They all congratulated him warmly.
“Where will you reside?” asked Tidy.
“There is an agent’s house down at Mount Walsh. But he will require me to make frequent visits to Dublin. His affairs, as you know, are extensive.”
“You will promise to visit us when you are here, I hope,” said Tidy.
“Indeed I shall,” said Stephen, giving them all a smile.
It was not until that night, as they sat in bed together, that Mrs. Tidy remarked softly to her husband: “Did you notice something when Stephen was here?”
“I think so. You are speaking of Maureen?”
“She loves him.”
Tidy sighed, but said nothing.
Stephen saw the telescope in August. He was on his way back from County Clare.
If anything confirmed for him the rightness of his decision to abandon politics, it had been the events of the last few weeks. With the Liberator gone, the confusion amongst the Repeal party had only grown worse. The Young Ireland men had found a rallying cry, however. The Famine was the fault of the British, they declared. And that armed revolt was the answer. It was everything his old master had tried to avoid. It was also futile. And, of course, they hadn’t the least idea what they were doing. If Emmet’s revolt had been a tragedy, this was a farce. Indeed, there hadn’t been a revolt. But at the end of July, feeling they must do something, some of the Young Ireland leaders had tried to rouse some villages in Tipperary. The Tipperary men had asked for food but declined to revolt, and a few dozen of the political men had had a brief fight with the local police in a small field. Hearing of it, Stephen had felt saddened.
His visit to Clare had been depressing. Having almost disappeared the previous summer, the potato blight had returned. More than half the crop had been ruined. There would be no letup, therefore: the sad regime of starvation and chronic disease would continue for yet another year. If he had not already been hardened by what he’d seen before, it might have been more than he could bear. Or perhaps—he admitted it frankly to himself—the fact that he’d saved one person, and brought her to Dublin, was enough to ease his conscience now when he saw thousands more who were probably going to die.
But there was also the question of the land. It was not only the poor who were being dispossessed now. The process had gathered a terrible impetus of its own. Cottagers could not pay small farmers. The small farmers could not pay the larger farmers from whom they had sublet; the farmers could not pay the landowners. And many of the landowners, it turned out, were so deep in debt that they were now being forced to sell up. “If this goes on,” Lord Mountwalsh had told him, “a large part of the west is going to be for sale.”
The question was, what should the Mountwalsh estate be doing about it?
“The government in London wouldn’t be sorry to see the western landlords go,” the earl had continued. “They believe that most of them are feckless and irresponsible, that they should never have let the countryside get into the condition that gave rise to this Famine, and that they have been shamefully unwilling to help their own people. I can’t say, insofar as it goes, that I would disagree.”
“The British are equally at fault,” Stephen pointed out, “in refusing to recognise that the problem is too big for a local solution.”
“Indeed, and history will so judge them. It is truly remarkable to me that, even now, the English can be so utterly ignorant of a country that lies so close to them, and with whom they have so many ties. Anyway, what they are thinking now is that, as soon as the western landlords collapse and sell up, they can solve the problem by turning the place over to honest yeomen farmers, who will look after it better.”
“And where will they find them?”
The earl smiled.
“When you think about it, they are saying the same thing now that their ancestors have been saying ever since they first encountered Ireland in the days of the Plantagenets, hundreds of years ago. The Tudors and Stuarts with their plantations were trying to do the same thing. Since the yeoman farmer is the backbone of England— and he is, Stephen—it is only natural that the English should suppose that the yeoman is all that is needed here. And such farmers do exist in Ireland, of course, many of Irish descent. We have them in Wexford. But they won’t want to buy land in Clare, and nor will any rich farmers from England. So my belief is that as land in Clare becomes available, it will mostly be bought up by the richer local men. And the question is, should we buy any of it ourselves?”
Stephen had looked hard, talked to Charles O’Connell, and Mr. Knox, and many other local men. After three weeks, he had prepared a report. His conclusions were partly financial and partly political. But at the end of the day, he was sure what he would say: “The Mountwalsh estate and family have built up such a good reputation in Wexford that it would be wiser to reinforce that than risk dissipating it in Clare.” Whether this was what the earl wanted to hear or not, he did not know.
He had been ready to leave when he had received a message from the earl, asking him to meet him in Offaly at the estate of a friend where he was staying, near Birr.
The great estate of Parsonstown, the home of the earls of Rosse, was rather what he had expected it would be, a noble place with a fine-looking castle. There was a considerable company there, and he was soon able to have some words with Lord Mountwalsh, who was eager to know his conclusions. He gave him the report but told him at once that he had advised against the investment in Clare.
“I was hoping you would,” William said with a smile “I felt I must look at the thing properly, though. I’ll read the report carefully, you may be sure.”
Their host genially invited him to join the company at dinner, but as he was very tired, he begged to be excused—only to be told that if such was the case, he must spend the following day with them and dine tomorrow evening, before he returned to Dublin.
And he felt much refreshed after breakfast when their host announced to the company:
“For all those who wish, it’s time to visit the telescope.”
If aristocrats are tempted to be amateurs, this could not be said of the Parsons family. Each generation seemed to produce at least one serious expert in their field. The difference was that they could afford to finance their own research. In the case of their host, the results had been quite awesome.
The great telescope at the seat of the Earls of Rosse was a monster. Sitting majestically in its housing, like a huge cannon pointing at the sky, it weighed four tons. Technically a Newtonian reflector, its polished mirror dish, in which the light of the most distant heavens could be gathered, was six feet across, making it the largest telescope in the world. “They call it,” William whispered to him, “the Leviathan.”
“The dish is metal—speculum. We actually ground it here on the estate. But in particular, I want to draw your attention to the wrought ironwork on the telescope casing, because it was all done by Mary.”
“You realise,” William murmured with a smile, “that he means his wife.”
“His wife did the ironwork?”
“Yes. She’s an accomplished blacksmith. She made the gates to the estate as well.”
It gave Stephen an interesting new light upon the aristocracy.
“We’ve only had this big one up and running for a few years,” their host continued, “but it has proved its worth. My contention was always that many of the stars we see are not single entities at all, but clusters of stars themselves, of possibly vast extent.” He drew out a paper. “Look at this. It is a meticulous ink drawing of a star that is in fact a nebula. This is what our big dish revealed. You can see, there are hundreds of stars there, and they are arranged in a huge spiral.” He passed the paper round.
As Stephen gazed at it with Mountwalsh, he felt a strange sense of wonder and excitement, and William spoke for him, too, when he cried:
“By God, we know nothing of the universe. Nothing! This is truly wonderful.”
As they all returned, William M
ountwalsh pointed out various other members of the party to him. His own brother was there, with a university colleague; there was a local scholar landowner, a fashionable painter. “And that,” William indicated a strong-faced, balding man who walked with a purposeful step, “is the great Professor William Rowan Hamilton, of Dublin. Have you ever heard of quaternions?”
“I have not.”
“Well, nor had I. But he’s the man who has discovered the formula for them, which to mathematicians is a matter of great significance. They say he’s almost the equal of Newton. And he’s an Irishman born.” He smiled. “What a strange mixture Ireland is, Stephen. On the one hand, we have the tragedy and shame of the Famine, and in other ways, we lead the world.”
“I wish,” Stephen sighed, “that I’d more of an education.”
“You’ve done well,” the earl said, “but I know what you mean.” And then he muttered something, which sounded like: “Have a son.”
Perhaps he should have thought of it, but Stephen was quite unprepared, as they reached the house again, to find himself face-to-face with Caroline Doyle, or Caroline Barry, as he must call her now. She had just arrived with her husband, who was in another part of the house.
She greeted him pleasantly, and they talked, quite easily, for several minutes.
“And the extraordinary thing was,” he told them, “I felt nothing.”
It was a week later and he was sitting in their parlour with the two Tidys. Maureen was sitting quietly in a corner. There were very few people with whom Stephen felt he could discuss personal matters, but for some reason, with the Tidy family, he felt secure enough to do so. As for the fact that Maureen was in the room, he didn’t suppose it mattered.
“My feelings for her had been tender before, after all; and when she chose another, I suppose I must confess that, after the pain, I may have felt some anger.” He smiled. “That was foolish of me. Unpardonable, perhaps. But I think I did.”
The meeting with Caroline had really been very agreeable. Before him he had seen a pleasant woman, a little fuller in the figure than before, happy with her husband, the mother of a child. She had been entirely easy in his presence, and the fact that she no longer had any interest in him as a man had probably prevented his experiencing any renewal of his former desire. They had parted the following day as friends. “It is agreeable,” he remarked, “that love can turn into friendship.”
Mrs. Tidy regarded him with a mild expression. She was a small, neat woman with yellow hair that grew naturally into small curls.
“There is something even better, Stephen,” she said. “That is when friendship turns into love.”
“Ah, yes,” said Stephen. “I’m sure that must be so.”
“You are not very knowledgeable in the ways of the heart,” said Mrs. Tidy kindly.
“Am I not?”
“No.”
It was just before he left that Tidy took him to one side.
“I have a favour to ask,” he said. Naturally, Stephen was only too anxious to do anything he could. “It concerns Maureen Madden,” the Quaker explained. “When you rescued her, she was entirely alone in the world. And yet she has relations—a brother and two sisters—but where they are now, and whether they are even alive, she does not know. I wonder if you would talk to her, and then make enquiries, to see if anything could be discovered?”
“Certainly,” said Stephen. And he agreed to return to interview her the following day.
The year that followed was not easy for the Tidy family. As one of those involved in the provision of relief, Samuel Tidy travelled twice down to Cork and across to Limerick. Each time, he came back more depressed than before. Part of the trouble was the new scourge that arrived on the island in November.
The arrival of cholera was not a surprise. The disease had been pandemic across much of Europe for some time; it was almost inevitable that it would reach Ireland, too, and when it did, it found its way easily into the drains and water supplies of the ports and the market towns where huge numbers of weakened people were seeking shelter. It raged across the country for more than six terrible months, adding to the causes of mortality already so well entrenched.
“We now have a quarter of a million more workhouse places than we had before,” Tidy remarked to his wife in the spring. At present, one inmate in eighty dies every week. That is two and a half thousand souls, or a hundred and twenty-five thousand a year. And that’s just within the workhouses. In parts of Clare, I’ve been told, people are dying at four times that rate.”
“Is it the workhouses themselves that are hastening the spread of the disease?” asked his wife.
“Possibly. But many of the people who enter the workhouses are dying already. One can hardly even blame the workhouse guardians. The system is completely bankrupt, and the government still refuses to give them funds.”
One small concession had come in February. The government had sent an extra £50,000 in relief. In England, it had caused a scandal. The Times of London had thundered that this extravagant gesture had “almost broken the back of British benevolence.”
“I met a poor law official,” he told her soon afterwards, “who intends to resign. He showed me the letter he’s written. He says that he refuses any longer to be an agent of extermination.”
But the worst moment for them both was when, one day, they found Maureen sitting in the kitchen. Upon the table was an English newspaper she had purchased that afternoon. On the page that was open, there was a cartoon. It showed a potato, large, blackened and rotting. But the potato also had a caricature Irishman’s face, which appeared to be corrupt and suffused with greed. In its putrid roots, the potato held a bag of gold. And under this picture, was the single word ROTTEN.
Maureen had burst into tears.
Conditions on the eastern half of the island were far better than in the prostrated west. Indeed, there were signs of a slow recovery. But the stream of wretched folk still came daily into the capital. And Tidy could see no end to it.
Meanwhile, there was the frustrating business of Stephen.
It did not prove easy to find any information. Stephen went to considerable trouble, but the displacement of people was so large that the chances of tracking a person down, especially a woman, were not good. He had started with Maureen’s elder sister, who’d left for England. Since the start of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837, records had been kept of English births, marriages, and deaths. He had employed a clerk to search these. It did not appear that Maureen’s sister had featured. She might have died somewhere unrecorded, of course. More likely she was living, unmarried, somewhere in England. He tried advertisements in the more obvious cities: London, Liverpool, Manchester. So far there had been no response. As for her brother, if William and his uncle had disembarked safely in America, they might be easier to find. But with the distances involved, that might take some time. Nuala, also, had vanished without trace. So many nameless people had succumbed already during the Famine that she could easily have died and left no trace. Enquiries in Wexford and Dublin elicited no response. But he kept trying.
And he was glad to help her. He admired her fortitude, and her grace under the circumstances. Each time he came to Dublin, he would come to see the Tidys and, at their request, spend a little time talking to her and telling her about what he was doing. Sometimes, she would politely ask about his own affairs—where he had been and what he had seen. She seemed to take an intelligent interest, though she would apologise for her ignorance.
“You have seen more of life, I dare say, than I,” he assured her once.
“Life in the conditions we suffered is not really life, I think,” she said.
The Tidys seemed rather proud of the talents they were encouraging in her. On one occasion, when he was offered a slice of rather fine cake, Mrs. Tidy announced: “This, I must tell you, Stephen, was made by Maureen. She has quite a talent in the kitchen. Indeed,” she added, “Maureen really runs the whole household better than I do.”
br /> Naturally, he complimented her on the cake, which actually seemed excellent. But he was careful not to say too much in case she should blush again.
During the midwinter months, he was not in Dublin much, but at the start of March, the Tidys had a small gathering at their house which he attended, and during this, Mrs. Tidy and Maureen sang together at the piano. Mrs. Tidy had a sweet soprano voice, but Maureen, they had discovered, had a lovely contralto, and it had to be said that, dressed in a long gown that Mrs. Tidy had given her, she showed to advantage. When he applauded warmly and told Maureen that he did not know that she could sing, she replied simply: “I had not sung, Mr. Smith, for a long time. But I assure you we have been practising since Christmas.”
Later, he had more conversation with her, and remarked that it must be a joy to use one’s talent.
“I agree. You have so many talents, Mr. Smith, do you feel that you are able to use them all?”
“Not so many, I assure you.” He thought for a moment. It was true that the agent’s job for Lord Mountwalsh called for the use of many talents he possessed. It was both testing and satisfying. He smiled at her. “I think I use most.” She was, he thought, a sensible woman.
“I think Maureen has a special kind of beauty, of the spirit as well as of the person,” Tidy remarked to him quietly, afterwards.
“Indeed,” Stephen said politely.
After he had left, Mr. Tidy remarked to his wife: “I think we made some progress.”
“Perhaps. It is hard to tell with him.”
“She let him see she liked him, I think.”
“I made her.”
“But I do not think he knows it. Perhaps she should do more.”
“No, Samuel, she cannot. It is up to him now. He must show his interest, or she can do nothing.”
In April, he came again. It was a fine day. There were spring flowers along the towpath, and Mrs. Tidy suggested he should take Maureen for a walk along it. As he had been debating whether and how to give her a piece of news he had received, Stephen readily assented. They walked, speaking a little, for about a mile westwards, then turned and slowly retraced their steps. The sun was pleasantly warm.