt Katie’s more reliable needles.

  Swallows had built nests in the barn and under the eaves, and, while Patience stood uncharacteristically still beside the mounting block, they darted about the stable yard, in and out of the barn through the wide, open doors. The morning was cool and sunny, and a low mist still lingered at the foot of the pasture below the house. It seemed as though tender new leaves had come out during the night. I felt a wave of gratitude and happiness to be part of the most beautiful place on earth. Patience was on her best behavior and I rode her with a new confidence. It was as though I saw, for the first time, spring. I longed to walk through the woods which now seemed full of, not hobgoblins and revolutionaries, but young animals and pleasant surprises.

  Jock followed us down the avenue, along the road and to Glenbeg. He went home with O’Neill. Later, when I rode there by myself every school day, he would sometimes come with me and would spend the day in the stable yard or on the lawn outside the schoolroom window.

  I didn’t like Clodagh, but I liked and admired Miss Kingsley. I had tried to like Clodagh; she was the only candidate for a best friend or playmate, and I was sometimes, although not often, lonely.

  Miss Kingsley was clever, funny, and subversive; these admirable qualities were faute de mieux restricted to the schoolroom. For a governess, self-effacement was a quality at least as important as being able to read, write, add, and teach basic French and the piano. Her story was not an unusual one. She was the youngest child of a rural dean and his consumptive wife, and there had never been any question but that she would stay at home to look after her parents in their old age. She was, I suppose, lucky that her father did not long survive her mother’s death, although life as a governess to Clodagh Bryce would not have been most peoples idea of freedom. Despite the prospects her life held—employment as a kind of upper servant until she was too old to work and a lonely, poor old age, dependent perhaps on handouts from the fund for Irish Distressed Ladies—Miss Kingsley behaved as though she were merely biding her time until her real future revealed itself.

  The morning was spent in the usual pattern of lessons. We started with a reading from the New Testament, mild religious instruction being part of the basic curriculum; then arithmetic, requiring no great effort on my part since Clodagh still had not caught up with what I had learned in London; spelling; geography, coloring in each province on our maps, marking the rivers and principal cities and some of the smaller towns close to where wc lived; French (we struggled through a page of Madame Souris); and history. We were learning about the Crusades: the history book we studied described brave Christians attempting to free the Holy Land, slaughtered by Infidels and dying of foreign diseases, good intentions gone sadly wrong; Richard Coeur de Lion the epitome of the good, the noble, the brave. Our governess took a different view.

  Before lunch Miss Kingsley dictated a paragraph of Children of the New Forest. Clodagh and I then each read a page aloud, and Miss Kingsley read us the rest of the chapter. For me this was one of the most pleasurable times of my day. I loved the book; I enjoyed being read to; and Miss Kingsley was one of my heroines. For Clodagh, the chapter of Captain Marriot’s tale was of no interest at all; I glanced over at her once and saw that her thoughts were far away.

  “Mummy, Miss Kingsley says Richard Coeur de Lion was a thug,” Clodagh said at lunch, her apparently innocent statement filling one of the dreary silences of which conversation at the Bryce’s dining table largely consisted.

  “A thug? Surely not, darling.” And Mrs. Bryce glanced enquiringly at our governess.

  “Thug. From thuggee, a Hindu word,” Miss Kingsley said, her tone that of one who takes pleasure in imparting knowledge.

  There was a moment of silence, more loaded than those, punctuated by rain against the window and the sound of knives and forks on plates, that had already taken us through most of lunch.

  “I see. Well. Really.”

  And Mrs. Bryce decided to take it no further.
I wished Captain Bryce were there, but it was some time since he had been home on leave. A good deal less exciting than Mrs. Coughlan, he, like she, bore the interesting label of an adult slur. I was still trying to work out the properties of what comprised “a temporary gent,” but this was not Captain Bryce’s only charm. I was very keen to listen to anything he might care to tell me about the beliefs of the British Israelites.

  The British Israelites, although they still exist, may now need a word or two of explanation. To sum up their beliefs in a few sentences, their central tenet is that Anglo-Saxons are the true Israelites, the descendants of King David’s daughter Zedekiah, and—making the theory irresistible to me—“the isles of the sea” to which she and her followers escaped was Ireland, whence they reached England and became, in a way I no longer remember, the English royal family. A mathematical proof of this belief and the source of several prophecies could be found in the measurements of the Great Pyramid. Once exposed to this truth, I was astounded that no one except me and Captain Bryce was prepared to be interested in it. Aunt Katie and Grandmother were amused and dismissive; Uncle William, entertained enough to make it a running joke at my expense, hurt my feelings; even the maids, who had shown an initial interest, shunned it once they realized it to be a Protestant heresy.

  “What news from the pyramids?” Uncle William was sitting by the fire in the drawing room when I got home from lessons. As the days passed, he had started to look and sound discontented. The role of head of the family in a time of crisis was wearing thin. Especially since news had started to seep down from Dublin.

  The Kildare Street Club, bastion of the Ascendancy, and where Uncle William, had the rising not taken place, would have been staying, was close to the center of events; those members in residence at the time unable to leave. I had at first wondered if my uncle was happy to have escaped the rising or if he rather wished he had been in the thick of it. When I heard that page boys had been sent out with tea and trays of bread and butter for the soldiers and that a member had narrowly escaped a bullet (a government soldier had seen him at a window of the club and thought him to be pointing out the location of government soldiers on the roof to revolutionary snipers), I no longer wondered. I knew Uncle William was deeply disappointed to have missed the excitement, the male camaraderie, the illusion of a return to military life, youth, and adventure. And he would have been happier away from Grandmother’s disdainful eye. There was no statute of limitations on the subject of the stolen guns.