"I promise not to," she said.
Again he was silent.
"Have you thought of it now?" she asked.
"I do not think I could. I respect you too much."
There was a pause before she pulled away and leaned her head up to his for one final chaste kiss. "Good night, Sam. I don't think less of you for it." Her tone implied that hundreds would.
She walked quickly into the downstairs bedroom and pushed the door almost shut. She busied herself at once with undressing, struggling with the buttons at her back, struggling too not to give way to tears. They bathed her cheeks as unfeelingly as sweat. I am hard, she tried to think.
And then the door opened again and Sam was close behind her. "What do you mean?" he asked. "'Think less of you'?"
As soon as he touched her she spun around and hugged him. "Don't think!" she said. "Don't think."
His hands discovered that her dress had gone; only a corset, a chemise, and six petticoats separated them. She felt the shiver of his discovery, and she pulled his head down to kiss her. His hands held her neck…her shoulders…her arms.
"I don't really know," he said. "I've never…"
"Never mind," she soothed. "Just get undressed. We'll manage."
Impatient minutes later they stood naked, two feet apart. In the dark they could each feel the heat of the other's body, each hear the other's shattered breathing through the pounding of their hearts.
And there they stood in thrall to a monstrous power that neither understood; for a moment, each was afraid to move, afraid to shatter the little gain they had dared.
She reached out. Her unclothed arm moved silently. Her hand touched his, reaching through the dark for her. His paused, but she swept it on and up to her breast. She spread his hand and fingers on her breast; with her other hand she reached for him—for the heat she felt and the stiffness her nights with Tom had added to her imagination. And there it was.
But it was not still. It throbbed. And it leaped like something demented. And there were sudden stabs of heat on her fingers and arms and stomach and thighs, which turned wet and cool. And sticky.
Then she heard the little puppy noises and gasps he was making. And they turned to sobs as he fell to his knees against her and threw his arms about her hips, saying, "Sorry…sorry…sorry…" like a litany. He kissed her stomach and her thighs as he wept and repeated that one word.
She stood and held his head while the realization stole over her—bringing no understanding in its train—that it was over. "Why did you do it like that?" she said at last. "That wasn't the right thing at all."
He laughed—or was it a sob?—into her flesh.
She withdrew from him then and, taking up a petticoat, wiped the wet patches dry—or at least damp—before she got into bed. He fell in beside her and was at once asleep.
When he woke again, half an hour later, Sarah was almost asleep, having cried herself cold.
His arm, encircling her, stirred nothing within. His hand, curling around her breast again, did not rouse her. But for memory's sake, and for the hope the magic would return, she sighed his name and amazed herself at the realism of the tremble in her voice and breath.
Encouraged, he raised a thigh upon her and began to widen his caressing exploration, while she, unblinded now by any passion, experienced him with a clinical candour. Even her naïvety could not ignore his apish clumsiness.
But the stiffness would not come to him again and after five increasingly hectic minutes he fell limp upon her and laughed silently and in despair. Suddenly it seemed funny to her as well. She gave a little giggle. For a moment he held his breath and then he giggled too.
It was no more than that. She stroked his naked back and felt his male bulk as if she herself had never known the burdens of sex; and in that same instant, she was overcome by a neutered friendship for this stranger. It was so intense as to be a kind of love. "Oh, Sam!" she said. "What was it all about?"
He took it as a real question and thought long before he answered timidly, "The triumph of fondness over passion?"
"You're heavy," she whispered.
Later, when she was deep asleep, he managed to complete, alone, what they had so unavailingly begun together. It was a guilty, cold, aching pleasure, with her lying there so soft and warm behind him.
But—as he was to say so many times over the years that followed—it helped him off to sleep.
Part Four
Chapter 36
John paid Flynn the compliment of not being present when the Carlow branch was inspected and—of course—given its clearance. It was the first time he had ever been absent from the inspection of so large a contract. Instead, he took Nora by coach down the route of the main line, as close to it as the roads permitted. It was very much the route he and MacMinimum had followed that April. Nora had agreed to come only to lay to rest the ghost of their flare-up last May. But she set out from Dublin with great foreboding. This country seemed to bring out the differences between herself and John at their starkest and most disruptive.
Though the distress was still great, the mood of the country was far happier, for a fine, luxuriant potato crop filled the fields. Everyone said it was going to be the heaviest crop in memory; and though the blight had shown in odd patches here and there, it was much less severe than last year.
They had another reason for happiness too: Peel's Irish Coercion Bill, introduced in February, had been defeated on 25 June by a combination of Lord John Russell's Whigs and a rebel group of Tories, still angry with Peel over his virtual repeal of the Corn Laws—one form of repeal that had not been popular in Ireland. Now, with the prospect of a glorious harvest, everyone in England could reasonably hope that only the usual two-to-three million Irish would starve this year and only a few thousand of them to actual death—so there would be no need for extraordinary coercion.
For John too, the promised harvest and the change in government brought fresh hope. The new liberal ministry was far less likely to start doling out government charity and food to the people. The liberals were staunch believers in the virtues of the free market, self-reliance, and initiative. True, when the distress was abnormal, governments had no choice but to offer such palliatives as food and relief works—it was the "market price" of buying freedom from total insurrection. But now, when the distress would be back to its usual levels, there would be a chance to let a proper mercantile system and an effectual farming system grow, all under the stimulus of competition and profit, and free of Tory paternalism. Bad, bankrupt landlords would no longer have the umbrella of the Corn Laws to raise over their own leaking roofs; they would crash—and newly rich merchants with some idea of business would buy them out. Estates in Ireland were going to be right cheap. It was going to be a long and painful upheaval, but a newer, stronger Ireland would emerge at the end—strong enough, perhaps, to govern itself. Already Trevelyan at the Treasury had turned away cargoes of relief Indian corn. And all relief was to end in mid-August.
He discussed these thoughts with Nora on their way down through Queen's County and County Tipperary.
"Do you think we should buy any estates here?" she asked. "If they are going to be so cheap."
He did not answer at once, and then all he said was: "It's tempting."
"That's not very enthusiastic."
"We'd be at the wrong end of a bad tradition," he said. "Absentee landlords."
"They're not all bad," she pointed out. "Sir George Staunton at Clydagh, everyone praises him as a model; and he's an absentee. And the Duke of Devonshire. It's a case of getting the right stewards and giving firm instructions. What this country needs is good landlords, absent or present."
"But that's not us, love. You've never bought land merely in order to improve farming. Anyway, we'll think on it. I fear we'll do precious little land buying on any scale these next few years."
Almost the first person they saw in the dining room of the Royal, in Tipperary town, was Captain Cashel Ormond, whom he and MacMinimum
had met in this same place in April. He greeted John warmly and was then introduced to Nora.
"You and Captain Ormond have something in common," he told her. "He is Master of the Tipperary. And Mrs. Stevenson is an enthusiast for…" His voice tailed off as he saw the bewilderment spreading over Ormond's face. "Are you not their master?" he added.
"Sure I never hunted in me life. Now, if it's fishing ye're seeking…"
"How odd, sir. I was told quite categorically that you were Master of the Tipperary."
"By MacMinimum?"
"Yes."
"God, isn't he the quare one! Sure he knows me like his own brother."
"Queer is the word. He told me particularly not to mention the Waterford and Limerick Railway, which was our business. He said you hunted the Suir valley and would kill us."
Ormond sat down, shaken, lost in thought. Then he looked sharply at John, seeing him in an altogether different light. "Stevenson?" he said again. "That Stevenson! Dear God! I'll kill MacMinimum, I swear it."
"Are you connected with railways then?" John asked.
"Connected! Aren't I the chairman of the Waterford and Limerick?"
The next day, the second of August, was damp and close. A strong southeasterly wind carried a fine drizzling mist almost horizontal over the fields. It obscured the carriage windows on the south side and cut off their view of much of the proposed route to Waterford. They spent the day wondering why MacMinimum had prevented John from revealing himself and his business to Ormond, and coming to no very tenable conclusions. Also, to be sure, they talked of their business in general. John, only halfjokingly, said how strange it was that to find release enough from the everyday press of affairs they had to flee to a remote Irish valley to see a line whose building would occur—as even Ormond had said—the Dear One knows when.
Another thing Ormond had said was that John's evidence before the select committee of Parliament on railway labour, given about two weeks earlier, had been very well received in railway circles. "You said a lot that needed saying," he said firmly. "There's few can command the gratitude of labourers and proprietors. And you, sir, are one of that few."
The praise had delighted Nora. If word of John's evidence had reached these parts of the world so soon, that was surely a mark of the respect he now commanded.
But John was more cautious. "Remember," he said, "that Ormond is Irish, and Irish hospitality has no equal. It's hospitality makes him say that. You'll never hear ill of yourself from Irish lips. Always remember that."
"I don't believe it," she said. "Not that they're so different."
"They are," he reaffirmed. "They're as different as the wine that goes in and the water that comes out, as Lucas once told me. Take Ormond and MacMinimum now. You'd never credit that they could be friends again, not after what MacMinimum did to Ormond."
"Certainly not," she said, forgetting Lord Wyatt and herself.
"If they were Englishmen, Ormond would find it hard to speak to MacMinimum. Yet if we turned back to Tipperary now and found the pair of them drinking and laughing this evening away, nothing would surprise me less. Two Englishmen could call themselves friends and sit the whole evening by the fire, the one reading, the other smoking and thinking. Not a drink or a word exchanged. And they could be the best and closest of friends. Now, I think there's not an Irishman born could begin to comprehend that as friendship. Friendship means talk, means laughter, means drink, means slander, means secrets blurted to the world, means a fight, means a grand memory. Loyalty isn't in it. An Irishman is hardly an Englishman at all in my view."
Nora, who wanted to talk about John, not the Irish, said, "All the same, Ormond knew what to say, so he must have heard of your evidence." John could not deny it. "I wish I'd been there to see it," she said.
He smiled at the memory of it. "I thought it was going to be held in Gothic splendour in Barry's new palace."
"Wasn't it?"
"It was held in a draughty wooden shanty in Palace Yard. I've seen navvies better housed."
The day was so overcast it grew dark early. They had to light the carriage lights long before Waterford. When they pulled into the town, they noticed a strange, sour, nauseous stench, which filled the whole valley.
They had barely drawn into the hotel yard when the nurse came running across to the coach door. "Your honour!" she called in high excitement. "'Tis Charles Coen himself come for his own little girl." Breathless she pointed to Char-less (as she pronounced the name), a stocky, curly-haired young man who followed her across the yard with the rolling swagger of a prizefighter. "He was after arriving yesterday," the nurse added. "And stayed on for to see yourself."
Young Mary bobbed behind her father, dodging the pools of dung-mottled water. One side of her head was badly scarred; the skin looked more like the membrane that sheathes an ox kidney than anything human. No hair grew upon it. But her smile was that of a seraph. "Would ye ever look at her!" the nurse said, beaming. "If it wasn't her leg hindered her, sure she'd fly the carriage for joy."
"Mr. Coen, I'm John Stevenson." John shook him by the hand and presented him to Nora.
Coen had intended saying something, but now the moment had come he merely stood and smiled, and blinked. And swallowed. John bent down to see Mary more closely. "Well, young lady," he said, "you're a lot better than when last we met."
"God be praised," Coen said above him as Mary retreated once more behind her father. "And your honour too. God be good to ye!"
"Have you another home now, Mr. Coen?" John asked, standing tall once more.
"I have, sir. I have a brother in Philipstown."
"And work?"
"I…" he began. Then he lowered his eyes. "No, sir."
"Have you tried the railroad?"
"I have that. God, that Flynn! He's the divil. There's no place there."
"Well, before you go back to your brother—tomorrow?" Coen nodded. "Call at the hotel here. There will be a letter for you to carry to the 'divil Flynn.' He will give you work. I promise it."
"Ah, God, sir!" Coen began, his eyes filling with tears.
But John cut him short. "The thing that was done to you and your family, Mr. Coen—and to your neighbours—should never be done by any man, no, nor any woman either, to a fellow creature." He glanced casually at Nora as he spoke. "The world owes you the chance to start again. It's not charity, man. It's a debt discharged. I wish I could find all those who were evicted and give them work."
Coen's eyes brightened in such a way that Nora truly feared he was about to say he had all seven hundred of them waiting just around the corner. But he merely repeated his thanks and left with Mary's hand in his.
Next morning the smell they had noticed on first entering the valley was overpowering. It woke them long before the maid came with hot water. John, unable to bear it, went to the window and threw back the curtain. There was nothing in the street to account for the odour, no refuse tip or dead animal. He looked farther, at the rooftops and spires. There was no fire nor any wet and steaming remnant of a fire, as far as he could see.
And then, above the rooftops, he noticed the fields. They were black and dark brown, for mile upon mile. It was not wheat and corn that had blighted—their golden acres stood out bright against that terrible darkness—it was the potato. It had been the potato.
Not a patch of its bright green leaf remained. No matter where he looked, not a field had been spared. Overnight the entire crop had perished.
"What is it?" Nora asked, still in bed.
He was too shaken to reply at once. "A death warrant," he said at last.
But the devastation they could see from the window was as nothing to the utter ruin they drove among all day, from Waterford up the valley of the Barrow to Carlow. At breakfast the maidservant, subdued like everyone else in the town by the local calamity, had thanked God the crop in the rest of Ireland was so luxuriant. But by that evening, they knew that the "local" calamity extended fifty miles at least.
Over al
l that blighted land lay the cloying stench of decaying potatoes. The earth looked as if a wet fire had passed over it. Everywhere, they saw families digging desperately among the wilted plants, seeking a few tubers they might salvage. Several times John stopped the coach and got out to see the blight for himself; it was as if he could not believe the vastness of it and had to remind himself, time and again, of its horror. In all that sombre day they did not see one potato plant left green, nor one potato tuber that would not crush to an evil black slime at the slightest pressure.
The faces of those who alighted from the "celebration" train from Dublin next day told the rest of the story. They too had come through mile after mile of black field upon black field. The day was so wintry that the green upon the trees and hedgerows seemed incongruous. Fierce and heavy downpours of cold rain swept down from the Wicklow mountains, drenching the land. Lightning flickered over the wasted fields. And toward evening a dense, chill mist sprang up, seemingly out of the ground, and enveloped them all. The Carlow branch had a very muted opening.
The Rich Are with You Always Page 37
