“What’s that?” asked Brennan.
“I was only thinking of the absurdity of the thing,” answered Smith, and shook his head with amusement. “I looked into O’Byrne’s claim once, you know. Years ago. There’s not a shred of a case he can make in either English or Irish law. His ancestors were passed over because they were worthless. And the O’Byrnes of Rathconan had a perfectly valid English charter for their land.”
Dermot O’Byrne glanced at him, then spat on the floor.
But Garret wasn’t done. There were times, when he was somewhat drunk, when the arrogance of his youth would still return to him. At this moment, though his tousled hair was grey and his face mottled with drink, he still resembled the self-absorbed young man who had gone to Quilca.
“So I just find it funny to hear two ignorant peasants arguing over whether one of them should be lord of Rathconan.”
And now Brennan and O’Byrne looked at each other.
If Garret Smith was not entirely liked by his neighbours, it was not just on account of his unreliability and his drinking. It sometimes seemed to them that there was a pride in him that was unpleasing. Because of his learning, which was far less than O’Toole’s anyway, he appeared to think he was better than they.
A silence followed this last statement, therefore, while the two men pondered.
It was Brennan who finally spoke.
“We were not so delighted, Garret, when you married my sister.” He paused to let this sink in. “You seemed to have a great opinion of yourself. But we were not delighted. For it’s certain that you did little enough to provide for my sister once you’d married her, God rest her soul.”
“It’s true, Garret.” O’Byrne saw the chance now to take his own revenge. “You were never a worker. Nothing you do is ever finished. It’s a wonder to me you can pay the schoolmaster what’s owed.”
“Not that he always does,” muttered Brennan. “He has only the one son at home, and he takes no care of him at all. You’d think the boy meant nothing to him, the way he drinks and does no work.”
And now he had struck home. He saw Garret, in his half-slumped position, wince as though he had been hit in the stomach. Brennan didn’t care. So much the better, he thought. He half expected an outburst—for Garret could lose his temper sometimes— or a cutting remark. God knows the man had a cutting tongue when he wanted. But there was nothing. Garret reached for his drink in silence. Whatever he was thinking, he was keeping it to himself. His head hung a little lower. His shoulders hunched.
There was a knock at the door.
If he heard it, which he must have, Garret Smith didn’t move.
The knock was repeated, louder, more peremptory.
“Garret Smith.”
Budge’s voice. Brennan and O’Byrne glanced at each other. Why would he be calling? Brennan picked up the beakers and the bottle and placed them discreetly in a corner. It looked better that way, he considered. O’Byrne, however much he despised the landlord, also straightened up. Garret remained as he was.
“Better let him in,” said O’Byrne, and went to the door.
“Is Garret there?” Budge’s voice again.
“He is, Your Honour. Come in and welcome,” said O’Byrne with a warning look back at Garret, who still hadn’t moved.
Budge bent his head and stepped through the low doorway into the room. He stared towards Garret, who didn’t look up at him. Under normal circumstances, Budge would have asked Garret to speak with him alone, but the apparent rudeness of Garret’s manner annoyed him. He began politely enough all the same.
“I came to ask about the door, Garret. Do you have it for me?”
He noticed the other two men exchange glances.
“I do not.” Garret’s voice seemed a little slurred. He was still staring down at the table.
“It’s been six months.” Budge’s voice was one of reasonable complaint rather than anger. Again, he saw the two other men look at each other. They appeared to be enjoying Smith’s discomfort. “You must be nearly finished by now.”
“You are assuming,” Smith said, thickly but calmly, “that I have started.”
“Started?” This was too much. “Good God, man, what are you thinking of?”
“These gentlemen will tell you,” Garret said coolly, “that I never finish anything.”
“You mean you have deliberately kept me waiting this half year with not the least intention of completing the work?” Budge was becoming heated. “Is that what you mean?”
“To tell you the truth,” Garret answered, “I cannot now recall whether I intended to finish it or not.” Budge stared at him. There being no way that he could possibly guess at the secret anger, self-loathing, and despair that lay behind these words in the soul of Garret Smith, he could only think that the man was either drunk, mad, or, for reasons beyond his understanding, deliberately trying to provoke him. Well, the reasons didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to stand for it.
“You are a useless and a worthless man, Garret Smith,” he shouted. “Is this an example to set your son?”
He could not know that he had just probed the same distressful nerve again. But now, stung twice, Garret suddenly leaped up.
“The only lesson my son needs now, damn you,” he cried, “is how to fire a musket for the French when they come!”
Budge became very still.
“I see,” he said. Then he turned upon his heel and, stooping quickly, went out the cottage door.
Inside, all three men remained silent. Then Brennan spoke.
“Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said in shock and awe. “Whatever made you say that?”
It was two days later that O’Toole watched Budge take Conall Smith away. It was only his assurances that Garret had been drunk when he spoke that had prevented Budge arresting Smith as a dangerous person and sending him in chains down to the garrison in Wicklow. The boy’s fate had been sealed entirely. “You can choose,” Budge had told Garret firmly. “The boy goes to Dublin or you go to Wicklow.”
“He is not a fit person to bring up the boy, anyway,” the landlord had announced so that several of the villagers had heard it. Whatever they thought of the landlord and his Protestant school, there were not a few of Garret’s enemies who were glad to say, “He brought it on himself.”
And on the boy, thought O’Toole. For in their different ways, it seemed to him, both he and Garret Smith had betrayed the boy. Garret by his drunken carelessness. And he himself? What else could he have done?
He answered that question by asking another. What if it had been Deirdre, rather than Conall, who was threatened? Wouldn’t he have found a way to protect her? Relations elsewhere to whom she might quickly have been sent? Indeed, knowing what he did, he hadn’t even warned Garret Smith of the danger.
And why? That was where his conscience troubled him. He knew very well.
Deirdre. She loved Conall. How could she fail to love him? There wasn’t another boy in Rathconan, or in the whole area, like Conall. The boy was princely, magical. But also the son of drunken Garret Smith and the Brennan slut. Bad blood. He feared it. He’d seen such things before—a brilliant early promise followed by a disastrous manhood. No, he did not want his little Deirdre growing any closer to young Conall and one day—he could see it all too well—becoming his partner for life. He did not want it. He’d sacrificed the boy. It had to be done.
“It will all work out for the best,” he’d told Conall when the boy came to bid him farewell. “Trust me that it will be so.” A lie. “You’ll only be in Dublin, you know, and be back to see us often.” Two more.
And now, dear God, he was witnessing the boy depart. And suddenly Conall looked younger, and he was crying out like a little boy, clinging to his father, with Garret himself looking like a man before the gallows, so pale and in despair—worse than death, for certain, worse than death—and little Conall was crying out, “Don’t take me from my da, I want my da.” But the men were pulling him away, dragging him to
the cart that was to carry him to Dublin, placing him in it and holding him there while he turned round, his green eyes wide and streaming tears, looking pleadingly at his father, who could only stand there, stone cold sober, watching him like a dead man.
Then they flicked the pony with a little whip and the cart went down the track.
It was as the cart began to move that Deirdre stepped away from her grandfather’s side. He’d been holding her hand, but as the cart started, she slipped her hand from his and walked alone, quite slowly, down the track behind the cart. At the first bend, there was rock beside the track, and she stood upon it, watching the cart’s slow progress down the valley, standing very still, never taking her eyes off it, but watching, as it wound slowly away, until it was out of sight.
But even then, the little girl with her long dark hair stayed where she was, moving not at all, staring into the distance, and the great mountain silence, and the nothingness that was her future. And she remained there, as if she, too, had turned to stone, for over an hour.
GRATTAN
1771
OH, IT WOULD BE a grand evening, an evening to remember. The whole family was coming—brother, children, grandchildren, cousins.
“It gives me great joy,” old Fortunatus said to his wife, “that during all my eighty years and more, our family has lived without any discord. And,” he added contentedly, “I’ve every reason to hope this will continue for another eighty years.”
They were coming to see him and his wife, of course. But Fortunatus had also arranged a guest of honour—a personage of such singular interest and fascination that they were all agog to meet him—and who, with a proper sense of the dramatic, he had asked to arrive an hour after the rest of the party. “He will make, you may be sure, a remarkable entrance,” he told his wife with relish.
But even more exciting, to Fortunatus himself, was the news of another addition to the party—news that had only reached him at midday—and which caused the dear old man more joy and anticipation than he thought it proper to express. Hercules was back. “George and Georgiana will bring him. He will be here with all the others. They will all be together,” he allowed himself to say. “That is what pleases me so much.”
And now the guests were arriving.
After mounting the dozen broad steps to the front door of the house on St. Stephen’s Green, the visitor entered a stone-flagged lobby with a fireplace. Here Fortunatus, dressed in a gold-braided coat as red as his face, breeches and silk stockings that still showed a manly calf, silver-buckled shoes, and his best powdered wig, affably greeted his guests in turn.
First came his brother Terence, slimmer than Fortunatus, his face less florid, with his children and grandchildren. His first wife having died, Terence had married again when well into middle age, a widow from a Catholic family, and to everyone’s surprise had produced another son, a delightful young man named Patrick, of whom Fortunatus would happily exclaim: “Mark my words, that boy will go far.” The two brothers greeted each other with warm affection.
Soon after came the Doyles. If Fortunatus had spent years moving his family up the social world, now in his old age, he had relaxed. He was genial, even sentimental. And the fact that his kinsmen the Doyles, though rich enough to set up as gentlemen, had chosen to remain stolid Dublin merchants, with no trace of bon ton, was no reason to forget them when the extended family gathered. He was only sorry that his formidable cousin Barbara, dead seven years now, was no longer there to terrorize everyone. But here was her son, the boy he remembered her bringing to his house almost fifty years ago, a dark, rather taciturn man with grandchildren of his own, showing in the politeness of his greeting that he appreciated Walsh’s kindness in asking not only himself but all his family to the house.
His granddaughter Eliza arrived next—George and Georgiana’s eldest girl—along with her husband. He was one of the Fitzgeralds—another brilliant match that had raised the family’s social status even further. He had Georgiana to thank for that. And Fitzgerald was a very decent fellow, too. He welcomed them gladly.
Then two of his own daughters and their families. Well, he saw them often enough, thanks be to God.
But where were George and Georgiana? And Hercules? Ah. He saw their carriage drawing up outside. Without knowing he did so, he pulled in his stomach and stood a little straighter. The past, wishing to make a good impression on the future. The footman was opening the door; the butler was bowing, more deeply that he had before. George and Georgiana came in first.
Lord and Lady Mountwalsh were a very handsome couple. Everything about them was handsome. The fine Palladian mansion they had built at Mount Walsh, their Wexford estate, was handsome. The big town house they had recently acquired in the nearby development of Merrion Square was handsome. Their fortune was more than handsome.
For when not only sickly Lydia had died, very properly as she was supposed to, but also Anna, quite unexpectedly, had succumbed to a fever just before she was supposed to be married, Georgiana had been left the sole heiress of her father Henry’s fortune. And when Henry had quietly passed from life ten years ago, George had remarked to his father: “We’ve so much money that I scarcely know what to do with it.”
He need not have worried. In no time at all, a host of charming people appeared—architects and artists, cabinet-makers, rug sellers, silversmiths, antique dealers, horse dealers—every kind of huckster. Even a philosopher. “Don’t worry,” they assured him, “we’ll show you.” And making only a modest dent in his fortune, he patronised them all. Dear God, the man was loved.
Easygoing, nonpartisan—it had surprised no one when soon after building his Palladian country house, George had obliged the government enough to be raised to the peerage. And so, while old Fortunatus remained very contentedly in the Irish House of Commons, his son now sat as Lord Mountwalsh in the upper chamber, where, it was universally agreed, he was a handsome ornament.
A rustle of silk beside him: Georgiana, grey-haired but still in the full flower of mature womanhood. A soft look came into the old man’s eye. She had brought his family not only a great fortune but beauty and kindness, too, and he quite openly adored her. She kissed him tenderly on the cheek. Her two younger daughters he also greeted affectionately. But now came the moment. Here came the man.
“Hercules, my boy. Welcome indeed.” The Honourable Hercules Walsh: heir to all the family’s wealth and growing power, who had just stepped off a boat from England that very morning. Their hope for the future.
By God, the boy was good-looking. No doubt about it.
He was only twenty-two—they’d celebrated his majority down at Mount Walsh the year before—but he might have been a year or two older. He’d graduated from Trinity College, in Dublin, and was now at the Inns of Court in London. Not that he needed to follow any profession, of course, but these were useful parts of the education of an aristocrat with estates and a fortune to manage, and who would probably enter public life. He had a rather square, well-cut, manly face, which might have belonged to a young Roman general. His hair was light brown, thick, and grew forward, ending in curls. His eyes, set wide apart, were brown and even. He was quiet, though polite when he answered your questions; he smiled only when it was necessary, and he did not often seem to think it was. Clearly he thought it was now, for he smiled as well as making the old man and his wife a polite bow.
“Grandfather. Grandmother.”
But already his grandfather had turned his face towards the inner hall.
“Patrick! Patrick!” Old Fortunatus called. “Bring Patrick here. Ah, here he is.” The young man appeared, accompanied by his father. “Stand beside your cousin, Pat, so that I can look at you both together. There now. Did you ever see a more handsome pair?” he cried delightedly.
Though closely related, the son of Terence and the grandson of Fortunatus were an interesting contrast. In the great minuet of the genes, it seemed that, when each was formed, different music had played and different partners been sel
ected. Patrick, though about the same height as Hercules, was of a thinner build entirely. His face was finer, and suggested a clever lawyer or a doctor, a man of ideas. His eyes were lustrous. When in genial company, he had a delightful, boyish charm. When listening to a serious conversation, he would incline his head, slightly tilted, towards the speaker, with a concentrated but kindly expression.
As Patrick stood beside his cousin Hercules, who had given him a brief nod, it did not escape Fortunatus that a tiny cloud had passed across his nephew’s face. It would be understandable, of course, if young Patrick, the son of a Catholic doctor of comfortable but modest means, should feel a little constrained beside his Protestant cousin, whose resources must be a thousand times his own. But generations of family loyalty weren’t to be troubled by such considerations.
“How I wish,” Fortunatus exclaimed happily, “that our dear father could be here to see this, eh, Terence?” He turned to the young men. “When our father Donatus decided I should be brought up in the Church of Ireland and Terence remain in the Catholic faith of our family, he intended that one branch should always protect the other. He himself, let it be remembered, stayed a good Catholic until his dying day, God rest his soul. And in time it will be your turn to maintain that tradition, Hercules, as I know that you will. Let me see you shake hands now. There. That’s it. Bravo.” He looked round them all, beamed, then linked his arm in his brother’s. “Come along, Terence, let’s drink a bumper of claret.” And the brothers went together towards the parlour, followed by the two young men. Hercules did not smile.
Georgiana watched it all. She liked Patrick. As for her relationship with old Fortunatus, her husband had cheerfully remarked, many years ago, “My father’s quite in love with you,” to which she had sweetly replied, “I know, my dear,” and, giving his arm a friendly tap with her fan, “so just remember that you have a rival.” The old gentleman himself, while freely admitting his affection, also had a more calculated assessment. “I love my son,” he told his wife, “but Georgiana’s got the brains.”