But she forgot about it, as she forgot about most things of a practical nature, and I was allowed to go my own way, forgetting about dresses, and this unknown, unattractive-seeming man, and what might be expected of me, or what I might owe to whom. The coming of the heir with inky fingers and the clerk’s manner was only what it had always been, a distant threat.
The winter was over, the hunting ended, and Half Moon was mine ‒ or as much mine as any animal of her pride and will would ever belong to another. The mare accepted me as she accepted the sugar from my hand. I never took the acceptance for granted; it was a relationship which only love would hold together.
My mother, without the long days in the hunting-field to tire her, grew more restless. Without my grandfather’s restraint, the atmosphere at Clonmara grew uncontrolled and rather wild. I never seemed to pass through the hall without seeing the hats and riding-crops of my mother’s gentleman visitors, without hearing the loud laughter from the sitting-room. The drawing-room was scarcely used these days; its air of shabby formality did not suit the new laxness which had come with Grandfather’s death. The servants hurried by constantly with decanters of port and brandy. The laughter and the talk went on late at night ‒ sometimes I heard stifled voices in the passage outside my bedroom and pretended I didn’t hear them. The house grew dusty and unkempt. ‘This place needs a housekeeper,’ Nanny would say. ‘And there’s your mother, God help her, thinking that the new Earl will ask her to stay and keep house for him and be his hostess! ‒ she who never kept an account straight in her life! His hostess she says! ‒ wouldn’t that be a pretty scandal to add to all the talk she’s already got dragging after her name.’
Only in the stables was discipline maintained ‒ partly because my mother genuinely loved horses, and partly because Andy himself would tolerate no slipping of standards. Sometimes I wished my mother cared about or noticed the needs of her daughter as she noticed a swollen fetlock, or a poorly mucked-out loose-box. But mostly I was content enough, content to hold these precious days when Clonmara was still ours. My mother would never change, but only go further along the bent her life had taken so many years ago. My mother was simply my mother, beautiful, reckless, lovable if one could overlook all the things that went with her passionate nature. She was the affectionately tolerated scandal of the society in which she now mixed, and she was the coldly-talked-of scandal of the society which would no longer receive her. An earl’s daughter she might be, but she was a married woman living apart from her husband, who himself had been no good to begin with. She encouraged her gentleman visitors, other women’s husbands, and showed no sign of repentance for having disgraced herself and her name. At eighteen she had had a brilliant season in London on money my grandfather had had difficulty in raising; she had been presented at Court, been pursued by the son of a Duke, and then hustled back to Ireland because she had caught the eye of Edward, Prince of Wales. She had then run away with a quick-talking, seemingly charming rogue, the son of a Scottish farmer whose poor acres would support no more sons, but who had managed to squeeze out the money to buy a commission for Thomas in an unfashionable regiment then stationed in Ireland. His name was Drummond, Thomas Drummond, and I had never seen him. The stories of him still lingered, mulled over by the servants. He had been suspected of cheating at cards, they said, though it was never proved; how else, except by cheating, could a man win so consistently? ‒ win enough to pay his mess bills. He had also won a very fine horse, and he had won, briefly, an earl’s daughter. It was even said, I knew, that he had borrowed money from the Earl which he later used to carry Lady Pat away. That story was one which never had been proved, either; my grandfather’s lips were sealed about my father. He had welcomed his daughter back to Clonmara as a loved child, and no one had ever heard him reproach her. She had refused to assume the role of meek penitent for her sins, and her father had supported and shielded her. ‘Ah, sure the Earl was always butter in your mother’s hands,’ Nanny said. My father, Thomas Drummond, had served in India, and remained there, stubbornly refusing either to divorce his wife, or to die conveniently of some tropical disease or a rebel’s bullet. He sent no money to support us. My mother told me he had written the Earl, ‘They will have my support when they come to live with me in the regiment.’ And that was that.
And so I saw my grandfather, in the years when I was old enough to observe such things, struggling futilely to make some kind of fortune for us against the day when he would die, and we would have to leave Clonmara. He had tried and failed disastrously. He had placed himself in the hands of money-men in London, and whatever Clonmara yielded in profits had gone to them to speculate with. Safe investment would not make a fortune ‒ only great risks would make that kind of money. The risks had not paid off. ‘I’ve no head for it,’ I once heard him confess to a friend, ‘and I suppose, no real heart for it either, or I’d get in there and do something for myself. The worst of it is that I’ve sold off the few farms that were outside the entail. If I had them back again, they’d see her through, though not in style. I don’t say I’ve been cheated. I’ve just not had very good advice.’ As the years passed and I learned more of such things, I knew he moved desperately from one venture to another and when he had died on the hunting-field, he had been old beyond his years, exhausted with the efforts and the worry of trying to provide some inheritance for my mother and me. Half the county, it seemed, had turned out to his funeral. He had been more popular with his tenants and small farmers than his own class. He had supported the views of Charles Stewart Parnell and the Land Leaguers, which automatically made him suspect by his own people, the Protestant Ascendancy. He had been notoriously ‘soft’ with his tenants, deferring rents when the harvests were bad, and forgetting to demand the arrears the next year. He was the despair of every steward he ever had, and they had come and gone in my time, frustrated at being unable to carry out the work they were employed to do, which was to make the estate profitable. So everyone, except a few of his own class, had a good word for the Earl, and everyone had come to his funeral. But that was the end of it. There was no one to rescue my mother and me. Since his death we had lived in a kind of limbo, my mother making the most of every day left to her at Clonmara, refusing to face the inevitable future; me spending my days as I pleased, riding Half Moon, trying not to think of what would happen to us. The summer approached and it should have been a time of mild excitement for me. That year I was supposed to have been presented to the Viceroy at Dublin Castle ‒ my grandfather no longer pretended that there could be money for a London season. But all those plans had ended with his death. Officially we were in mourning; and we were waiting.
Now the waiting was over. This day had brought with it the man and the horse, and a sharp new hunger in my heart for both of them.
We faced each other, and the surf crashed near us ‒ the waves lapped the horses’ hooves, and receded, to come again. This was no inky-fingered clerk, with pale face and hunched shoulders. He was like some phantom of my dreams, the vague adolescent dreams of a man who would take the place of my grandfather, a man rich in looks and authority. He became all those things for me in those first few minutes, and as yet he had not even smiled at me.
The afternoon light was opalescent on the rise to the Wicklow Hills to the west. The wide acres of Clonmara lay between the sea and the gentle slope to the hills, land that was boggy and waterlogged near the sea, and rich and sweet as it rose to the height crowned by the house. It was good land that gave grazing to Clonmara’s famous horses and sleek cattle, good arable land which yielded plentiful harvests of wheat and barley, potatoes, turnips, beets. Some of the best land in the county belonged to Clonmara but it was beginning to show the lack of money which should have been spent on it. Small things, but important. Drainage ditches were blocked, and not cleared, walls tumbled and were not repaired, sheep, who were less demanding, grazed land which had once fattened cattle, gorse took hold in places and spread unchecked. But it was still a fair and beautiful i
nheritance, and now this man had come to claim it. Through the turmoil of what I felt for him, a shaft of jealousy and pain stabbed me the way the long afternoon light pierced the dark little coppice on the road back to the house. I had never known a feeling like it. Thoughtlessly I had loved Clonmara, possessed it, taken it for granted. I had taken it as Half Moon took sugar from my hand. But this man offered no sugar. The days of sweetness and sugar were gone.
I could stand it no longer ‒ the pain and bewilderment of this clash of feelings. I was astride Half Moon, wearing the breeches no lady should wear. I dug my heels suddenly into the mare’s flanks, and she shot away with a swift motion which was half indignation, half delight at the chance of an all-out gallop. The mare was supremely suited to the soft going of the wet sand; I gave her her head. We moved easily, almost flying, it seemed to me. It was a sweet release from the tensions of these last minutes to feel the wind in my face, the wind of our own making as we sped along the shore. Clonmara wasn’t quite lost while there was even a single moment like this left. Suddenly I understood my mother better.
The thunder of the hooves increased. Glancing back I saw the man and the stallion were coming after me. But the mare was lighter, swifter, more used to the terrain. Even the mighty span of the stallion’s legs was stretched to the limit to gain on us. I leaned forward in the saddle, rising on the stirrups, my head low to the mare’s neck. We were ahead; we held our lead. I heard myself laugh aloud with the triumph of it. But the strand was very long, miles of pale sand still to be raced before we reached the headland. The mare had great stamina, but the stallion had more. Slowly he gained. I urged Half Moon on, but I knew that soon she must be spent and winded. Not for any race, nor for any man, would I knowingly ruin a horse. So gently, gently I began to rein Half Moon in, letting her stride drop naturally, letting the headlong gallop drop to a canter, a trot, an easy walk. The man had waited only until he was a clear length ahead of me before he too began to rein in. We fell into stride together, the horses moving smoothly side by side. It seemed as if they moved in some guided rhythm, like the sea itself. At last we halted, and I slid from Half Moon, contrite now to see the lather of dark sweat on her silken coat.
The man did the same thing. We turned back towards the place where the track to Clonmara House began in the dunes, each leading a horse. Then suddenly the man took the reins of both animals in his hand, and with his free arm gathered me to him. The first kiss of passion I had ever received had no flavour of sugar about it. It was hard, and warm and searching. It surprised me, but being my mother’s daughter it did not shock me that not just my lips, but my whole body responded. For half a minute we were still, I clinging to the new, wondrous creature who had come into my life. A wave of pleasure ‒ no, of happiness, caught me up, wiping out the pain I had experienced. It was, then, I thought, just as all the stories, all the poems I had only half-read, had promised. It was possible to love in an instant, and to know it would last a lifetime. It was absurd ‒ and true. Half Moon thrust her head between us, seeking attention, seeking the praise she believed she had earned for that wild race, seeking the sugar. I drew back, laughing, happy, believing that this was only the first of the many, many times I would taste the warmth and passion of this man’s lips.
‘I can hardly believe it,’ I said, knowing my tone was awed and hushed so that he had to stoop to hear it above the waves. ‘I never thought it could happen. You’re Richard Selwin, and I love you.’
He still held the two horses. Now his free hand went to sweep the tangled hair back from my face.
‘Hush, child,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have done it. I should never have done it.’
I remember laughing, so confident I felt. ‘But why undo it? Why undo anything? We have this, and we have so much else. There is everything before us …’ I gestured widely. ‘This place, the horses, us … We were made for each other. Why did I never believe it? They all said it might happen. It’s so right. Grandfather would have been so happy …’
Afterwards, for all the years afterwards, I would remember how my words must have sounded ‒ ingenuous, the words of a child, foolishly seizing on love like some new toy, certain it would be mine forever, certain it could not shatter, or pierce or wound. Love could have no cutting edge.
He touched my hair again, traced his finger along the line of my cheek. ‘Red hair you have, and eyes that are no particular colour, like the sea. And I should never have kissed you.’
‘Have you to ask then? ‒ to wait until we know more than each other’s names? Do we have to sit and talk in the drawing-room before we may kiss again?’
‘I may never kiss you. I have no right.’
‘But you have ‒ and it’s done. It’s so perfect. It fits so perfectly together. We fit ‒’
‘Hush, child,’ he said again. ‘It’s ‒’
‘Don’t call me child. I’m not a child any more. Don’t you know that!’
He shook his head. ‘Child ‒ woman ‒ whatever … It’s too late.’
‘Too late?’ I echoed, and already the first disillusionment of love was upon me.
He gave me back Half Moon’s reins, and turned and started to walk towards the break in the dunes where the road began.
‘Wait!’ I called. ‘Tell me why it’s too late. Why?’
He looked back at me. The resemblance to my grandfather came and went every time he turned his head. He had some of the Blodmore features, the high cheek-bones, the strangely light eyes that changed colour to reflect that about them. But he was darker than any of us, darker of skin and hair. I knew him so little I was still discovering these things about him, obvious physical things, his height, which reached up well against the shoulders of the stallion, the springing, lithe power of his body as he walked on the soft sand. He was so strange to me, so unknown, and yet I did know him, and I loved him.
‘Why? Better to have asked your grandfather why he would never let me come to Clonmara. Ask me why I hadn’t the sense to come as soon as he died. I was trying, against my own inclination to be kind, to give you all time to get used to it. To make your plans. I didn’t hurry because I wanted to be the gentleman he never thought I could be. If I had only known what was waiting here …’
I knew he was not speaking of the lands, the house, the inheritance of Clonmara. ‘It’s all here,’ I said, but a coldness of fear and crushing disappointment was growing in me. It was not going to be as I had thought. ‘It’s all here for you. I’m here ‒’
He cut off my words with a jerk to the stallion’s reins. ‘We’ll walk the horses until they’ve cooled. And then we’ll go back to the house, and we’ll never speak like this to each other again. When we get back to the house I will introduce you to my wife ‒ my bride whom I married in Spain three weeks ago.’
II
The new Lord Blodmore’s arrival, unannounced, had thrown Clonmara into confusion. We met it first in the stable-yard where grooms were rubbing down four perfectly matched carriage horses and a little mare almost as beautiful as Half Moon, tossing clean hay into loose-boxes, and, I guessed, congratulating themselves on the tone and style the new Earl set. There was an air of excitement after the lassitude of these last months which communicated itself to the horses, who stood with their heads thrust out of the boxes, enjoying the activity; the hounds bayed in the kennels. A look of reverence was on Andy’s face as he took the reins of the white stallion, and it tore into my heart. So quickly were allegiances changed. Half Moon was already second to the stallion. ‘Sure they must breed fine horses down in that place in Spain, m’lord.’ I turned my back and started to walk to the house. This from Andy to whom, until now, Irish horses, and Clonmara’s horses in particular, had been second to none.
Richard Blodmore was at my side as we came around the rhododendron-lined path to the south front of the house. While Clonmara wasn’t as big as the largest of them, it was said to be one of the finest houses of its kind in Ireland, built in the early eighteenth century, pure and spare in line
and style, belonging to the great Palladian age of Irish building. It was an almost square, balanced house of pale grey stone, with curving colonnades which had been added at a later date, each ending in an elaborate pavilion, some of whose windows now were broken, and whose walls were threaded with the devouring ivy. It was beautiful, and for the first time I was acutely aware that it looked to be decaying. Lichen was darkening the grey stone, and valerian was sprouting along the balustrade which crowned it. Involuntarily we both paused, as if Richard Blodmore looked clearly for the first time at his inheritance, and I was seeing it as if it was the last sight I would have of it. ‘Clonmara,’ I said quietly. ‘So much better a name in Irish ‒ meadow by the sea. When it was built it was called Seafield House. That’s forgotten now.’
Inside the house, another kind of confusion from that of the stable-yard had been let loose. My mother seemed to have gone into a mild state of shock at the unexpected arrival of two coaches, a string of horses, the Earl’s bride, her personal maid, a valet and two female servants. I learned later that of them only Lady Blodmore spoke a careful, correct English. She sat now on a sofa in the little sitting-room, and her eyes and ears seemed to miss nothing, to judge everything. The room was dusty and strewn with magazines and newspapers, old hunting fixture cards, dates of point-to-point meetings, a few half-chewed bones left by dogs, three of my grandfather’s gun dogs themselves, and two gentleman friends of my mother’s, who had chanced to call that afternoon, and stayed on to see the fun.
It was obvious that my mother had had a little too much wine. Her talk rattled on, talk about things and people the Spanish bride could not have known of, desperate talk that strove to cover her shock, her disbelief in the fact that this day had actually arrived.
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 2
