*
A falcon, also belonging to Mr Sinclair, was perched on the branch of a pear tree, overhanging the Castle wall, a matter of feet from Lord Belfast’s top hat, as though waiting on him for its commands rather than on the falconer, wherever he had got to. It was as curious a grouping as could be imagined and for a moment, hearing the barking of the dogs echo off the narrow ravines of the streets, I had the uncomfortable sensation that any one of us shut up in our houses could be the quarry, so that when his lordship glanced up, in laughing, towards my grandfather’s house I instinctively let go of the curtain and stepped back from the window. Would he notice where my fingers had wiped the glass and know that I had been watching?
When I dared to look again, some minutes later, the hounds, their master, the Earl and his mare were all gone from the street. Only the falcon remained, perched in the pear tree, pecking at the jesses attached to its ankle. Then the falconer at last arrived and held up his glove for the bird to hop on to and the street for an hour or two more was empty again.
*
A Cantonese merchantman had anchored during the night at Garmoyle.
Davidson, one of the deputy dock masters, had rowed out at first light with Dr Forcade and reported back that there was no sign whatever of illness or infection among the crew, who should therefore be allowed to come ashore. In the course of the morning, however, word spread throughout the town that we were about to be invaded. Shortly after midday a delegation of weavers from Sandy Row arrived at the Ballast Office to demand that the ship be turned away. (They had been brought up perhaps on stories of the Rabbi who was kept from lecturing at the Exchange by an earlier generation of townsfolk concerned about “infection”.)
Sir Clueless came down at length from his lookout post and after a few minutes more of pacing up and down and stroking his lapels went out on to the street to offer his reassurance. All on board were in excellent health, we heard him say (to the casual observer Ferris, Bright and I might have looked as though we had been nailed by the ears to the door): the weavers were welcome to ask Dr Forcade themselves. They, though, did not care a jot (though neither did they say “jot”) for anything the doctor might have to tell them: Orientals were Orientals. Sir C said something else that was lost to us in the roar that greeted this piece of self-proving logic. There was a sound as of the handles of shovels or sledgehammers, whatever weavers were doing with shovels and sledgehammers, being struck on the ground. Gelston, the Harbour Constable, had meanwhile let himself in at the back door. “You boys look like you have been nailed up there,” he observed, casually. He selected from the iron ring at his belt the key to the cabinet where his pistols were kept. I watched as, one after the other, he took them down and went through the business of loading – powder, wadding, ball . . . rod to ram the whole lot home – as briskly as if he were filling and tamping a pipe. I watched him tap a small measure of powder into each of the frizzen pans and set the firing pins from half-cock to full. He saw me staring. “The first one goes over their heads,” he said, and after a moment smiled. Fortunately, before I could discover whether the joke was that both shots went over the heads, or that the first one in fact did not, Sir Clueless succeeded in making himself heard.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen! Please!”
It would go very ill for the town, he said, if merchant ships were to be turned away from it without good cause. We were an island nation, with an island nation’s weaknesses as well as strengths. Where was the cotton to come from to feed their looms in the event of a retaliatory action? “We will all go over to flax,” said one voice, and was roundly cheered for it. How, Sir Clueless persevered, would they otherwise get their finished goods, cotton or linen, to market? The cheering died. They were all, he knew, reasonable men; surely they must be able to arrive at some compromise.
Two hours later a small flotilla of rowboats began to land the crew at the head of the dock. In fact, there were as many Portuguese as Chinese among the sailors, although the former had to a man adopted the latter’s long “queues” at the backs of their heads, their black silk caps and slippers, and the whole lot together had taken on that weathered hue common to seafarers the world over. They set up camp where they landed – such was the compromise – creating tents out of broom handles and sailcloth weighed down with barrels. In the course of the afternoon they washed their shirts and hung them to dry on the dock rail, and cooked food in shallow cauldrons that smelled like no food any of us had ever in our lives eaten and few of us ever would.
Ferris, who had gone out to take a closer look, reported back that several among the Chinese had passable English, and one had used his to express his bemusement at the hostility they had encountered: he had a brother living near to Pennyfields in London, who had previously visited Belfast without comment being passed. “But not with so many of his fellows,” Ferris suggested to us, “and in all likelihood not during a cholera scare.”
Towards evening the weavers returned to satisfy themselves that their terms were being adhered to. Gelston had kept the pistols loaded all day as a precaution, although, as he explained to us, once the balls were in, it was easier to row out and discharge them into the mud than try to unload them by hand.
While the weavers were there, a party of butchers, as Catholic as the others were Protestant, arrived from Hercules Street to ensure that Sandy Row did not imagine it had the sole right of refusal. (The Sailortown dockhands had fewer qualms. Some of the silk garments bartered for in the days that followed were features of the Belfast streets for years to come.) Mr John Hanlon had shown up too, a merchant who by virtue of his trade with that part of the world had assumed for himself the role of Vice Consul for Portugal and – by virtue of Portugal’s recently ended interest there – Brazil. He, though, could neither engineer a lifting of the dock-head blockade, nor persuade any of the Europeans to abandon their comrades in favour of a night in his servants’ quarters. They accepted, though, his offer of a barrel of port wine, which being opened without delay added greatly to the air of revelry.
As I walked away from the quays at the end of my day’s work I passed the two younger daughters of my grandfather’s immediate neighbour, who just happened to be on their way from the Flags to their singing master’s house on Hamilton Street, a quarter of a mile in the opposite direction, and who wanted to know if it was true that the heathen sailors had been running around all afternoon (their mouths could scarcely sound the words) half naked.
“Yes,” I said, leaning in towards them. “And do you know which half?”
Millar had sent me a letter in the course of the afternoon telling me that he had been called back to Gosford Castle, and asking if we might meet. We made a poor tea of ox tongue in aspic – poorer still with the memory so fresh of what I had earlier smelt cooking – in Magee’s on High Street, where Millar had brought his boxes for the following morning’s five o’clock coach to Enniskillen by way of Armagh. (For one who had so little regard for appearance he had an impressive amount of luggage: “I take my world with me each time I travel,” he said with a shrug.) He was entirely ignorant of the excitement at the docks, but had spent the greater part of his day at Boyd’s foundry on Donegall Street, where the columns were to be cast for the peripteral portico that would, he hoped, complete the rescue of the Third Presbyterian Church: ten of them in all, each weighing two tons.
“It will not, of course, be a feat to compare with dragging megaliths down from the hills to Ballynahatty” (as I now knew to be the name of that portion of Drumbo parish where stood the Giant’s Ring), “but it will still be a sight to behold when they are delivered.”
“I wouldn’t miss it for worlds,” I said.
“I will see to it that you don’t.”
He picked up a piece of tongue with his fork. In the premature twilight of Magee’s rear parlour it resembled more a piece of the furnishing fallen on to his plate.
“I have been giving more thought to the church at Castlereagh,” he told the tongue. “When
I was in London I saw some drawings of the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae in Arcadia.” He looked past the fork at me. “You will not have heard of it,” he said, then, before I could thank him for his confidence in me, went on. “Scarcely anyone has. It was so inaccessible few Greeks had set eyes on it until late in the last century. The Frenchman who discovered its ruins was murdered by bandits; the first surveys made of it were lost in a storm at sea.”
“I am bound as your friend to recommend that you steer well clear of it.” I laid my hand on his wrist. He batted it away for the joke that it was . . . mostly.
“There are things in those drawings as yet untried in the modern era, in this island or the next, in the whole continent of Europe, that I know of. Imagine if they were to be attempted first in Belfast.”
“In Castlereagh!”
“Why not? It is a good deal more accessible, and visible, than Bassae,” he said.
We parted early, for he had an eight-hour journey ahead of him and a final check to make, before he slept, on Rosemary Street.
“I have left instructions with the foremen that if either of those buffoons shows his face the police are to be sent for at once,” he said, and I had to ask myself again whether it was not Duff and Jackson who were most in need of protection.
I came round by the Castle gardens on my way home and paused a few moments under the pear tree where Lord Belfast had earlier sat astride his grey mare. Of the hounds there was not a whimper to be heard now: huddled safe in their numbers while the night dogs roamed and howled. The foliage, I noticed, was particularly dense directly overhead. Perhaps I had misinterpreted this morning’s little scene. Perhaps his lordship had been no more aware of the falcon’s proximity, its scrutiny, than he was of mine, for – this too was only now apparent to me – he would have had to lean so far back to see my window he would likely have fallen from his saddle. Perhaps he was, after all, not the hunter, but the hunted.
I would afterwards return to this thought many times and to the unexpected thrill it produced, and I would ask myself whether that was the moment, before anything further had passed between Maria and me, between the Earl and the town, at which I realised that my destiny and Lord Belfast’s were somehow intertwined.
“To see a lady drinking of tea is no news. To see a bird shoot a man in a tree is news indeed.”
*
What with one thing and another – one thing and John Millar – a full week had passed since I last took the road out to the Mill for Grinding Old People Young, an omission I rectified the very next evening. Maria, when she saw me come in at the door to the main room, nodded, to herself, as it seemed: “Good.”
It had been in my mind as I went to ask her if we might take a walk together some time, with – I thought it would be the done thing to suggest – one of the other girls from the inn, the Lord alone knew which, for company‚ although as it transpired, having had to wait again until the end of the night for the opportunity to ask it, I got no further than the first half of the question. “Of course. I should be delighted,” she answered, without hesitation. She would have the whole of Sunday afternoon to herself.
Accordingly on the following Sunday I presented myself at the side gate of the inn at the hour agreed. My grandfather had passed comment on this second consecutive Sabbath excursion with my friend (I did not disabuse him of the notion that Millar was still in town), and on my cravat, which he fancied must be new, although as he recalled I had a perfectly serviceable one, bought for me only last Christmas.
I might have been wearing an ass’s yoke for all the notice Maria took.
“Let us walk then,” she said, whatever of delight she had felt in accepting the invitation having clearly evaporated in the interim, and set off at such a clip that I had almost to run to get into step with her.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“What could possibly be wrong?” she said, and I decided to pursue it no further. She would talk when she was ready. This, it turned out, was when we had already got halfway to Whitehouse, having overtaken in the process a dozen pairs of young ladies and gentlemen, walking at love’s more leisurely pace, dawdling being long recognised as more effective than sprinting for shaking off a chaperone (for we passed an equal number of that species too).
She stopped abruptly by a milestone: Greencastle 2 . . . Carrickfergus 4½.
“Louisa tells me she was taken to see a mermaid in Carrickfergus when she was a girl,” she said, as though that had been the very thing that had been troubling her all the while. I remembered having heard the mermaid story from somebody else whose cousin’s friend had seen it – or “her” – caught in a fisherman’s net. I had never had reason till now to doubt it. “Do you think she could be in earnest?” I asked. Maria looked at me for almost the first time since we left the inn. I laughed. “Of course not,” I saved her the trouble of answering. “It is absurd.”
“She can describe for you in great detail the hair,” Maria said, “‘beautiful golden tresses, cascading down her back’.” Her hands described the contours. “But ask her an important question, about the tail for instance, how it attaches to the waist, and she is like a fish herself.”
She performed the flapping mouth. I tried to steer my thoughts away from waists and tails, and, for different reasons, from the casual cruelty of Maria’s mimicry.
“You must think us a very credulous lot.”
I wondered had Louisa told her too about the people who went prospecting at night for the gold the Danes were supposed to have abandoned on the Cave Hill; or about the Fairies who with mists and spells made sure they did not find it. The Fairies at any rate were patent nonsense.
“No more credulous than people where I come from,” Maria said, then paused. “It is just that I had been depending so much on the Reason of the people of Belfast.”
I laughed again. I thought it was another test. She peered at me more nearly still.
“Why else would I have travelled halfway across Europe to reach here?”
A fat raindrop landed at that moment on the road between us, then another, and another.
“For the gentle climate?” I said, and she let out such an exclamation that a curlew, turning stones down by the shoreline, some thirty yards distant, took sudden flight, calling its name as it went.
As the raindrops continued to come down we fled ourselves for the cover of a nearby chestnut tree, whose lowest branches, growing out almost at right angles to the trunk, offered us in addition convenient seats on which to carry on our conversation. Because now that she had started to speak Maria was in no mood to stop.
Her family, she told me, were szlachta, members of the Polish nobility, which might have signified something for generations gone by, but by the time Maria was born, in terms of wealth and status, was all but meaningless. Every second or third family in the district where she lived were szlachta, and like Maria’s the majority had no land to farm or to let; for some the coat of arms was the nearest thing to a coat that they possessed. “I have tried to explain this to Dorothy at the inn, but she is interested only in the first part. Every day it is, ‘Pardon me, your ladyship . . . If it is not too much trouble for you, highness.’ I tell her what my father told us growing up: nobody ever ate a title. Better that they were all abolished.”
Her father brought up Maria and her siblings to expect nothing and work for everything and above all to stand up for one another. I did not confess to my own doubts about her capacity for work, and of her “activities” in her current position she herself said only that, although she had been introduced to the English language at an early age, the dialect of the people here, and the speed at which they unleashed it, on occasion overwhelmed her.
When Maria was five her father showed her how to form a proper fist. “Do not make the childish mistake of tucking your thumb under the other fingers,” he said. “Place it on the outside, like this: the lock that holds it all together. And, remember, when the punch connects, grind your knuc
kles. Whoever is on the receiving end will not be back to bother you in a hurry.”
The word “mother” did not appear in any of these stories. Beyond a certain point “father”, too, began to flit in and out. The Poland her father was born into had, before his childhood was at an end, been carved up between the Russians, the Prussians, and the Austrians. Several times when he was a young man he had chosen exile over foreign rule, but always he would find himself drawn back. Why should he have to be the one to leave, after all? His native country?
Maria was twelve when the Russian soldiers arrived at their house on the edge of the village and arrested him on charges of sedition. More than nine years would pass before she saw him again.
One day, not long after the arrest, a group of boys followed Maria and her brother Jan through the village, shouting taunts and insults. Maria ignored them for as long as she could possibly bear, then turned, thumb already pressing her fingernails into her palm. She singled out the biggest of her tormentors – Tomas, the carpenter’s son – and before he even had a chance to retract his slanders, or repeat them to her face, caught him with her fist in the left eye, giving her knuckles a twist for good measure. The boy staggered backwards, yelling that he was blinded. She hit him again, on the side of his head, and felt the gristle of his ear yield. Where the third and fourth punches landed she could not have said, such was the rage that had now possessed her, but blood spattered her smock, her face and her hair. Jan pulled her off, urging her to run, fast, before the carpenter himself was alerted by his son’s screams.
Her father was wrong, though. Tomas did come back to bother her, the next time she and Jan were in the village: he and seven others, older and bigger again. Together they dragged Maria off the path into the undergrowth beyond the forge. Jan managed to struggle free of the boy pinning his arms and ran for help. It was a quarter of an hour before he returned.
The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Page 10
