Another Heartbeat in the House (24 page)

Last night an idle curiosity had compelled me to try the trick I had told St Leger about, the one that was believed to foretell the gender of an unborn child. I had performed it, not with a duck egg and a hair taken from the head of a pregnant woman, but with a needle suspended from a thread, the way the dancers at the
Variétés
had used to when they were
enceintes
.

It had swung to the right.

Before my mistress returned from Dublin, I spent much of my time sequestered in my apartment at Doneraile Court with my sketchbook. In it, I drew up plans for my house, adding a kitchen, lobby and stairs to the ground floor, and designating the rooms already there as double salon, library and dining room. A bay with superimposed windows to the left of the stairwell extended to the first floor. Beyond the pencilled wall of the upper corridor I outlined four rooms. My apartment – sitting room, bedchamber and dressing room – would take up two of the first floor rooms; the remaining two would serve as guest chambers.

My house was far enough off the beaten track to discourage casual visitors: this suited me admirably, for I did not want people arriving uninvited. If, however, I chose to entertain, I could offer my guests comfortable accommodation. This afforded me the best of both worlds; I could have my cake and eat it too.

I incorporated window seats into all the corner rooms, added an external privy, and a pantry alongside the kitchen, and, upstairs, I made sure to pencil in a window overlooking the stream. I went about the drawings in a steady and concentrated way, enjoying the work because I was utterly certain of its purpose. As an afterthought, I sketched in a discretionary extra storey above the kitchen, for I would need staff.

After I had submitted my drawings to St Leger's architect, I mulled over the pattern books that Lady Charlotte had brought back from Dublin, and made a list of the furniture I required: I did not want furniture for show or prestige – as had been the case in Mr O'Dowd's flashy mansion and Lady Charlotte's country seat – but for comfort. I wanted bookcases and a writing table for my library; a cheval glass, wardrobe and
table de toilette
for my dressing room; a games table and drawing-room suite for my salon; chairs, table and a sideboard for the dining room. Sundry chaises longues, sofas and beds (I specified a half tester with drapes for my own use); screens, lamps, carpets and clocks.

For the first time ever, I wished I had a doll's house. I would have taken untold delight in arranging and rearranging tiny movables in a facsimile of my home. Instead, I pictured myself walking along the corridors, upstairs and down, passing through doorways leading to other doorways, and through French windows to the terrace where … there ought to be a sundial!

Maria had a sundial in her garden. It was an ornate affair wrought in marble and brass, the final extravagance of her late bankrupt husband. It was the last thing of any value that she owned, apart from her jewels. She had kept it because it made her laugh every time she passed it: Mr Fagan had had it inscribed with the motto
Memento vivere
(Remember to live) a week before his untimely death.

I added ‘sundial' to the list, along with ‘stone jardinières'. On the page opposite was a record of invoices received for carpentry work, plastering, slating and glazing.

Running an eye over my inventory, I wondered if St Leger would balk at the expense. But when I handed him a statement of monies due, he did not cavil.

‘What will you call your house?' he asked.

‘Call it? I had never thought of calling it anything.'

‘You must give it a name. It's your palace.'

I contemplated. ‘What is that in Irish? Palace?'

He narrowed his eyes and smiled. ‘
Lios
. It rhymes with “kiss”.'

‘
Lios
. I like it. And what is the Irish word for “hare”?'

‘“Hare”?'

‘You said you had built your bothy where the first hare stood.'

‘It's
giorria
.'

‘Say it again.'

‘
Giorria
. Guer – ri – a.'

I tried it out on my tongue. It sounded rich, and faintly pagan.

‘So if you put them together, to make “the palace of the hare” you would get “Lissaguirra”?' I asked.

‘Yes.'

I turned to him with a smile. ‘That's it. That is what I shall call my house. Lissaguirra.'

Edie was entranced. Prospect House was Lissaguirra! It had been built to the specifications of her beloved Eliza – for Edie now felt such close rapport with the writer of the manuscript that she felt entitled to claim her as a beloved. She located the advertisement that Mr Quilligan had sent her and, following the floor plans, walked the corridors and the rooms upstairs and down, taking the same route as Eliza had done in her imagination, descrying the objects with which she had furnished her dream house: the bookcases and the writing table in the library; the drawing room suite with its threadbare silken upholstery; the elegant chairs, table and sideboard in the dining room. She looked with a new eye at the chaises longues and sofas, and at the screens, lamps and carpets that were now piled higgledy-piggledy in what had once been Eliza's beautiful double salon, and at the rococo gilt-framed looking glasses waiting to go under the auctioneer's hammer.

She felt anxious now, about the people who were due to come tomorrow. Would they look at the furnishings and curl their lips? Would they open the lids of the trunks full of old clothes and shut them again with distaste? Would they sneer at the quarry tiles on the kitchen floor and talk about ripping out the chimneypieces?

Edie felt a great surge of love for the house. She wanted to protect it, to cocoon it, to magically grow a forest of briar roses around it as the fairies had done in the story of the sleeping princess, shielding it from the outside world and preventing anyone from trespassing.

She wished that Hilly was there, so that together they could sift through Eliza's manuscripts and put all the pieces in place like a jigsaw puzzle. She remembered how, the summer they had holidayed here, it had poured with rain for two consecutive days and they had spent hours at the dining-room table doing a huge jigsaw puzzle of Notre-Dame. It was the most tedious subject imaginable, but they had persisted until the final stone curlicue on the final flying buttress had been slotted in. The ironic upshot of this was that Uncle Jack had presented Edie with boring jigsaws on her birthday for years afterwards: Westminster Abbey, Edinburgh Castle, the Giant's Causeway – jigsaws of such awesome, tedious complexity that they had become a running joke between Edie and Hilly. Now Edie had a perfectly extraordinary puzzle to put together, and no one to share it with.

For the second night in a row she took a chunk of the manuscript to bed and carried on reading, hoping that if she fell asleep with the pages on her pillow, perhaps Eliza would come to her in a dream and show her where the pieces ought to go.

The invoices piled higher. I had not dreamed that so much expense could be accrued in the building of a house, but St Leger was extremely generous. It was as though, now that he had been confronted with the corporeality of his unborn child (albeit in the form of speculation about the size of its nose), he was determined to ensure the comfort and well-being of its mother.

I had few opportunities to visit my future home, but on three occasions I tucked Lady Charlotte up in bed with Sooty and made her tea from valerian root (the best cure for her sick headaches and a reliable soporific), before surreptitiously changing into my old grey travelling gown and driving out with St Leger to see how the building work was progressing.

The first time I visited, the scaffolding was in place and I had to climb a ladder to inspect the work; the second time our horse lost a shoe and we had to go back; on the third occasion I did what I had until then only dreamed of – I walked the corridors, upstairs and down; I passed through doorways leading to other doorways, and stepped onto a terrace that had been paved with slabs of local white limestone.

For several months I had managed to conceal my condition with the help of corsets and shawls, and by making a great show of consuming sweetmeats to explain away my embonpoint, but when it became necessary to lace my stays more tightly and reef my petticoats higher to hide my thickening figure, I knew that it would soon be time to withdraw from the world.

I wrote to Maria, requesting a meeting. I guessed that she would not care to visit Doneraile Park (for Her Ladyship was longing to show off her newly decorated parlour), so when my mistress mentioned that she was fearful to entrust a pair of Venetian glass vases she had ordered to a clumsy Corkonian carter, I offered to fetch them myself.

In her house on Grattan Hill, Maria seemed blithe as ever when the maid showed me in. She was kneeling on the floor peering into a wooden crate in which the house cat was giving birth.

‘Will these kittens never cease!' she lamented. ‘Here comes another one. She has had four already.'

I crouched down to inspect the mother. She was sprawled comfortably in a nest of wood shavings like an odalisque, and she was purring loudly.

‘She seems to be enjoying it,' I remarked.

‘Yes,' said Maria, in a perplexed tone. ‘She enjoyed her last labour too, the contrary thing. I swore after my first that I would never do it again, but then I produced four more, just like Madam Tabitha here.'

I looked at the kitten sliding into the shavings, all bloody and damp and covered with what looked like curds. ‘Was it so very dreadful?'

Why did I ask? I knew it was dreadful – dreadful beyond description: I had heard the opera girls' stories of the agonies they had endured, the terror of imminent death, the fear that they might expel a mutant (in some instances they had – the deformed infants being spirited away at once by the midwife). But I asked Maria all the same, because, I supposed, I hoped for some words of reassurance or comfort from her.

‘Oh, yes, it
was
dreadful! It was like being kicked from inside by a mountain goat, or pulled apart by demons. It was as if red-hot claws …'

I tried to stop listening. Someone had once told me that women swap childbirth stories the way men do tales of derring-do. My mother had warned me not to heed the vaunting boasts of the pain borne and the torment suffered by her cronies, because one day I would have to undergo it myself. Here I was with a child on the way, watching a cat deliver kittens and listening to Maria describe how one of her babies had been delivered by forceps. The cat started to paw and sniff at what looked like a morsel of raw liver.

‘Tabby! You're disgusting,' scolded Maria.

‘What's she doing?'

‘She's eating the afterbirth.' Gently, Maria picked up one of the minuscule babies and placed it next to the cat's belly so that it could find a teat. ‘Still, it must be good for her, if she wants to eat it.'

I eased myself from my kneeling position on the floor up onto the couch and pressed my hands over my mouth.

‘They say the placenta's full of nutrition. They made me drink raw eggs beaten with milk when I … Oh. What's the matter, Eliza?' Maria looked at me with apprehension. ‘Are you going to be sick?'

I shook my head, my hands still clamped over my mouth.

‘Do you need a basin?'

I shook my head again. I felt as I would do when dance music stops abruptly while romping through a quadrille: disoriented and dismayed.

Maria opened her mouth as if to say something, then shut it. She folded her hands neatly in her lap, looked down at them, then tried again. ‘You're not … you're not pregnant, are you?'

I nodded.

‘Oh.' Maria stood up and made a show of brushing her skirts. Then she sat down beside me, trying to look unruffled. ‘I was exaggerating, you know, about the pain. It's not so bad, really. Some women pop their babies out. Why, they say that one of Louis XIV's mistresses gave birth while she was dancing, and just kicked the newborn out from under her skirts.'

‘What?' My hands dropped to my lap.

She nodded vigorously. ‘It's true. She couldn't let anyone know that she was
enceinte
, so when it came during a saraband or some such she just sent it scooting across the floor with her foot. So they say.'

‘What happened to it?'

‘I don't know.'

On another occasion I might have laughed. ‘I don't think it will be that simple for me,' I said.

‘Who's the father?'

‘Jameson St Leger.'

‘Oh, the deuce!' Maria seized my hand. ‘Tell me.'

I told her. I told her of the circumstances surrounding the conception and the intended outcome, and of the benefits it would bring to all parties.

‘It will certainly
not
be simple,' she said, when I'd finished. ‘Where do you propose to deliver the child? In your new house?'

‘Yes.'