The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  ‘You belong with the future. Remember that—Nonie.’ The sound of her name faltering from his lips filled her with a wistfulness that was a separate thing from that other all-pervading sense of sorrow that never left her.

  Roderick suddenly realised that she was parted from the Hennesseys. They were in the Steerage penned up with the crying children and keening ancients. Above the din Mark suddenly heard his name called. Sir Roderick O’Carroll arranged with one of the ship’s officers for Mark and Kitty to join the First Class.

  Then it was the final moment; when all the impersonal things are said: You have that address? You are sure you have enough of money? You will let me know the moment you arrive? But all the time, inside, other thoughts are jostling in a panic to get out; to utter personal things. Like tiny stars, the brief seconds that had brought their lives together broke and illumined his memory. He longed to tell her that life had not quenched their light; he bent over her.

  ‘Nonie!’

  ‘Rody!’

  A bugle sounded and a wild lament rose from the quayside.

  The Hennesseys came aloft, dazzled by the sudden light. For an insane moment Kitty had the impression that Sir Roderick O’Carroll was kissing Mrs. Black Pat Ryan goodbye. Then he vanished in the throng.

  Young Thomas, standing on the dock, saw Mark and Kitty reappear. He craned eagerly over those in front. He longed to call out something; to go on talking in a link of words to hold them to him a while longer; but nothing would rise out of the arid desolation that was within him—desolation and joy, too. He touched his cheek. He had never known a human caress until the moment when he had reached out his hand to Kitty and instead of taking it she had flung her arm about him and pressed him to her and on the cheek that she had kissed she had left a tear.

  A child groped past him and staggered. He steadied her and a woman murmured thanks and told him that the child had been partially blinded when the town of Loughrea in Galway had been set afire by the Big Wind. From every part of Ireland the emigrants continued to arrive, some well-dressed, some gentry already beggared by the famine. They gazed with haggard wonder at the foodstuffs piled along the quayside for shipment abroad; thousands of tons of grain were being loaded on to ships for England. Beside the emigrant ship a military transport ship was being provisioned for the West Indies. Emigrants watched the hams hauled aboard by the hundred, the firkins of butter. English soldiers guarded the waggons of corn grown by the starving emigrants; herds of cattle were driven aboard; even the skins of the asses that the emigrants had used for food were being shipped. They thought the sight was a progression of the food dreams that had haunted their existence night and day; a phantasmagoria of food stretching out before their eyes into the infinity of the ocean. A thin foreign voice called over their bedevilled sense for ‘the cream for the officers’ table!’ Cream in scientifically sealed tins went aloft so that the officers would have fresh cream on the high seas! Was the like ever heard?

  ‘Where did this food come from?’ It was a man from the fertile county of Wexford who spoke. Wexford men providently equipped for American employment with the tools of their calling gazed unbelievingly at the English soldier’s food. Where did it come from? What country could produce such food? And when they were told, their faces lost that look born of a submission to a calamity that they had deemed an act of God. There was a buzz of angry comment. These men had endured longer than the other emigrants. For, strangely, it had been in their own fertile Wexford with its people noted for husbandry, that the potato had first failed. They half-turned and looked whence they had come, as though they thought to return and demand their rights.

  Father Matthew, who attended all the emigrant departure ships, comforting those who had taken the pledge from him in all parts of the country during his campaigns, watched them take the last four steps. On their faces he could see the mutiny of their hearts. He murmured, ‘Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare current.’

  Thomas, standing sideways from the priest, his eyes glued to the ship, caught the words and half understood them. Something, he thought, about those who must go over the seas, something to do with those chaps going batty at the sight of all that food and dragging the bitterness of what it had conveyed to them across the world to another land.

  He took a frantic step forward. The boat had started to move and Kitty called out to him. Beside him the priest’s Latin still sounded, but now it spoke a blessing and Thomas fought clear of the surge that blocked his throat. His own voice startled him as it went across the space of water; ‘Sursum corda!’

  The clear, brave cry startled Roderick too as he made his way towards his knife boy. Roderick was amazed at the vibrancy more than the words, that had escaped in a kind of cadence from the voice of subdued servitude. But he stared at crowds pressed against the railings of the deck, hoping for a glimpse of Nonie, but he could not find her tiny figure. He felt a strange sense of finality, as if a large part of his life had been cut away. He stepped forward, raised his arm, holding it high above his head and remained immobile and unseeing as the ship moved away from the harbour. Not until Father Matthew touched his shoulder the second time and asked if he would share his luncheon did Roderick return to his surroundings.

  27

  Margaret looked up with an expression of delight. Lieutenant Fitzharding-Smith had come spanking into the drawing-room. He dropped a kiss on Sterrin’s nose, a box of chocolates on her lap then bowed low over her mamma’s hand. It was ages since he had been here. And it would be ages before she would see him again. He was leaving for India!

  Margaret, when he told her, forgot to withdraw her hand. All those years she had taken the friendship of this charming young officer so much for granted. And now when life was so grey and stark he was going away.

  ‘To India!’ she cried in dismay. ‘Oh, Basil, I shall miss you terribly.’

  No one heard Roderick come into the room. He had some idea of surprising her; of slipping up behind her at the embroidery frame and throwing his arms around her. On the way homewards he had decided that this childish situation must go no further. Two people concentrating on petty grievances in the midst of a people’s agony. He had not waited to remove his cloak. He was still holding his beaver.

  He went on holding it. One could scarcely throw reconciling arms around a wife who was clinging to another man’s hand assuring him that she would miss him terribly.

  ‘I trust,’ he said coldly, ‘that I am not intruding.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, with matching coldness, and then she remembered that she, too, had planned a different greeting. She had planned to run and kiss him and afterwards try to make him understand the way things had befallen on that terrible afternoon of the Ryan tragedy. But here he was as unapproachable as ever!

  ‘Basil is going to India,’ she explained briefly.

  ‘Oh! When are you off, Fitz?’ Roderick would like to have sounded more regretful but he was conscious only of his everlasting fatigue. Anyway, departures had lost their former significance.

  The Lieutenant explained that his draft had been ordered to Vizagapatam in a fortnight. ‘We leave for Cork tomorrow.’ As he looked round the room after Roderick had left to remove his travelling clothes, his thoughts went back to the first day that he entered it and saw Lady O’Carroll, in a robe de style with little bows running like steps of stairs from the waist to the neck. His first impression had been—a beautiful girl in a beautiful room. But he had made some facetious remark and she had not liked it. The brittle badinage of the garrison had left him unready for such superlative graciousness blended with the naturalness of a pleasing child. When the lovely baby had been brought and placed in her arms he had thought of her as a madonna. Later when she had lain, pale and terrified, amid the broken glass from the chandelier after the Whiteboys’ raid, his heart yearned for her. She had become his ideal of womanhood but, despite the smirks of the garrison set, it had never occurred to him to contemplate an illicit flirtation.
/>   He sighed, ‘I’m going to miss all this. You have no idea how much you have meant to me since that first afternoon that I came here.’

  Margaret fought her tears as she bade him farewell. She watched him ride down the avenue until he passed out of sight. Roderick stood behind her. ‘How could you?’ she sobbed. ‘Hinting and gibing! He shan’t trouble you again. You might have been generous.’

  Roderick had seen too many tears in the past months to be moved by those in his wife’s beautiful eyes.

  ‘I might remind you,’ he said coldly, ‘that there was little generosity shown to those who left here yesterday to face a grimmer voyage. But rest assured that Lieutenant Fitzharding-Smith will travel comfortably. Fresh cream for the officers’ coffee on the high seas! By gad, what will they think of next? Forgive me, I must not intrude upon the sacredness of your grief.’

  He strode to the dining-room and pulled the bell rope. He was hungry. Lunch at Father Matthew’s had been sparse. He sat before the dark expanse of Domingo mahogany, weary and dispirited. Suddenly he put his head down on his arms and as he did so he experienced the sentient feeling of familiarity; and then he remembered. The night of the Big Wind he had sat like this; in this posture; feeling the same, racked and drained; life an arid desolation. Father Matthew had said at lunch that the famine was another big wind only that its blast was foetid like the simoon* of the desert. Roderick recalled the invigorating uplift and resurgence that the Liberator and Father Matthew had brought to the land. The famine had killed all that. It had tainted both earth and people. He thought of the separate hell of each father and mother. How could we hope to escape? We are tainted, Margaret and I. The Big Wind was the Bard’s ‘wild huntsman’ careering on his eight-footed steed. But the famine was—a serpent, leaving a wake of slime.

  *

  Sterrin, too, watched with sadness as Lieutenant Fitzharding-Smith rode down the avenue. On a sudden she streaked across the park and jumped up on to the gap in the wall. He saw the red head pop up in the gap as he rode past the Sir’s Road and looked back for a last look where the castle came into view again. On a sudden he, too, turned in towards the gap, reached up and took her face between his hands. ‘Goodbye, you sweet child,’ he said. ‘When next we meet I shall have to stand on a chair to see Miss Sterrin O’Carroll, the belle of the county, go past.’ When the last hoof-beat had died away she turned forlornly and looked towards the castle. Everyone was leaving. Suddenly she remembered Young Thomas. Her gloom lightened. There was always Young Thomas.

  He was in his room. When he had returned after taking leave of Kitty and Mark he felt that he must get away from the kitchen atmosphere. This was one of the times when he was conscious of not belonging there. But then, he belonged nowhere. He turned on the pillow to look through the window at the distant hillside speck that had been for so long his focal point of outlook; up there he had known complete and easeful equality with his fellow beings. A knock shattered his reflections. The devil whip them! The Sir himself said that I was to have a rest!

  His pull at the door brought Sterrin inwards, clinging to the knob. Sterrin let out a gusty sigh. ‘I’m feeling terribly dovroanach,’ she said. Thomas’s sigh mingled with hers. ‘I’m feeling dovroanach myself,’ he said.

  ‘Did you know,’ she asked him, ‘that the De Laceys are going to America and Lieutenant Fitzharding-Smith to India?’

  He didn’t know. Tiredness came back in waves. He sat on the side of the bed but remembered his manners and stood up again. ‘Is Master Hubert going too?’

  She nodded. ‘All of them. All our friends are going; yours and mine. Soon, Young Thomas, we shall have no one left but each other.’

  He looked at her silently. She was getting long and leggy. It might be the famine, of course. But it might also be that she had begun to grow up. Another two or three inches would make the world of difference; the difference between her world and his. But what was it that she had said? No one left but each other? A warm glow spread through him. ‘Miss Sterrin,’ he cried, no longer dovroanach, no longer even tired, ‘your papa said that I was to have the rest of the evening off. Maybe Mr. O’Driscoll would allow me to exercise the old Rajah. We could ride to Lissnastreenagh. The blossoms are out.’

  As they cantered across the fields their youthful sorrows went floating off into the May sunshine. They dismounted at the fairy rath and looked down. It was eerily beautiful. The trees grew in a perfect circle around the edge, their branches so closely woven that they formed a flowered canopy overhead. The floor of the hollow was covered with pink and white blossoms. All the time as they gazed petals kept dropping in a snow of fragrance. By June the bowl-shaped hollow would be filled to the brink. Thomas reached to break off a stem, but Sterrin gripped his wrist. ‘It is unlucky to touch a blossom,’ she warned.

  ‘That is superstition,’ he said. ‘How can one avoid touching them? Look.’ A blossom had fallen on his shoulder.

  ‘That’s different,’ she said. ‘The Bard says that if a blossom falls on you it is a sign that you will marry your true love. But if you pick one yourself, it will bring you bad luck.’

  Young Thomas sniffed disdainfully. ‘The Bard lives in a dream world of pishoguerie.’ He was holding the Rajah’s reins over his shoulder but as he removed them to remount he took care not to dislodge the blossom that had fallen there.

  On their return, she pulled up suddenly by the side of the stream. ‘Look!’ she cried, ‘the fly is risen!’ He reined in beside her to watch the first flight of the mayfly soaring up dizzy with light and air after the long, strange life beneath the darkness of the waters. She flicked the reins. ‘I must hurry and tell Papa.’ There was a traditional glory in being the first with that ritual cry, ‘The fly is risen!’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Thomas dully, ‘that there is only one cry now that your papa can heed.’ Involuntarily she slowed. Even she understood that everything in life seemed to be subordinated to that unceasing famine cry, ‘Tá ocras orm! The hunger is on me!’

  Near home they came upon another rare sight. The Bard, wrapped in his saffron cloak, was pacing a plateau above a small tributary of the trout stream. ‘And where were ye, children?’ he asked. When they told him he peered at Thomas. ‘Ye have no call going there, a comely youth like yourself, O’Carroll Og. You might be spirited away by the Spéirbhean.’ He merged off into a spate of words that held more of dreaming sound than of sense. In spite of themselves, its witchery beat gently into the young minds of his listeners. Out of its cadence came the likeness of the Fairy Queen, the Spéirbhean. Beautiful in every way she was. Her hair golden, flowing in trembling waves to the ground; her eyebrows a curved stroke, deadly as an arrow; her skin white as the foam of a wild lake. The beauty of her eyes had laid a hundred men in weakness.

  Thomas, feeling in danger of being drowsed into a weakness himself, stemmed the flow of vowel music. ‘We won’t go there again, Bard.’

  ‘That’s right, O’Carroll Og. Let ye take yer divarsion here on the Hill of The Embroidering Women where the Bride’s price used to be paid. There is water here when ye race yer horses.’ He was looking down into the stream that had been there when the great Aonachs of bygone centuries had been held here and the horses and great hounds had raced on its banks and the Levantine merchants had waited patiently to sell their jewels to the ladies from all the thirteen castles of the O’Carrolls, who were contesting for the embroidery prize that the High King himself would bestow.

  ‘The poor Bard,’ commented Sterrin when they were out of earshot. ‘Isn’t it funny the way he mixes you up with the family? He is doting.’ She cantered ahead and cleared the bay hedge. Thomas looked after her. She might have remembered that the Rajah could not take the jump.

  ‘Why didn’t you wait for me?’ he said when he reached the yard.

  She raised her black brows at him and dismounted without answering. He flushed and stooped to unfasten the horse’s girths. She came over and looked down at him. ‘Isn’t it funny the way th
e Bard can never remember your name? He remembers everyone else’s.’

  He went on unloosening straps, then from underneath the horse he said, ‘It is extremely funny.’ He rose to his feet. ‘You see,’ he continued as he led off the horse. ‘I happen to be the only one who has no name for him to remember.’

  * A hot, dust-laden wind of the Arabian desert.

  28

  For the first time in his memory, the Scout had missed the arrival of the mail coach on the birthday of the reigning monarch. He had felt so strangely weak that he had been compelled to send his son to deputise. And the rascal hadn’t gleaned an iota of news.

  ‘I have to see to everything myself,’ the Scout told Constable Humphreys as he made his way to the inn.

  The ostler at the inn could tell him nothing but news of the plague. ‘Thirty died above yesterday.’ The ostler nodded towards the fever hospital. The Scout turned from him. ‘Do you call that “newses”.’ When he had moved on the ostler remembered something. He removed his straw from his mouth and called out. ‘There is a cake at the Coffee house might be worthy of your interest.’

  ‘Cake!’ The Scout halted and lashed the fellow’s insolence. Cake! He that had been first with the nation’s most momentous newses, that had bribed a waggoner with a golden sovereign to bring him the first word of the Liberator’s sentence! That had been first out of Kilsheelin Castle to carry to Templetown the newses of his release! He drew his sleeve across his eyes.

  The ostler uncovered. There would be no thunder in the House of Commons today. The Liberator had made his last speech. In a voice scarce more than a cracked whisper he had pleaded for food for his starving people. The desolation of his land that he was powerless to alleviate was slowly tearing O’Connell’s heart asunder. He had stood in the House a drooping figure of pathos as he stretched out trembling arms in supplication ‘...I call upon you to recollect that I predict with the sincerest conviction that one-fourth of her population will perish unless you come to her relief...’ It was his final effort. A year later he was dead.