“We can leave now,” my voice said. “At once. As soon as we get back.”
“It’s too late for us to leave,” said Marguerite. The long silence had enabled her to recover herself, and when she spoke she sounded as crisp and practical as she always did. “But Nanny and Nurse must leave with the children as soon as they wake in the morning, and they must leave in the other carriage and with the other coachman.”
“But …”
“The fever travels on the clothes, Sarah. We may both be carrying it at this minute. We can’t risk seeing the children again until it’s certain we’re safe.” After a pause she added, “Edward’s favorite son Louis died of fever here at Cashelmara thirty years ago. We mustn’t let history repeat itself.”
The very idea was so appalling to me that I could not speak again for the rest of the journey and found my tongue only when on our arrival we found that Patrick had been busy in our absence. Fires had been lit in the nursery, library and kitchens, and Patrick himself was chopping wood as vigorously as any artisan. The kitchen fire looked so cheerful that I thought I might stop shivering if I knelt beside it, but I was chilled to the bone and my mind remained numbed by the horrible experience in Clonareen.
The very next morning the children left for Galway on the first stage of their journey back to England.
When I had finished crying I found that Patrick had taken one of the horses from the remaining carriage and ridden to Letterturk to buy food. None of us had slept that night. Patrick, Marguerite and I had huddled in the chairs before the library fire, while his valet and our maids had rested as best they could before the fire in the kitchens.
“We must keep busy, Sarah,” said Marguerite. “Tell the servants to unpack the clothes upstairs while we start taking off all the dust covers down here.”
“But, Marguerite …”
“We’re going to be here at least a week and we must have something to do.”
There was no arguing with her, and when Patrick arrived back from Letterturk he found Marguerite industriously sweeping the hall while I was folding discarded dust sheets into neat piles.
“Heavens above!” exclaimed Marguerite. “Look at all that food!”
“Isn’t it odd? There was plenty for sale in Letterturk, but George said when I saw him that the poorer people have no money at all—their last article of bedding is pawned to the gombeen man—and so they can’t even afford fourpence for a stone of potatoes.”
“But that’s monstrous!” exclaimed Marguerite. “How can famine exist in a country where there’s plenty to eat? I shall write to the Times at once and expose the situation. There must be some very muddleheaded thinking at Westminster! Any administration that permits a situation like this must be criminally negligent.”
“But the English are trying so hard to help!” protested Patrick. “Think of all the money that’s being raised at present!”
“Yes—but where is it? What happens to it? Why isn’t it saving people from starvation? It’s a scandal,” said Marguerite, having whipped herself into a fine rage by this time, “an absolute scandal.”
Her intensity was characteristic but too frantic to be normal. I sensed her repressed fear and had to struggle to fight my own panic.
“We must keep busy,” she was repeating. “Let’s try and cook. I’ve always wanted to. How do you suppose one cooks a potato?”
“You boil it until it’s soft,” said Patrick promptly. “It takes about half an hour.”
“How on earth do you know that?” I said, amazed.
“I was always in the kitchens at Woodhammer when I was little,” said Patrick happily. “I know all about cooking. It’s great fun.”
I restrained myself from saying how extraordinary he was. I was too hungry to do more than urge him to cook us a meal immediately.
Summoning the servants from their labors upstairs, we divided one of the loaves to take the edge off our hunger while more food was cooking. Patrick boiled eggs and potatoes together for the same length of time and was disappointed to discover how hard the eggs were. However, we were all so hungry that we ate everything, and when Marguerite’s maid offered to cook one of the chickens Marguerite promised her an increase in salary.
The last egg had just been eaten when MacGowan, having seen the smoke from the chimneys, arrived to find out what was happening. He looked not only stupefied to see us but shocked to the core to see Patrick in his shirt sleeves by the kitchen range.
“If your lordship had written to tell me you were coming …”
As we had suspected, he had not received Patrick’s final letter. He began to apologize for the broken windows, the damaged front door and the missing livestock, and he was still explaining how the police had left despite all his attempts to bribe them when Marguerite said fiercely, “MacGowan, why did you send reports that matters were improving in the valley? It’s obvious everyone’s on the brink of starvation.”
“No indeed, my lady, with all due respect. The starving people are mostly O’Malleys, and they were always too shiftless to do more than tend a potato patch. This is God’s judgment on their idleness and sloth, my lady.”
“Don’t talk of God’s judgment to me!” cried Marguerite in a fury. “It’s English negligence, not God’s judgment!”
“That must, of course, be for your ladyship to decide,” said MacGowan sulkily. “But the Joyces and the O’Flahertys have their crops now, and although it’s not a fine harvest it is at least an average one and they’ll pull through. All the reports of famine are much exaggerated, and if your ladyship knew the Irish as well as I know them, your ladyship would also know the Irish love to make a fuss over their troubles. To tell the truth they welcome it because it gives them a chance to complain about the English.”
“Absolute stuff!” said Marguerite. It was so unlike her to be so rude that we all gaped at her. “I’ve seen starving people dying of famine fever. How dare you tell me they welcome it!”
“It’s God’s judgment, my lady,” said MacGowan again, “and God’s will. My lord, with your permission I beg leave to withdraw.”
“Yes, very well. No, wait. MacGowan, we must have some servants—a cook, a couple of maids. Employ some women without delay, could you, and send them here as soon as possible.”
“I’ll do my best, my lord, but these peasant women know no more than how to cook a potato, and they wouldn’t know what the word ‘clean’ meant. I’ll have to send to Galway for decent Christian servants.”
After he had gone Marguerite said in a trembling voice, “Patrick, you’ve got to dismiss that man. He’s intolerable.”
“Marguerite …” He saw she was overwrought and tried to take her in his arms, but she pushed him away.
“Don’t come too near me.”
“You’re not going to get fever,” he said gently. “Plenty of people are immune to it, you know. One often hears stories of people who nurse the sick and yet never sicken themselves. You’ll be safe and everything will soon be well again.”
“Nothing will be well unless you dismiss MacGowan” was all she said as she turned away from him. “He’s going to bring us trouble, I’m sure of it. I can feel it in my bones.”
“I’ll dismiss him later when everything’s returned to normal, but I can’t dismiss him now. I need him.”
Even Marguerite had to admit this was all too true. MacGowan, heavily armed, made the regular expeditions to Letterturk to buy food. He would set out at different times to avoid the risk of ambush, and during the week that followed he managed to find an old woman who would cook for us and two young girls who would wash floors and light fires. All the local cats had been eaten, so the mice were still rampant in the house, but Patrick built traps for them and soon I could go to sleep without fear of finding a mouse in bed with me when I awoke.
Presently the scarecrows came to stand in the drive. They were not violent, but they refused to go away even after we had distributed what food we could spare. They would stand for hours a
nd hours in the cold and only disperse at nightfall.
“We must start a soup kitchen,” said Marguerite. “I believe soup is easy to make, and a little of it goes a long way.”
So the soup was made, and one of the maids, who had had the fever in the past, was put in charge of the distribution.
“What can we do next?” said Marguerite, still aflame with energy as I longed to collapse with exhaustion. “I know—the nurseries! We can prepare them for the children’s return. That’ll cheer you up, Sarah. Let’s get the dusters and take them upstairs right away.”
We had been doing all our own dusting, as the maids had been too burdened by the heavy work to spare time for the lighter cleaning, and Marguerite had attacked the work with great zest. I can see her now, her wiry hair tucked neatly under a cap, an apron tied tightly around her tiny waist, her spectacles anchored firmly to the bridge of her thin nose. She had abandoned her pince-nez a year ago after complaining that she could see nothing at all whenever it fell off and that she was too old to be blind for vanity’s sake. The spectacles did make her look older, but she was still so petite that she looked far younger than her age, which was thirty-seven. Only her hair, mellower now than the startling carroty red of her teens, hinted that she was closer to middle age than one might have guessed.
However, there was nothing middle-aged about her dusting, and so I was surprised when later in the day nursery her energy seemed to flag. I was in the middle of wiping the dust from Ned’s rocking horse when she stopped work and began to open all the windows.
“What are you doing?” I said, startled. It was a chilly day and the upstairs rooms were very cold.
“Don’t you feel hot?” said Marguerite.
“Not in the least.”
“I think I’ll go downstairs and see if that new pot of soup is ready. Then I can step outside for a breath of air. I won’t be long, Sarah.”
When she didn’t come back I went downstairs to look for her, but no one had seen her in the kitchens.
I went to her room. “Marguerite?” I said, tapping on the door. “Marguerite, are you better?” And then as I opened the door I smelled the stench of sickness and saw the pool of vomit on the floor.
We tried to get the doctor. Patrick rode to Clonareen at once, but Dr. Townsend had died of fever that same morning, and Madeleine was alone at the dispensary with her sick and her dying. Someone said there was a doctor at Letterturk, so Patrick rode there to fetch him, but he too was dead and no one knew where another doctor could be found. Meanwhile, all the Irish servants had left us except the one who had already had the fever, and Marguerite’s maid was in such a stupor of fear that she refused to go into her mistress’s room. I could not ask my own maid to go, and I refused to leave Marguerite’s care in the hands of the poor illiterate servant girl who remained at the house.
“But surely someone else can nurse me, Sarah,” whispered Marguerite. “I know how you feel about illness.”
“It was the thought of illness that frightened me,” I said. “But now that I’m face to face with it I don’t mind.”
“But you mustn’t come too near.”
“Dearest Marguerite,” I said.
“I want you to be safe, Sarah. Please go. I shan’t blame you a bit. Please.”
“No.”
“But …”
“Never.”
She suffered dreadfully. There were headaches so painful that she would scream in agony, dizziness, nausea and vomiting. The eruption occurred on the fifth day, a dark blotchy red that covered her entire body and led to hemorrhaging beneath the skin.
Patrick had ridden to Galway for a doctor, and I knew he would be away for some time.
There were days and there were nights. I sponged away the fever as best I could, changed the linen often and did everything I could to make her comfortable. I no longer noticed the smell. I sat with her hour after hour, and presently I no longer noticed anything except Marguerite. Sometimes I remembered my children and thanked God they were safe, but I no longer wondered if I myself would live or die because I had accepted the fact that the choice was not in my hands. I was living daily with the unthinkable, so I no longer thought but merely held Marguerite’s hand as if I could hold her back from the brink of that darkness which had terrified me all my life.
Marguerite’s maid sickened but she lived. I always felt bitter about that afterward. I could only look at her and think: She lived. And I never forgave her for living, just as no doubt she never forgave me for begging her mistress to spend Christmas with us at Cashelmara.
From Galway Patrick sent the letter to Thomas and David, but of course it never reached them in time.
It began to rain at Cashelmara. The larchwoods were black against the winter sky, and above the house the tower of the chapel was iron-gray among the bleak trees.
The end came, the delirium before the final coma. She talked a great deal of her husband Edward, and when Patrick arrived back from Galway she mistook him for his father and said how wonderful it was to see him again and that she had missed him more than anyone had ever guessed. She talked of Thomas and David too, and sometimes it was as if she were telling Edward about them, for she said that he mustn’t be impatient with Thomas’s passion for medicine because it was so important to let children do what they were best suited to do and not to expect them to be replicas of their parents. Sometimes she talked of London and Woodhammer and even of New York, and once she spoke of her honeymoon on the Continent, but always she spoke of them to Edward as if he were at her bedside and she could see him more clearly than she could see us.
The doctor Patrick had brought from Galway could do nothing.
It was before she slipped into unconsciousness for the last time that the delirium ebbed and she recognized me. I was alone with her. Outside the sun was rising and the room was filling with a pale white light.
“Sarah, I’ve felt so guilty,” she said, and the shock of hearing her speak in a lucid voice was so immense that I was struck dumb. I realized I had let go of her hand as I dozed in the chair, and that so frightened me that I clasped the hand quickly and pressed it in mine.
“So guilty,” she repeated. “All my fault.” Her voice was gone; her whisper was very faint. “I urged him to get married and you’ve both been so unhappy.”
I shook my head. “We’re happy now.” I groped for words. “Everything’s well—the new baby …”
“Such a waste,” she said. “Such a pity.”
“You mustn’t feel like that.” I was so distressed but could think of nothing else to say.
There was a long silence, and then just as I was wondering if she had fallen asleep she said in a strong, clear voice, “Be very careful, won’t you, Sarah?”
She never spoke again.
An hour later I noticed that she was no longer breathing. I held my own breath to listen, but no sound broke the silence and I knew I was alone.
I was still holding her hand.
After a while I looked upon her face and saw that she seemed very young, much younger than I, and her features were strangely unfamiliar, as if they belonged to someone I had never met.
I was still sitting by the bed when Patrick slipped into the room and asked how she was.
“She’s dead,” I said. “Marguerite’s dead.” And I went on looking at her stranger’s face and I went on holding her familiar hand.
It was he who cried. He said very violently, “The people I love best always die,” and then he pressed the palms of his hands against his cheeks as if he were a small boy and began to sob as if his heart would break.
IV
We buried her beside her husband in the family graveyard. It was a clear day, mild for the time of year, and the white surplice of the parson from Letterturk fluttered gently in the soft wind. Thomas and David had arrived the day before, Cousin George had ridden over from Letterturk Grange and Madeleine had somehow managed to leave the dispensary to attend the service. There were no other mourners. Pe
ople were too frightened of fever, and all Marguerite’s many friends were far away in England.
I didn’t cry. I watched the coffin being lowered into the grave and knew there was no God, and that shocked me because everyone believed in God, didn’t they? It simply wasn’t done not to believe or, at the very least, not to pretend to oneself one believed. But I no longer believed, and that was really very awkward, because if I didn’t believe in God I couldn’t blame Him for Marguerite’s death, and someone had to be blamed, I saw that very clearly; someone had to take the responsibility.
Someone scattered earth on the coffin. It was Sarah Marriott, Sarah de Salis, Lucky Sarah who had always had everything she could possibly want. She had wanted Marguerite to go to Cashelmara for Christmas, and of course Marguerite had gone.
No, it wasn’t my fault. I’m not to blame. I didn’t want to go back to Cashelmara. It was Patrick, talking of his garden. I didn’t want to go.
But you asked. “Oh, Patrick, we really can’t go on living on Marguerite’s charity …” You thought of Maxwell Drummond and you asked to go back.
“Sarah.” Someone was talking to me. The coffin was covered with earth. The clergyman had closed his book. Everyone was walking away. “Sarah …”
“I want to be alone for a while,” I said to whoever it was. “I want to think.”
“But you mustn’t stay here … must come back to the house.” It was Patrick I could smell the whisky on his breath, and I wrenched myself free.
“No.”
“Sarah …”
“Leave me alone!” I shouted at him and ran away across the graveyard to the door of the chapel.
It was dark inside but quiet. I sat down, listening, but now the silence was no longer oppressive but comforting to me. I was thinking clearly at last, my thoughts sensible and logical. No more Drummond. The very sight of him would repulse me since he was responsible, no matter how indirectly, for Marguerite’s death, and once I had accepted that I saw no reason why my marriage shouldn’t be tolerable. I could have at least three more children at three-year intervals. That would take up nine years. I was now twenty-nine, so by the time I had the other children I would be thirty-eight. Perhaps I could have one more. Then I would be past forty, which would be dreadful, but it would be time to enjoy the older children’s maturity. It would be fun when Eleanor was old enough to be presented—all those parties and dances—but who was she going to marry? I would have to see that we were leading some form of acceptable social life by that time. It was no use Patrick thinking we could continually live like recluses while he worked like a navvy in his wretched garden. We must at least present Eleanor at Dublin Castle—no, that was really too provincial; it would have to be London, and we would find the money somehow.
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