The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  She just stood there looking at him until he saw a tear escape the veil.

  He touched the veil. ‘This must be what Nurse Hogan had meant when she wrote me long ago to say that you had taken the veil. Why cover your lovely face?’ He felt her start from him sensing something wrong.

  Ah, God, it had to come! ‘I told you about the fire,’ she cried. ‘Did you not understand that I am disfigured?’ She turned from him.

  He gripped her arms so that they hurt. ‘Wear your veil! Always and for ever if you wish it that way. But don’t turn from me ever. What do I care about disfigurements? You are part of my life. I’ve loved you since the morning that I hoisted the flag to proclaim that you were born. What use to me would be the perfection of any other woman’s face?’ He drew her into his arms and held her to him and she could feel his body trembling. ‘You frightened me just now. You have turned away so often.’

  He was at the end of his tether. She could feel the panic in his body. ‘Don’t leave me Sterrin. Don’t leave me!’

  She put up her arms about him. ‘Never! Young Thomas, Never! Mo bheal asthore!’

  *

  Thomas was emerging from the solicitor, Hoey’s, office in Templetown, when Mr. Lubey arrived with his son. Ten minutes later the Lubeys picked a crumb of comfort from telling the dour James’s James Keating that he also was too late. Strague Castle had been bought privately.

  The three men watched Thomas as he went into the Livery Stables.

  ‘A play-actor!’ young Lubey sneered, ‘and by all accounts, a former servant at the castle!’

  Thomas came towards them from the Livery Stables. Deliberately, young Lubey pressed in against the wall of the sidewalk. ‘I never,’ he sneered again, ‘yield the inside of the path to an upstart!’

  Thomas slowed. ‘Indeed!’ he exclaimed. Then he stepped on to the muddy road and gestured the side path with a sweep of his arm. ‘I always do!’ He uncovered courteously and moved on.

  James’s James Keating never forgot a face. A former servant of the castle! He remembered a castle-servant who had served his brother’s Wedding Mass. He studied Thomas during the little passage of arms. James’s James was always watching when people didn’t suspect; watching in hidden places for the brother who had been ‘on his keeping’; watching Kilsheelin Castle that he had coveted; watching its daughter that he had coveted more. He had watched her yesterday in the arms of her former servant. He remembered how Sterrin had spat in his face.

  That evening James watched as Sterrin waited inside the niche in the castle wall. He watched her lover arriving and smiled when he heard the cry: ‘Halt! In the Queen’s name!’

  Thomas did not halt. He set the horse to its haunches and as it sprang over the wall, he tossed an envelope to Sterrin. She called a word to him. The police inspector, in the act of following, was nearly thrown from his horse. Sterrin had jumped into the niche as his horse’s forefeet approached. ‘This is private property,’ she said quietly.

  The inspector turned and made for the road where the British military had arrived. Thomas galloped across the park, over the haunted field, up the Slopes of the Embroidering Women, past Lissnastreenagh’s bowery shelter and on to the old mountain road. The military, out-distanced on the road, came within firing distance of him on the narrow track. Thomas fired back till his horse was shot from under him. He gave his last bullet to the screaming animal, then ran.

  The shouting and thudding had long faded away when Thomas crept out from a dyke made by a stream between the mountain and moor. It was almost dark. Thomas crawled across the moor top until increasingly large tufts of heather forced him to his feet. Their crackling brought a hare bounding out with ears alert for its cause. From another tuft came an officer also alerted by the sudden crackling. His revolver rang out but missed its aim in the uncertain light—then the sound of futile clicking told Thomas that the officer’s gun was as empty as his own. He started to run. The officer sprang and caught him. They grappled and struggled, wrestling each other to the ground. They rolled over, displacing great sections of bog topped with heather and leaving bare patches of black mould, slippery as butter. They skidded down the hill till they met grass and ended up in a great clump of nettles. Thomas made one final effort to rise but a grab at his legs brought him down with a yelp of pain. He lay gasping for a moment then sat up and rolled up his trousers to disclose a great zig-zag gash, barely healed. ‘Sorry—about—that,’ gasped the officer looking at the wound.

  ‘’S all right.’ Thomas took a long, painful breath. ‘I don’t mind bullet wounds at all—but—’ gasp—‘I simply loathe nettle stings.’

  ‘So do I!’ said the officer rolling up his cuffs.

  Thomas looked about him and made a sudden move. The officer grabbed.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Thomas. ‘I just wanted to get these dock leaves. That’s what I like about nature. She holds no spite. She always produces a cure for the stings she inflicts. Here you are!’

  They sat side by side doctoring each other’s stings with the soothing dock leaves.

  The officer looked at Thomas’s ugly wound. ‘Which side were you on?’ he asked.

  ‘Confederate. I was with Cleburne when I got this.’

  ‘Tragic about him. From around here, wasn’t he?’

  ‘No, Cork. But his father, like myself, came from around here.’ The captain economised on breath and let his face show his surprise.

  Thomas nodded in the direction of the distant castle. ‘Grew up over there.’ Laboured breathing made conversation staccato. ‘Remember?’

  Captain Fitzharding-Smith, dock leaf suspended in hand, turned round and looked hard at Thomas. He knew that he had made the prize capture of the Movement; the mystery man who had baffled the authorities and demoralised the army for eighteen months and who had proved, incredibly, to be the celebrated actor, Thomas Young. Back in the mess they were making wagers about his capture.

  ‘I still have a book that you chose for me,’ Thomas went on, ‘Saint John’s Eve, it is still my favourite.’

  A speck of white showed on the heather. An instant’s hesitation—and then away—a white hare with black fringes to its ears. Together the two men watched it run like a thing with winged heels; barely touching the ground till it disappeared around the shoulder of the hill. ‘People,’ said Captain Fitzharding-Smith, ‘call that kind of hare a witch in disguise.’

  The officer turned back to him. ‘You have thought of a great many disguises. How is the leg?’

  Thomas’s eyes still followed the hare’s course. To its right he could glimpse the tip of the canopy where the circle of hawthorn trees sheltered the dell that held the underground passage. This evening, as he jumped the wall niche, she had whispered, ‘Lissnastreenagh,’ and he knew that the secret door would be left unbarred.

  ‘Up there,’ he answered, ‘there are dock leaves with special properties.’

  They eyed each other. ‘Could you find them?’ asked the officer.

  Thomas nodded. ‘Do you wish me to bring back some?’

  The officer helped Thomas to his feet.

  ‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to find my horse. I got unseated in a damned ravine full of boulders.’ He moved off then stopped. ‘By the way,’ he called, ‘if you should find it—’

  From the hedge behind sounded a crackling. A voice called, ‘Are you all right, sir?’ and a redcoat struggled through. ‘What happened to your horse, sir?’ he asked. ‘Shall I—?’ He spied the tall figure limping up the hill and bounded in pursuit.

  His commanding officer raised up his voice. ‘I left my horse in the ravine behind that scrub up there to the left.’

  Thomas swerved to the left. More smashing in the hedge admitted a gaggle of police who streaked after the soldier. Thomas disappeared into the ravine. The soldier jumped. A moment later Captain Fitzharding-Smith saw his horse clearing the ravine with Thomas on its back.

  ‘Why the devil did you let him get away with my horse?’ he
demanded when he caught up with the crestfallen soldier. The gasping man could only look away to the distance where Thomas was disappearing into a dense circle of trees.

  61

  All of Kilsheelin seemed to be assembled in the Bard’s room. Sterrin, white faced, sat slumped in a chair. Hegarty was on one knee, his head down, listening at an opening in the hearth. A large slab of carved stone stood upended in the fireplace. Mrs. Stacey stood by the window, while Sir Dominic paced up and down. Only Lady O’Carroll was missing. She was to be told later about her new kinsman and the danger he faced.

  Suddenly, Hegarty cried out, ‘They’re here!’ All watched silently as Big John pulled himself through the hearth-opening. Once through, he turned back to grasp another pair of hands. But with a spring Thomas was in the room. He is in the castle, Sterrin thought, but still not through the front door. Mrs. Stacey had taken the initiative. With a ‘Céad míle fáilte, Young Thomas, a boucaleen,’ she had thrown her arms around him. Then, as if suddenly conscious of something about the voice that answered her, she realised that this was no ‘boucaleen’ of the kitchen that she was greeting with such familiarity, she stepped back. ‘It’s forgetting my manners I am—making so free.’ Hegarty, with hand outstretched, edged her away and told her that indeed she was forgetting her manners, then realising that he was forgetting his own, made way for his master.

  Sir Dominic, expecting the former servant to be overwhelmed to be greeted as a kinsman, was formulating a reception that would be reassuring, yet tinged with a judicious touch of condescension. He found himself according a youthful deference to a dignity that out-matched his own.

  It was in the dining-room later that Thomas felt overwhelmed. For after a whispered order from his master Hegarty, like an ancient Ganymede offering the wine cup to a god, came solemnly to the table bearing a four-sided cup of yew wood and silver, and placed it before his master.

  ‘The Mether Cup!’ The words burst from Thomas with a kind of awe. Sir Dominic had indeed made a gesture of high tribute. Sterrin, moved almost to tears, realised that the ceremonial cup had not figured at her wedding. No one had thought of it and Dominic had been too immature. She felt a rush of gladness for the omission. Here was its true occasion.

  ‘When was it last filled, Hegarty?’ she asked.

  ‘It was filled, my Lady, when the Liberator—God rest him—drank your health from it a few nights after you were born. It was a great occasion but—’ he turned to Thomas, ‘this, too, is a great occasion, if I may make so bold as to say so and proud I am Young Tho—Mr. Thomas, sir, to carry the Mether Cup to the table in your honour.’

  Dominic took hold of one of the cup’s silver handles. ‘I drink to Thomas O’Carroll of Strague Castle.’ Still holding the handle he moved the cup to Sterrin. She gripped a handle. ‘I drink to—’ She looked out over the cup to Thomas, ‘to Young Thomas.’ She pushed it gently towards him. He reached for a handle and their three hands held the cup while he sipped in response.

  Thomas felt incapable of speech. His mind was a suffusion of wonder; of fraternity, of shelter after storm; of a fine-drawn emotion too exquisite to bear. At last he said in a low, tired voice, ‘You do me too much honour.’ Then to cover his emotion he told them of the silver cup he had got from his foster-mother that was a replica of the one owned by the hermit of Bannandrum. Sterrin told him how she had drunk from the hermit’s cup and been told its history. ‘Little dreaming—’ she broke off. ‘Young Thomas—your eyes are closing with sleep.’

  He gave his head a shake. ‘Not sleep, they are just dazzled by—everything.’

  Sir Dominic observed the look that passed between them. He had been so taken up with the romance of this splendid clansman who had materialised out of the mists of the dawn, that he had forgotten that it had other aspects. His sister had turned the castle upside down last night. She had insisted on opening the subterranean passage for the first time in God knows how long and she herself had kept vigil at the exit! Dominic rose from the table with a remark about seeing that a guest-room was prepared. Sterrin smiled at the subterfuge. As if a pull of the bellrope would not suffice!

  When he had gone Thomas reached across the table and took her hands. And as he did he realised that in all his years in this house, in this room, this was the first time that he had sat at the same table with her. For a moment they sat silent, their arms forming a bridge between them.

  ‘Do you know what this recalls to me?’ he said, gently. He inclined his head towards their outstretched arms and clasped hands. ‘It reminds me of that early morning, how many years ago—when I went from you because I had to cross the bridge between your world and mine.’ He drew her closer and reached to kiss her forehead as he had done that morning. ‘It has been a long journey, asthore, but I seem to have crossed the bridge at last.’ His humility swept through her with a tearing pain. She placed her head on her arms in an excess of humbleness. That such a man should have had to journey so far and so long; should have had to suffer, to demonstrate his worthiness for her!

  ‘Oh, Young Thomas, avourneen! What must God think of us—of people brought up like me? We seem to expect him to create special beings to be worthy of our class. That there should ever have been a bridge ’twixt you and me! And surely God never built a bridge to divide people like Denis, the blacksmith, from us. Donal too, I used to look at him from across a bridge.’ She lifted her head. ‘People shouldn’t trouble to journey across such bridges. They should smash them!’

  ‘And why, my stormling,’ he answered, ‘do you think that there are so many wars and revolutions? People everywhere are beginning to do what you suggest; to smash the bridges between one class and another. Oh, Sterrin a gra, but I’m weary.’ He dropped his head on his arms, but raised it instantly. ‘Forgive me,’ he murmured sleepily.

  He rose to his feet, dizzy with fatigue and the ache of his wound. He refused to go to a guest-room—just somewhere with a quick exit. For the first time she noticed that he limped.

  ‘Did Basil Fitzharding-Smith do that?’ she asked, as she helped him to the couch in the Bard’s room.

  He shook his head. ‘America’s very Civil War—a fellow Irishman. He had a miniature bough of peace in his hat—and a long-range rifle in his hand.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Like Cromwell exterminating the Irish with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other.’

  He opened them again to the touch of her lips on his forehead and the sight of her face bending over him as she tucked rugs about him. ‘It is only a dream,’ he murmured, ‘I shall wake and find that you have vanished. You always do.’

  She tiptoed from the room. When she reached her own room, she flung herself down on the chaise longue, too tired even to undress.

  That afternoon, when she awoke from an exhausted sleep, she tiptoed again. A few steps, then stopped, then tiptoed again; fearfully, she raised her hands to the fastenings of her veil then dropped them again.

  ‘Go on, Miss Sterrin,’ Hannah had come up behind her in the mirror.

  ‘Oh, Hannah, I daren’t face up to what I might see.’

  ‘You’ve faced up to worse, Miss Sterrin. Go on.’ She tensed as her mistress pulled the veil with a desperate tug, without unpinning it from the band of velvet that held it.

  The two women gazed into the mirror, wordless. At last Sterrin turned to the maid. ‘I don’t understand it, Hannah,’ she breathed. Hannah continued to stare. Close as she had been to her mistress this was the first time in years that she had seen her face without being covered either by thick layers of ointment or by a veil.

  ‘You should have taken it off long ago. I often told you.’ She touched Sterrin’s face. ‘It’s as soft as a baby’s bottom. You can scarcely see the scars. I should have used the ointment all the time the way you did! My legs are still purple!’

  Sterrin had her face pressed to the glass in rapture. ‘No, Hannah,’ she answered. ‘You should have gone to Mag Miney every morning at the crack of dawn like my Ladyship did.’

&nb
sp; ‘No! Miss Sterrin, you never!’

  Sterrin nodded. ‘Filthy, smelly stuff with hair two inches long. You’d think it was the inside of a dead rat that she was applying to your face.’

  Hannah made a grimace of disgust. ‘But you ran from her at first. When did you go back to her?’

  With a sudden pang, Sterrin realised that it was after Donal had told her that he loved her, that night when she took the Fenian oath, that interest in her looks had been reborn.

  Poor, darling Donal! She looked at his ring gleaming on her engagement finger; then deliberately she changed it over to the right hand. You wouldn’t begrudge me my happiness, Donal, and the dear knows it is not too soon. She unpinned the ringlets that dangled over her cheeks and drew her hair back into a figure eight on the nape of her neck.

  Lady O’Carroll, descending the staircase, glanced back over her shoulder at the spectacle of her daughter tripping down like a schoolgirl.

  ‘When am I going to meet our distinguished guest?’ she began and then she stopped and stared. ‘Sterrin! Your face!’ She reached up her hands as Sterrin came abreast of her. ‘Sterrin, what has happened? You are transformed!’

  Before Sterrin could reply a great clanging sounded at the hall door. Dominic came hurrying from the drawing-room and opened it. A police officer stepped over the threshold without being invited.

  ‘I have reason to believe,’ he said, ‘that a dangerous and wanted criminal has gained access to this castle.’

  Margaret reached for Sterrin. Her eyes, detached from sensation, noticed in this moment of crisis, the scars that had emerged from the quenched radiance in her daughter’s face.

  Dominic was demanding the officer’s warrant and the officer was saying something about special powers of entry and search.

  The hall filled with policemen gripping carbines. Sterrin darted away from her mother straight down the passage to the Bard’s room. Lady O’Carroll took a frightened step backwards. She lost her footing and fell heavily, striking the back of her head. Dominic lunged up the stairs, shoving policemen aside, and lifted his mother from the staircase and carried her to her room.