The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  The throne had come into view. The Viceroy in blue coat and white knee breeches was not looking too appreciative as he stooped to exercise his privilege of kissing each debutante on either cheek. The Vicereine, a-gleam with teeth and diamonds looked indulgently at the ceremonial caress.

  ‘He has my sympathy,’ whispered one of the Honourable Mesdames in the estrade behind Her Excellency. A debutante was raising a face ravaged by smallpox beyond the shelter of lappet or ringlet and the Viceroy bent in service to his Queen.

  When the Viceroy straightened after bestowing the ceremonial kiss on Margaret’s neighbour’s cheeks there was a distinct smudge of red on his upper lip!

  The stentorian voice of the chamberlain called out: ‘Lady O’Carroll presented by Lady Cullen.’ The aides-de-camp were spreading out the glory of her train. Pray Heaven, thought Margaret as she went down into the billows of her satin, that he won’t kiss rouge on to my cheeks! But the Vicereine had seen the smudge and murmured something through lips that continued to smile. His Excellency rubbed a handkerchief over his lips and the beautiful Lady O’Carroll received a kiss that was unsullied and—unhurried!

  11

  Next day, Mr. O’Connell called to collect Sir Roderick, who had promised to join the Repeal Association at the bi-weekly meeting at the Corn Exchange. The cousins were thrilled to see him and called his attention to their father’s sword hanging over the fireplace.

  ‘We hung Papa’s sword there, Mr. O’Connell, the day the Union was signed forty-three years ago,’ said Hester. ‘You would have been too young then to be concerned with the significance of the Union.’

  ‘Too young!’ cried O’Connell. ‘In troth, madam, I was not. When I saw the new royal standard go up over Dublin Castle on that first day, and heard the artillery thundering from Phoenix Park and the bells of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral sounding their carillon de joie for Ireland’s degradation, I swore that I would devote my life to restoring our stolen freedom.’

  ‘You certainly succeeded,’ said Sir Roderick, ‘when you won the victory of centuries with Catholic emancipation. But surely a second victory so soon is too much to envisage!’

  The Liberator put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. ‘The road to freedom has been opened. By the same method that we won the right to practise our religion, we will win the right to govern in our own parliament; not by bloodshed or violence or turbulence, but by legal, peaceable and constitutional means alone.’

  He took his leave of the ladies and swung Sterrin on his shoulders for a pick-a-back down the stairs. On an impulse as he kissed her goodbye he turned to her parents and said, ‘Why not take her along with us to witness your initiation? It will be something for her to remember later when prosperity has returned with the parliament that she saw her papa vow his services to its achievement.’ As he watched her skedaddle up the stairs for her bonnet, he murmured, ‘There is something about that child that I find arresting. Perhaps it is that, like myself, she was hurled into life by storm.’

  In the Ladies’ Gallery at the Corn Exchange, sitting between her mother and Lady Cullen, Sterrin listened wide-eyed to the sound of her father’s name sent in clarion tones down the thronged hall as the Liberator introduced that ‘distinguished and honourable gentleman, Sir Roderick O’Carroll of Kilsheelin Castle, Templetown’. Her embarrassed papa had not anticipated rising to confront such a throng of people. He was glad when he could sit down and listen to the Liberator.

  O’Connell was declaiming that in the last war with France, Ireland had supplied the general and two-thirds of the officers and men in the English Army and Navy. A clock struck. O’Connell fumbled automatically for his watch, ‘And yet, she has no parliament—’ then stopped dead and whispered.

  Before he could resume, Tom Steele was on his feet. His lugubrious voice, cracked with emotion, was announcing. ‘Sacred Heavens! Have I lived to see this day of woe! A transaction unparalleled in the annals of infamy has occurred in this hall to the country’s Liberator, my august leader!’

  A gasp went through the audience. Roderick rose and looked anxiously towards the gallery that held his wife and child. He had exposed them to danger by bringing them! Surely Steele was speaking of attempted assassination. Steele drew his hands across his face but his voice still held tears as he said brokenly, ‘The watch of the illustrious Liberator has been stolen from his pocket!’ The Liberator calmed the pandemonium. In the gallery, Mrs. Kennedy-Sherwin whispered to Margaret that there was nothing to fear. The audience was soon lost in O’Connell’s vituperative eloquence against Wellington and Peel. Roderick, chuckling away, found himself crushed sideways by a powerful gentleman. He was holding aloft a gold watch which he placed in front of the Liberator. Up jumped Tom Steele, his hand on his sword. ‘Name the base miscreant! He is not fit to live!’

  ‘It was found, sir,’ said the gentleman calmly, ‘under your pillow in your bedroom.’

  Later in the Ladies’ Gallery a toast to Father Matthew, the Temperance leader, was drunk with tea while the band played ‘Ned Gower’s Fairewell to Whiskey’. ‘It appears to be a lingering “Farewell”,’ said Lady Cullen looking down at Lord Cullen who rose more unsteadily to raise his bumper each time the toast was repeated. When the band changed to ‘We’ll Never Get Drunk Again’, she saw him go down for the third time and disappear beneath the table. There was nothing she could do about it because O’Connell was on his feet reading a report on Ireland written by some gentleman sent over by The Times.

  ‘He says here,’ cried O’Connell, ‘that Irish women are ugly.’ There was an angry roar. Then every gentleman rose to his feet and raised his glass towards the ladies. Margaret lifted her fan in front of her face and there was a fluttering as all the ladies did likewise against the onslaught of all these staring gentlemen. Sterrin looked up over her head to see what it was that some of the gentlemen were actually pointing at. It was a great bunch of mistletoe.

  ‘I’ll die! I vow I shall die,’ wailed Mrs. Kennedy-Sherwin.

  ‘Not likely,’ said Lady Cullen.

  The Liberator, eager to get home to his correspondence, could not see the cause of the commotion that barred his way; but as the wardens with Tom Steele booming, ‘Make way for the Liberator!’ cleared a path, the cause came in sight. He strode forward and placed his hand on the shoulder of the gallant who was bending over Mrs. Kennedy-Sherwin under the mistletoe. ‘Young man,’ he cried, ‘make way for the Liberator!’ Mrs. Kennedy-Sherwin found herself engulfed in the tidal wave of the Liberator’s amorous kisses.

  ‘Come,’ said Margaret to Sterrin. ‘We have had enough excitement for today. Let us find your father.’

  It had been a puzzling day, Sterrin thought, as she and Margaret pushed their way through the crowd. She would be glad to find her father, of course, but gladder still if Margaret had said: ‘We have had enough of Dublin. Let us go back to Kilsheelin.’

  12

  Young Thomas crouched with his ear to the ground. ‘Ah, here they are,’ he murmured. He had caught a faint subterranean rumble. They would soon be here. Young Thomas was to serve the marriage mass of Ulick Prendergast’s daughter. He knew the Latin and the priest had asked him to assist.

  He straightened and resumed his arm-swinging and stamping up and down past the back lodge. It must be half five by now thought he. The night still held the dawn in its dark grip.

  A few minutes later there was a gruff, ‘Whoa there!’ and Ulick Prendergast’s side-car reined in.

  Thomas stepped forward with a God-save-you. The gruff voice said, ‘God save you kindly. Let you get up on this side. Why weren’t you at the cross?’

  The devil whip you! thought Thomas; and I obliging you! ‘The priest told me,’ he answered civilly, ‘that you’d pick me up at the back lodge at half five.’

  ‘It would have shortened the journey had you waited at the cross.’ The prosperous old farmer was as economical of words and time on the wedding morning of his only child as on all other occasions.

/>   An overhanging branch spent a spray of drops over their heads. The still figure on the far side moved to avoid them. She seemed to have a queer, bulky shape and, like her father, nothing much to say for herself. Maybe she was wondering what kind of a man she was to marry. Maybe she had not seen him yet!

  Thomas sighed as he thought of the romances that he read about in books. It seemed that only the Quality could have Love Matches! Sometimes in the kitchen Mrs. Stacey talked of the love match between the Sir and her Ladyship. How he had seen her floating over a frozen lake in a wonderful place called the Park of Nightingales; how he had stood transfixed at the sight of her loveliness; waited while her servant removed her skates, then followed her carriage all the way to her home. Her Ladyship, they said, had peeped the Sir out of the corner of her bonnet and it was love at first sight with her, too.

  It would be the same with Miss Sterrin. One day she would come galloping down the high road on her horse and some rich nobleman with a sword at his side and silver spurs jingling against a fine black horse would fall madly in love with her. Miss Sterrin, for some reason or other, would be dressed like her ancestress in a green cloak embroidered with the seven colours that only those of royal blood used to wear; and it flying from her shoulders and her red curls flying in the wind; the way Athele O’Carroll must have looked when she dashed on her horse through the woods to warn her father, the little red-haired Sir Timothy, that Cromwell was riding for Kilsheelin.

  A little sound from the far side of the car interrupted Thomas’s daydreams. The girl had started to say something, then stopped. The church spire was in view; the end of her life! The familiar life of home, girlhood, convent, home again, her cosy bedroom above the ceiling of which lay a paradise of bees. Thomas heard the little sobbing sigh.

  From another direction three men and a boy were driving towards the church. The driver, James Keating of Poolgower, looked across the well at his second son, John. ‘You won’t change your mind about Dublin?’

  ‘No.’ The small monosyllable was gorged with emotion: anger; resentment; despair.

  The eldest son, James’s James, turned round to his brother. ‘People will think that we are doing things mean.’

  ‘I don’t give a tinker’s curse what people think.’

  They were trying to get the bridegroom to go to Dublin for the Bed of Honour. A cold bed, he thought. He had no heart to go away with a woman he had never set eyes on. He had never dreamed of a match for years to come. He, a younger son with no prospects; but neither had he dreamed of this unexpected legacy of a farm from his uncle. Overnight he had become a man of property. Overnight too, almost, the matchmakers had come to ‘draw down’ talk of a match with the daughter of the rich and miserly Ulick Prendergast. He was lucky, they told him. A nice-looking girl with everything that a man could wish for! What did they know about a moment of dance? What a man might wish for? The face that had haunted him for months floated back. With it came the golden scene around the Platform Dance; the girl he had faced in the Change Partners; a laughing, breathless moment as he swung her off her feet, then gripped her tight until she had steadied herself, then a shocked voice summoning her back to her parents’ phaeton.

  The car halted. They were at the church. John stepped down.

  A sudden squall of wind and rain blew across the chapel yard. ‘We may as well move inside,’ said James Keating. Inside! Not even the preface of a meeting in the chapel yard! By God! Was he mad to have consented to this marriage barter? Hadn’t he finished with his father’s tyranny when he acquired a farm of his own? Scenes from a life that was over flashed across John’s mind; that first sight of the field that had fallen to them from the skies; the sight of a resplendent officer springing eagerly up the steps of the Protestant church, smiling, because he was going to marry the woman of his choice; and again, recurring, unforgettable—a laughing colleen swinging in his arms to the sound of fiddles; losing her footing so that his hold on her tightened to a caress, a mingling of laughter, a brushing of soft hair against his cheek—‘There is no sense.’ John started to shout but no one noticed anything because his voice scraped through on a low pitch. ‘There is no sense in getting wet out here.’

  During the Kyrie he peeped sideways from under his hands. That must be she in the blue bonnet! Her head was bowed and the bonnet brim covered her face completely.

  But her right eye had found a peephole through the involutions of the velvet ruching beneath her brim. It strained for a sight of the bald head, the toothlessness that had caused a bride to fly from this very church two weeks ago. In the last panic-stricken stretch of the journey she had resigned herself to some such destiny. The peephole showed her a young man with glossy hair, lots of it, one wide shoulder—and the other one must be just as wide—covered in the finest chocolate coloured broadcloth with a velvet collar.

  Life flowed back into her veins. It gave her strength to lift her head and look full at his face. It couldn’t be! It couldn’t! The stranger that she had danced with for a moment in the Change Partners at the Crossroads dance last Assumption Day. The stranger whom she could not forget! ‘’Tis a sin for me to let thought of that face into my mind this morning.’ But the rosary beads no longer hung limply from her hands. They danced. All that it needed was music. And the heart inside of her was filled with music!

  Through the third and fourth finger of his left hand he had glimpsed a pair of small white hands. Hm! Very white indeed for a farmer’s daughter who did the amount of work that was claimed for her at the matchmaking. His eyes slewed up higher.

  The blue bonnet turned full face at the eye between his fingers. His heart gave a mighty thud across the width of his chest. I’m dreaming, he cried out in the silence of his mind. This morning of all mornings, I ought not to have let that face into my mind!

  But the face wasn’t in his mind at all. It was there across the aisle. It was beside him at the altar. The little hand that lay in his for the ring was the one he had clasped on the platform dance at the Crossroads last August.

  ‘You wouldn’t read better in a love story,’ said the bridesmaid to the best man at the breakfast table. Old Ulick unscrewed something between a snort and a chuckle. ‘Truth,’ he said, ‘is always stranger and better than fiction.’ For it was old Ulick himself who had made the love story come true. He had recognised the boy who had danced at the Crossroads with his daughter; knew his family’s history and had watched its industriousness. The moment the inheritance of the farm had made the lad eligible, Ulick had dispatched his emissaries for the ‘drawing down’.

  James Keating took out his timepiece. ‘There will be a Bianconi at the cross in three-quarters of an hour. It catches the mail coach at Thurles—but I keep forgetting; you are not going on the mail coach.’

  The bride turned towards him with shining eyes. Joy and relief had distilled a radiance that glowed around her like a halo.

  ‘Of course, we are going on the mail coach,’ she said.

  ‘Of course, we are going on the mail coach,’ chorused her husband.

  Thomas tried to make his farewell to Mrs. Prendergast. He had been in a state of dread since he discovered the identity of the bridegroom. What would become of him if the Sir were to learn that he had served at a Wedding Mass for a son of James Keating; the land grabber of Poolgower, brother of the man who had led the Whiteboy raid on the castle and barely missed shooting her Ladyship?

  Mrs. Prendergast was pressing food on Thomas, recognising the boy, and James Keating sensed the cause of his reluctance to accept. ‘Perhaps,’ he remarked coldly, ‘the lad would feel more at home in the kitchen.’

  Thomas felt his cheeks stinging. This was the first time his servitude had been cast at him as a stigma.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll just break my fast with the three sips of water and then I’ll be on my way.’

  The girls were sorry to see him leave the parlour. They had thought him some nice-spoken college boy. A youth called Tim Lonergan, the s
on of a well-to-do farmer, had seen the hurt flush on Thomas’s face. He slipped out after him. ‘There is more divarshun here in the kitchen,’ he remarked. Young Donal Keating, a boy of about ten or eleven had seen the slight but when he tried to follow Thomas, his father drew him back. ‘Stay where you belong!’ he ordered. ‘Let us hope that you will serve the next Wedding Mass in the family.’

  There was always more fun in the kitchen; away from the priest and the parents and the uncles and aunts, and these uppish merchants, like the ones inside, who bought the Prendergast farm produce; and the schoolmaster who was using long words that people only pretended to understand and quoting, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment’, whatever that meant.

  There were no poetic subtleties in the kitchen where two long tables, end to end, had two people squashed together on every chair. Half a dozen girls were pelting backwards and forwards from the fire to the table and ‘Let go of me arm or I’ll let this spill on you, gravy and all,’ was the prelude to every helping of roast meat that they tried to place in front of the boys. It wasn’t bad enough having their faces roasted off them bending over the blazing turf and from the steam from kettles and pots hanging from every hook on the crane, but every time one of them passed the tables with a plate of roast meat, a hand reached out to catch her or an arm shot around her waist or some other piece of deluderin’ by play. Never had gaiety entered the scene of a wedding so early in the day. It had burst out from the morn’s unexpected romance like the sudden flowering of a nordic summer.

  Nora Campion, one of John Keating’s cousins, put another leg of chicken on the plate of a man who had danced in the very Cashel Sets where the bridal pair had met. ‘Lay that across your lips,’ she said, ‘and tell us all about it.’