Ashes In the Wind (2 page)

That night at the Duhallow Hunt Ball, Henry asked for Eileen’s programme the moment they arrived and pencilled in ‘HB’ for every alternate dance, for supper and for the last waltz. Henry was a better rider than a dancer, but tall enough to make a good partner for Eileen. She was nineteen, Henry was twenty.

There was a fierce argument when Eileen told her father that she wanted to marry Henry Burke.

‘The Burkes are Williamite adventurers, and Derriquin is twenty thousand acres of bog and rock with a rent roll of two and a half thousand pounds. Half of it uncollected. Mortgaged to the hilt, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Middleton.

‘Well, I’m not marrying him for his money, that’s sure,’ said Eileen.

‘And there’s a dangerous religious streak in that family.’

‘Deans of Ardfert and Archdeacons of Aghadoe over three generations? Those livings kept the estate afloat. Besides, I thought you were a pillar of the Church of Ireland.’

Middleton, not sure he was winning the argument, stoked the fire noisily and poured himself a glass of sherry.

‘That’s not what I meant at all. Henry’s grandfather, High Sheriff of Kerry at the time, converted when the Revival came to the South-West. Joined the Plymouth Brethren and wound up preaching the Gospel in Weston-super-Mare. Why Weston-super-Mare, for heaven’s sake? Sent me a copy of his book, he did,
Twenty-One Prophetic Papers
. Couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Said I could be a brand plucked from the burning.’

‘That was meant as a compliment. Henry’s not like that, and he’s certainly no Plym. We agree on lots of things. I like him, and for more than his looks. And he’s asked me – that is, he’s asked to come and talk to you. You knew his father, you invited him to stay for the hunt ball, you loaned him a horse.’

‘I asked the young men for you and your sister Agnes to dance with, but not necessarily to marry. You could have the pick of County Cork. And this one’s lukewarm about the Union.’

‘So am I,’ said Eileen.

Eileen married Henry Burke despite her father. She understood enough about the Famine, for there were many still alive to give her first-hand accounts of its toll on the Irish countryside, to convince her that Home Rule for Ireland was inevitable.
Her views enlivened and disrupted many Kerry dinner parties; several of her Ascendancy neighbours thought her a traitor to her class and her country.

J
OHN
B
URKE
’
S
TRAIN
is armoured. Slabs of steel have been bolted to the sides of the engine and the top of the cab, where the narrow slits are barely wide enough for the engine driver to see ahead. On the platform are two large wicker baskets, the source of a warm murmur that contrasts with the clatter of the station. Three or four grey and blue and white heads poke out and as quickly withdraw. A large brown tag on each basket says, ‘Ballsbridge Racing Pigeon Society; please release at Mallow.’ The crowd on the platform waits patiently; train timetables are a pre-war luxury.

Kingsbridge Station, an Italianate palazzo with Corinthian columns, carved swags and urns and twin campaniles, looks out of place in Dublin’s reluctant sunlight. The building appears embarrassed by the railway tracks, engines and ticket offices that hide behind its imperial façade. Bullet holes scar the columns and the walls, and the little dome that tops the left-hand campanile has been given a rakish tilt by an artillery shell. Dublin is dangerous but alive; not a day passes without news of a shooting, an abduction, an escape, a Black and Tan outrage, an IRA ambush. Ireland, an angry beehive without a queen, already has two Parliaments, Dáil Éireann and Westminster, and will soon add a third at Stormont.

John, a country cousin in Dublin, is leaving the front line. He has none of the war stories that some of his older Trinity College contemporaries tell of the Easter Rising – the battles for the General Post Office, the Four Courts, Jacob’s Factory, St Stephen’s Green, the failed attempt to take over Trinity. So he is pleased when his train is stopped and searched twice on the long journey to the South-West, once at Kildare Station by the British Army, once by the IRA five hours later beyond Mallow. He is travelling in a second-class carriage among the bank managers, land agents, racehorse trainers, clergymen and nuns. First class is for the Protestant Ascendancy and Roman Catholic bishops. Third class has hard wooden benches for small farmers, their wives and their livestock.

The British Army search is silent; no questions are asked. A man from the adjacent carriage is taken away, protesting angrily.

‘At least it’s not the bloody Black and Tans,’ says a farmer as the train is waved on.

The priest is asked by a small wiry fellow, a jockey with a lightweight racing saddle strapped to his bag on the rack above, what he thinks of the IRA.

‘I understand where they’re at,’ he says. ‘But there’s no absolution for murder.’

‘Have you ever been asked?’ says the jockey. There is no reply.

By the time they reach Mallow the carriage is full of cigarette smoke. Over the years the framed photographs of Irish landmarks on the walls, Howth Head, Killarney, the Cliffs of Moher, have turned to a yellowish brown. The jockey is asked what he’s riding.

‘I’m on two of Dinny MacShane’s tomorrow, one in the novice hurdle, one in the three-mile chase. Hopeful Colleen in the chase has a chance at the weights.’

The priest scribbles down the name on a scrap of paper, but when the jockey gets out at Mallow the farmer says, ‘Save your money, Father. That Mick Malone’s still a chalk jockey after seven years, and it’ll be another seven before he gets his name painted on a board. He never gets a decent ride, no harm to him.’

The priest smiles, puts away his piece of paper.

‘Ah, well.’

Beyond Mallow the train is stopped again in the middle of the country, this time by a dozen IRA Volunteers in a cobbled-together variety of uniforms. They are mostly fresh-faced farmers’ boys in their twenties; one of them looks no older than John. They ask the passengers in each carriage to open their bags. The priest points to his dog-collar and gets an abashed, ‘Sorry, Father,’ in response. After half an hour and no weapons the train sets off again and by the time they reach Kenmare the two-hundred-mile journey has taken six hours. John spends the night with his Herbert cousins at Muckross Abbey.

The next afternoon he is met by William McKelvey in the Humber. William, a taciturn Ulsterman, delivered the car, the first in Kerry, from Belfast in 1912, keeping it going for seven bone-shaking years over bog and mountain roads with an ingenuity that triumphed over the absence of spare parts. It is a long drive over the twisting mountain roads; as they reach the top of the pass the sun comes out and the Kenmare estuary spreads out before them in a dazzling mixture of colours – the colours, John thinks, of his mother’s watercolour box, Ultramarine, Cerulean, Indigo, Cobalt Blue. And for the land, Burnt Umber, Siena, Hooker’s Green.

As they get closer to Drimnamore they are stopped.

‘It’s a Shinners roadblock,’ says William. ‘You’d best do the talking – they’ll no care for my accent.’

There are four Volunteers; after looking in the boot they wave the car on.

As the castle comes into view in the fading evening light, John, in spite of his reluctant departure from Dublin, feels a returned affection for the rough grey stone, the absurd battlements, the long view down the mile-wide estuary of the Kenmare River stretching towards America. Three little islands, the Bull, the Cow and the Calf, punctuate with the smallest of dots the wide expanse of the Atlantic. The sky is grey, matching the stones of Derriquin, turning almost black out to sea where sheets of rain slant in towards the land.

His mother rises as he comes into the library. Eileen Burke is a tall, handsome, fair-haired woman whose figure is concealed by several layers of sweaters to keep out the cold. A fire smoulders in the grate, the bitter-sweet smell of the turf smoke telling John that he is properly at home.

The library, its four tall windows shuttered against the winter gales every evening, looks out on the terrace and the Kenmare River. The shelves are full of leather-bound Dublin editions collected by past Deans of Ardfert and Archdeacons of Aghadoe, the novels of Somerville and Ross the only concessions to the twentieth century. Eileen keeps her Irish dictionary and texts in the old schoolroom. John strokes the faded green leather on the round estate table with its six lettered drawers; twenty-seven people come here every Friday to be paid. The table is covered with papers and letters. Bills are stacked high on a single spike. On the end wall, unrolled from its long mahogany case, hangs a large map of the estate, holding by holding, townland by townland.

Eileen gives John an affectionate embrace. He is a head taller than his mother, lean, with her fair hair and his father’s strong features.

‘You’re the image of Henry,’ she says, ‘I’m glad you’re back safe. Things have got a lot worse here since the summer. But it’s bad enough in Dublin.’

‘Not so bad. Exciting, dangerous only if you’re a soldier or a policeman. William and I were stopped on the way here by four Volunteers. One of them looked like Tomas Sullivan. I haven’t seen him for a while, he was at the back of the group, didn’t say anything.’

‘You recognized nobody,’ replies his mother sharply.

John goes up via a winding staircase to his room at the top of the tower. There he can see the broad sweep of the estuary, over the trees to Drimnamore village and the Coomakista Pass, and back across the demesne to the wild bare heights of MacGillycuddy’s Reeks. In the summer he sometimes climbs the pull-down ladder to the trapdoor that takes him out to the roof. He has a battered telescope with which he has tried to look, guiltily but unsuccessfully, into the upstairs rooms of the Great Southern Hotel two miles away. The hotel’s summer dances are John’s meeting ground for girls, Dublin girls from substantial Catholic families living in Rathmines or Ballsbridge, intrigued by John but armoured against his inexperienced advances by impenetrable underclothes and fear of hell-fire.

All his treasures are in his room – his shotgun, which has hung inside a pair of trousers in his wardrobe since The Troubles, his collection of birds’ eggs, an old paper kite that his father made on his tenth birthday, two fishing rods, his books, his matriculation photograph taken at Trinity. In a silver frame he has a picture of his parents on their wedding day on the steps of St Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork.

The next day John wanders around the outbuildings and the farmyard. He goes down to the sea-water pool where whiting, bream and haddock are kept for the table. He has taken some bread to feed the tame mullet, now five or six pounds, that escaped selection for the kitchen and has earned a permanent reprieve. He walks on to Oysterbed Pier, where a consignment of spats from Arcachon has just arrived. The rest of the afternoon he is up to his waist in the cold water of the estuary with the two Doyle brothers, who give him a pair of chest waders from the oyster shed. The three of them lay the spats out in the ambulances, the wooden boxes on trestles that keep the young oysters clear of silt and starfish
.
Big spring tides, rising and falling fifteen feet, and the clean water of the Atlantic make the Kenmare River an ideal site for the oyster parc which John’s great-great-grandfather had established a hundred years earlier.

‘It’ll be a good year, this,’ says Jim Doyle. ‘As long as we’re spared the disease.’ He makes a sign with his right hand and spits over his left shoulder to ward off
Haplosporidium nelsoni
.

‘Here you are, Sean,’ he says, opening his clasp knife and shucking a mature oyster. ‘Taste the good on that one.’

John takes it, feels the plump, firm, slippery texture, chews for a second and swallows, the taste of the sea on his lips. He spits and smiles. ‘All right, I’d say.’ The mother-of-pearl on the inside of the shell gleams in the spring sunshine.

He goes for long walks around the Derriquin estate, sometimes with the keeper, Ambrose O’Halloran, more often on his own.

‘Don’t go to the north of the road,’ says Ambrose. ‘You never know who you’d meet up the mountain.’

When Henry Burke came back from France for a week’s leave over Christmas 1915, John and Eileen met him at Kenmare, a tall, gaunt, exhausted figure in a khaki greatcoat, a major’s badges of rank on his sleeves. Henry spent forty-eight hours in bed, then took John shooting for the first time. John, who had been out several times with Ambrose, but always with an empty gun, was excited at this promotion, at doing something for the first time with Henry.

Father, son and gamekeeper quartered the big bogs with a riot of spaniels on a typical Kerry winter’s day, overcast, scudding clouds, sharp bursts of rain, occasional redemptive sun. ‘A great man for the snipe, the major,’ said Ambrose to John as Henry strode thigh-deep in water and clinging peat to the far end of Reenaferrara before bringing it back with the dogs. Henry killed three snipe with seven shots on his way through; John missed everything, hurried, anxious, until instinct took over and he brought down a high, twisting bird with a shot that was over before he had time to think.

‘Good shot,’ said Henry, and John smiled with pleasure.

‘
Mionnan aerach
, the child of the air, we call the snipe,’ said Ambrose.

‘Let’s pick the bird,’ said Henry. ‘They’re the devil to find unless you mark them to the inch.’

They spent five minutes searching until John’s springer, the wildest of them all, found the snipe and laid it at John’s feet. On the way back the dogs flushed a woodcock out of the rhododendrons in the demesne, and John killed it cleanly.

‘Another good shot,’ said Henry as he picked up the bird, showing John the browns and dark greys of its feathers. He took out the pin feathers and stuck one in his own cap and one in John’s, ‘I don’t shoot woodcock any more. They’re too beautiful. Look at those eyes and the long beak.’

Two days later they returned Henry to Kenmare and the long journey back to France. At the station four days earlier, Henry and John had shaken hands; now Henry held his son in a tight embrace before kissing Eileen goodbye. It was the only time his father hugged John. The rough cloth of the greatcoat scratched his cheek, his father’s chin rested on the top of his head; they were both afraid to let go. Henry kissed Eileen, murmured something in her ear and boarded the train.