Another Heartbeat in the House (49 page)

‘Sit down, ma'am, and I'll make you a cup of tea,' said Old Biddy, drawing out a chair for me at the kitchen table. ‘With cinnamon. I swear by cinnamon for a headache. Are you feeling any better?'

‘A little better, thank you.'

In fact, I was feeling dreadful. The headache that I had invented as an excuse for my ill humour had, ironically, become a reality.

‘'Twas exhaustion from all the travelling that brought it on. And you were up at the crack of dawn this morning, by all accounts.'

We exchanged an eloquent look. Clearly young Biddy had told her of our early-morning tête-à-tête.

‘I understand there is to be a wedding,' I remarked.

‘Something to celebrate at last.' Old Biddy took down a canister from the shelf by the stove and extracted a cinnamon stick. ‘It will need to be done soon. She cannot afford to leave it much later, in her condition.'

‘Indeed.'

In her condition
… Old Biddy had, in that laconic phrase, neatly précis'd the lot of thousands of girls: unmarried, poor, abandoned, pregnant, comfortless and – in the eyes of many – fallen, sinful magdalens.

‘She's a very lucky girl,' continued Old Biddy. ‘Christy will be good to her, and she is well set up here, with such a beautiful mistress as yourself, ma'am.'

I looked towards the window. Outside, Young Biddy was carrying the laundry basket across the yard. She looked ruddy and robust, and I thought of what might have become of her had not Christy come to her rescue, had she not been ‘well set up' with a ‘beautiful mistress'. There would have been no future for her, and no future for her unborn child. Mother and child would be dead, or destitute at the very least. What, I wondered, might have become of me, and of Clara Venus, if our circumstances had been different? If I had become pregnant by some man other than Jameson St Leger, if the father of my child had been heartless or dissolute or penniless, or all three? I had gambled wildly, but I, too, had been very lucky. I had had more than my fair share of cake, and I was still tucking into it with an appetite. I managed a smile. ‘When is the baby due?'

‘In the late spring.' Old Biddy poured water from the kettle into the teapot, then set it aside to allow the cinnamon to infuse. ‘She has said that she wants a girl.'

‘A girl?' No reasonable woman wanted a girl child! Girls were a vexation: they cost money to feed and rear, and were doubly burdensome if they were not comely, for at least a pretty face meant they could more easily be got rid of once they were marriageable. All mothers-to-be prayed for boy babies, because boys would grow up to be sturdy, dependable men who would provide and care for their mammies in their old age. ‘Why should she want a girl?'

‘She sees how much you and Mr St Leger dote upon Clara Venus. She wants her little girl to grow up to be as special as yours. And isn't she right? There will be a future for clever girls like your Clara: it will be a special kind of child who will pull through these benighted times undamaged. But there is no future for boys here. They are all dead or emigrated, like Phelim Daly. This is no country for young men.'

From the yard I heard a laugh. Christy had set his rifle and a brace of pheasants on the low wall by the gate and had joined young Biddy by the washing line, to help her unpeg the clothes.

‘I wish he'd got that fox,' went on old Biddy. ‘I won't rest easy 'til it's gone.' She poured me a cup of tea, and set an oatcake on a plate in front of me.

I pushed it aside. ‘No thank you, Biddy.'

‘But you've had nothing all day! Young Biddy told me you didn't touch your porridge this morning.'

‘I'm not hungry.'

‘Try it with a little honey,' she coaxed.

I shook my head. Then something seemed to snap behind my eyes, and I heard myself say, ‘Oh, dear God,' and then, for some peculiar reason, I started to cry.

‘What ails you, ma'am?' Old Biddy leaned her hands on the table and peered into my face. I saw her eyes narrow, heard a sharp intake of breath.

‘I don't know.' I fumbled in my pocket and produced the handkerchief that I had been using all morning to blow my nose.

‘No, no,' scolded Biddy. ‘It's a clean one you'll be needing.' She went to the door, opened it, and called out to Young Biddy. ‘Come here, you – young one! Bring the handkerchiefs you're after taking off the line!'

Through the window I saw Young Biddy turn, alarmed at the urgency in Old Biddy's voice. I saw her grab the laundry basket and cross the yard at a lick, heard her come into the kitchen, and then a muttered confab went on behind my back. I felt a handkerchief being pressed into my hand, and cool fingers against my forehead, heard Young Biddy say, ‘She's very flushed.'

Old Biddy uncorked a bottle and poured a measure of the vile-smelling liquid she had prepared earlier for Clara Venus. ‘Take this,' she said, holding the medicine glass to my lips.

I forced back the liquid and gagged, holding the handkerchief to my mouth. Why was Old Biddy making me drink this stuff? It was Clara Venus she had made it for. Where was Clara Venus?

‘Here, ma'am. Have your tea now. It'll do you good.'

Old Biddy handed me the teacup, and I sipped obediently as, behind me, I heard the sound of logs being lobbed into the stove.

‘Fetch more, Christy,' Young Biddy said. ‘And take a load upstairs. We'll need a basket-full in the bedroom. Warm a brick for the bed, and bring up the tin bath.'

What was all the fuss about? A flare caught my eyes as a candle was lit. I looked at the kitchen clock. It was getting late in the afternoon. Where was Clara Venus?

‘Where is Clara Venus?' I heard a voice say.

‘She's with her father,' said Old Biddy. ‘They went off for a walk in the woods.'

‘No,' said Christy, ‘he sent her back. She was distressed, so she was, by the notion of him killing the fox, so he sent her back. Sure you'd have seen her come by the yard, or in through the kitchen.'

‘I never saw her,' said Old Biddy. ‘Did you see her, young one?'

Young Biddy had lit another candle. The light played on her face, casting strange shadows on the planes and hollows. ‘No,' she said.

‘She must have slipped by me, so. Likely she's in the library; her play animals are there. Go and see.'

I heard the scuff of the kitchen door against the tiled floor, and footsteps receding down the passageway, and a voice calling, ‘Clara! Clara?' And then again, further away, ‘Clara!
Clar-raaa!
'

Old Biddy poured more tea and forced the cup between my hands. I had started to shiver, and could barely hold it. There was further muttering, and then I heard Christy go back outside, heard the sound of his boots cross the yard. Above my head came the thud of more footsteps, running now, running along the upstairs corridor, and again a voice was calling, ‘Clara!
Clar-raaa!
'

‘She'll be here somewhere,' said Old Biddy. ‘Hiding, I've no doubt. She had a grand game of hide-and-seek with her daddy earlier in the day.'

I heard a voice say, ‘But I heard them – heard them go off somewhere …' And I realized it was my voice, and that I had forced it from somewhere deep and painful in my throat.

Old Biddy gave me an anxious look, and set about folding the laundry that had come in from the line. ‘They went to the woods, so they did; they went off for a dander. She was in fine fettle. She'd had a bowl of soup, and she ate it nearly all but the carrots. Isn't it funny the way she never will eat a carrot? I made sure she was all wrapped up in her muffler and that she had her gloves on, and her cap and her new little boots that you got for her in London. She was excited; she was hoping to see some of the animals she might have in her ark, like the fox or a wolf even, or a giraffe, God bless her soul! Isn't she the funniest little creature, with her notions and her … her little ways. It's good to have her back again. It's good to have the two of you back, so it is. And Mr St Leger, too. It's a pleasure to – always a pleasure to …'

Young Biddy came into the room, and we looked at each other, the three of us, in silence, Old Biddy with a little chemise between her hands. The clock ticked on and on and then the gunshot came and I rose to my feet and dropped the cup. It broke so slowly that I could have counted the smithereens as they skimmed the floor. My skirt was stained with cinnamon; the liquid spread over the tiles like a dark tide, like mercury.

Through the window I saw an agitation of wings as a clamour of rooks rose from the forest beyond the stables. Young Biddy wrenched open the back door, and then she was racing across the yard, skirts gathered up above her knees. Old Biddy turned to me and gripped my hand and said, ‘Settle yourself, ma'am. 'Tis naught. Mr St Leger'll have dispatched that fox at last.'

But her hands were trembling, and I knew. I knew as surely as if my heart had cracked the same moment I had heard the shot.

I disengaged my hand and went out into the wood. I searched and searched, calling her name. I pushed through tangles of briars and brambles that caught my hair and tore my robe and scored my face, calling all the time, and finally, at the far end of a tunnel of trees, I saw them.

St Leger was carrying Clara Venus in his arms. Christy and Young Biddy stumbled behind, arms outstretched towards her. Falling aslant through the branches, the evening sun gilded the curve of my daughter's cheek, the crush of her new dimity pinafore, the fall of her bloodied hair.

There was an envelope pinned to the last page. Edie opened it with clumsy fingers and found a yellowed newspaper cutting.

An inquest was held some days since at a sitting of the Special Commission at Doneraile before the Chief Coroner of the county and a jury, on the body of Clara Venus, illegitimate daughter of Miss Eliza Drury, who came by her death in consequence of a gun-shot wound inflicted by Jameson St Leger on the 24th day of November, 1847. It appeared from the evidence of reliable witnesses that the deceased, a girl of some six years old, was walking in the wood by Lissaguirra Lodge when Mr St Leger, who believed himself to be alone, accidentally discharged his gun, which he had neglected to break. The jury retired, and returned in about ten minutes with a unanimous verdict of death by misadventure, which was unhesitatingly endorsed by the coroner.

The clock was near midnight as the court was cleared and the whole of the proceedings was solemn and impressive in the extreme.

It may be right to observe that throughout the investigation Mr St Leger's demeanour was decorous and sombre, and on being asked whether he had any observations to offer, he simply enquired after the well-being of the mother of the deceased.

THE FIRE HAD
gone out, and it was light outside. Edie put the manuscript down and went into the kitchen. She poured herself a tumbler of water and drank it. She took an apple from the fruit bowl, and a heel of bread from the bread bin. She put on her polo coat and her boots and walked out into the grey dawn, Milo at her heels.

She walked through the yard, past the shed where Eliza's horse and donkey had been stabled, past the vegetable garden where nothing now grew but wild rhubarb, past the gnarled trees of the little orchard, past the dilapidated hutch where the hens had laid fresh eggs every day. She walked a short way into the forest, along the track that had once been the main approach road to the lodge. In her mind's eye she saw Clara Venus running ahead, saw St Leger's horse come down the trail, saw Eliza in her walking costume with the satin lining, coming together all three beneath the boughs.

She walked down to the lake and waited for the swans to come to her, watched their elegant necks curve as they retrieved the crusts she tossed to them. She looked across the water to where Hilly had caught the small fish, and beyond to the far shore, where wraiths had once scraped a living from the earth around Aill na Coill, and where no one lived now. And when the swans had eaten their fill and sailed slowly back to their nest in the reed beds, she turned and looked at the house and started to climb towards it up the grassy slope. And as she walked, a poem came into her head that she had learned years ago at school: