Ruby Flynn (29 page)

‘And so, now I know what happened to Iona. She died in the storm of ’47 not when Rory Doyle took her away and she was yer mammy, of that I’m sure. So what have ye to say to that?’

Jack turned to look at Ruby. She was fast asleep. Her breathing was deep and sonorous, her head lolling from side to side. He doubted she had heard a word. He reached for his pipe on the dashboard and balanced the steering wheel with his knees once again as he lit up.

‘Well, maybe just as well,’ he muttered. He had guessed she was asleep from her lack of response, but had continued in the knowledge that he had at least tried to unburden his secret. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ he said, as she turned onto her side to face him and noisily sucked her thumb. Jack smiled to himself. In her waking hours she was as independent as any woman he had ever met and yet, looking at her as she slept, she could have been but a child. ‘Let Ballyford’s secret lie,’ he said, as he pulled on his pipe and drove onto the unlit road home.

Ruby woke with a shiver as they passed through Mulranny.

‘Ah, you’ve woken. Grand, I just need to stop.’ Jack pulled the cab over outside a cottage, which fronted directly onto the road. No sooner had Jack stepped out of the cab than the cottage door was flung open and Ruby heard a man shout out to Jack in greeting. Ruby noticed that a fire burned brightly inside the room and behind him, in the light of the lamps, she could see children sitting around the fire.

Now it seemed that she and Jack were being invited to step inside for a bite. Ruby had learnt, from her day trip to Doohoma, that there was no point whatsoever in refusing. Hospitality reached out from every roadside home and no one was more welcome than a weary traveller.

Inside the warm cottage, Ruby quickly became the centre of attention as the mammy of them all, Mrs Kenney, pushed a plate of fried potatoes into her hand and the children began to ask her questions about the castle.

‘Is it true the castle is haunted?’ asked a little girl who had been sitting at the window.

‘Not at all,’ said Ruby. ‘I have never seen a ghost,’ she lied.

‘There are a few stories about that place, I can tell you,’ said Mrs Kenney. Ruby saw Jack wink at her and gently shake his head.

‘Now, we’ll have none of that talk,’ said Mr Kenney, handing two glasses of a strange-smelling cloudy liquid to Ruby and Jack.

Jack downed his in one and thumped his chest with his clenched fist. ‘Sure, that’s the best I have tasted for some time.’

‘The talk is there’s to be a ball at the castle.’ Mrs Kenney looked at Ruby.

‘There is indeed. I think the whole of Ireland must know. We have been to fetch the provisions from Galway. The rest will be delivered from Dublin in a few days,’ said Ruby.

‘The van is loaded,’ said Jack. ‘I can feel every pebble on the road hitting my arse the cab is so low.’

‘My grandmother used to tell a story of a witch who lived in this very cottage and who finished her days up at the castle,’ said Mrs Kenney, sitting down in her rocker next to the fire, ready to step into the role of storyteller, the strongest of all Irish traditions.

‘In the time of the famine, it was now. She said everyone who lived in this cottage died, except for a young witch and she was rescued by the lord, and that when he sent her to the poorhouse, she cast a spell on the FitzDeanes.’

‘Hush your mouth, woman,’ said her husband. ‘People from the castle don’t want to hear all that nonsense your granny came out with. Sure, she was only sober for the first hour of the day. She talked nonsense.’

‘That is not so,’ Mrs Kenney said indignantly. ‘Told us some awful stories my granny did, God rest her soul. Three months later, the lord of Ballyford, he was dead. Him and his whole family. An awful accident. ’Tis no accident when a witch casts a curse. The story goes that Lord Owen fell in love with the witch. Eilinora her name was and they say she was the most beautiful woman ever to have been born in these parts. She was of such beauty she would take the eyes right out of a man’s head, just to look at her. She had Lord Owen captured, so much so that when he heard news of the famine, he rushed back to Ireland from England, on some made up story of having to write a report, and despite the danger to himself he secretly rode out here to find the young witch. She was within minutes of her life when he saved her, scooped her up on his horse and carried her all the way back to Ballyford, but not without danger to his own life, ’twas not an easy ride so it wasn’t. He was attacked by gangs of starving men on the journey back: men waving sticks and wanting food and his horse from under him, but he fought them off and carried her like the wind across the bog on his horse back to Ballyford. Some say the men fell to the ground in disbelief, because they saw his horse lift into the air and fly clean off the bog as she sat there in front of him. ’Twas like the horse had wings.’

‘Woman, will ye stop!’ Mr Kenney shouted.

‘No, please don’t stop there,’ said Ruby, handing her empty plate to the eldest child. ‘What happened to this Eilinora? Are her family still at Ballyford?’ Ruby’s curiosity was aroused.

Despite his every instinct pulling and telling him they should hurry and get a move on, back to the castle, Jack couldn’t help himself. He, too, wanted to hear more. Jack had already heard the story a hundred times at wakes on the estate and it always attracted the largest crowd, but it didn’t detract from the thrill of the telling again. He imagined it was him and his Amy. He would ride through a thousand bogs and battle a million men to save her and he would make his horse fly if it were him. He was sure every word of the myth was true.

Mrs Kenney needed little encouragement to carry on.

‘He carried Eilinora into the castle and nursed her on a pallet in the kitchen. By now, he was completely under her spell and he visited her night and day and never left her side. The staff, they would see him slip into the kitchen after they had already taken to their beds for the night and one of the maids told of how she came early into the kitchen one morning and found the lord asleep on the kitchen chair where he had been watching over the half-dead girl in front of the fire.

‘Now, someone got a sneaky word to his wife – ’twas the cook, everyone is convinced of that – and told her all that was happening. Lord Owen’s wife, she laid down the law and wrote that the girl had to be sent to the poorhouse in Galway. Trouble was, by the time she got there, his child was sat in her belly. Eilinora was madly determined she was, she would bear a child of Ballyford whatever it took. His wife ordered he take the girl himself and to make sure the poorhouse took her and that was what he did. Lady Lydia wasn’t having it any other way. He was a kind man, so he gave them sure enough money for her keep and she had a room of her own, to save her from the typhus. God, they were dropping like flies in the poorhouse, twenty a day. But, when the matron went to unlock the room they had put Eilinora in, she was gone. Disappeared into thin air, she had, until two weeks later when she turned up back at Ballyford at the old Mrs McAndrews cottage. Now, when that happened, even the agent was half scared out of his wits, but Mrs McAndrew she let no one near her or touch her. No one knew what became of her, or of the child she was carrying, but it was my grandaddy who found the bones of a little girl in a coffin in this house and took her to the priest to be buried. ’Twas the first child of Eilinora and the Lord Owen. He knew nothing of this dead babby when he came back to find Eilinora in the famine, nor of the next child he put in her belly. He never knew of that at all because of the accident: a train crash in England. Lord Charles’s grandaddy, he inherited, not that he ever expected that to happen. A distant cousin of the family and a bit of a rogue, but he knew about the curse and he lived in fear of it. A different type altogether now, I would say.’

All the children gasped and so did Ruby.

‘A curse?’ she asked.

‘Oh, aye, a curse. Have you not heard about the curse Eilinora put on Ballyford?’

Mrs Kenney looked down at the circle of eyes and open mouths, waiting for her to continue. Even her husband had abandoned any pretence at making her stop.

‘Oh well now, listen while I tell ye. The curse was that every male heir to Ballyford would die, or suffer in waiting, until the first female descendant from the line of Eilinora took her rightful place at the head of Ballyford, and only when that happened would the male line continue. It was prophesised that when a girl child was born, she would be left in the stables to take her place. That is how it has been ever since. The girl child did turn up in the stables, but that’s a different story for another day.’

Ruby felt a shiver run down her spine as the embers in the fire died and a chill passed over her. Jack began to feel uncomfortable and became impatient to make haste.

‘Now the storyteller, he tells it differently from my granny. He says that the lord of the castle had been bewitched and that she had practised her black magic and visited him in his dreams, that he never really had a secret affair with her and that he never even knew her, never mind gave her a child.’

‘Visited him in a dream my arse,’ said Jack, as he emptied his second glass.

‘Sure, ’tis possible, it has happened before. I know a man out at Kiltane, the same thing has happened to him on more than one occasion and a more holy man you could not meet,’ replied Mr Kenney. ‘He has made more than one girl pregnant that way. Never off his knees begging for forgiveness so he isn’t.’

Ruby had never heard either story before and she sat and sipped her drink, under the spell. Like Jack, her instincts were fiercely pulling her back to Ballyford, but she was so warm and cosy in the cottage, she could have remained there all night.

‘What they do agree on is that Eilinora’s last words, when the lord left her at the poorhouse in Galway, were the terrible curse on the castle and they say her image can sometimes be seen on the stairs, but only when a disaster is about to strike. They say that Lady Isobel saw her ghost on the night before each one of her babies died.’

‘Oh my Holy Lord.’ Ruby’s hand flew to her mouth, as Jack laughed. She remembered her own sighting of the ghost.

‘Let me know when you see her, will ye, Ruby, I’ve had half a dozen different descriptions over the years.’

Ruby had confided in no one other than Betsy that she had seen her and that she knew the ghost was smiling.

As they took their leave, Jack whipped out a few of the flowers from the back of the van and handed them over to Mrs Kenney.

‘It would be a disgrace indeed, not to cross the palm of a storyteller as good as yourself, now,’ said Jack.

He then pressed a coin into the palm of every child in the cottage, before they jumped back into the van and set off home.

‘How do you know those people?’ Ruby asked.

‘I don’t,’ said Jack. ‘I mean, sure, I know who they are, everyone knows who everyone is, but that was the first time I have been into their home. If you live on the road you will always be busy seeing to people, but sure, they live on the road because they like to do that.’

‘Fancy being tenants in the same cottage for three generations; I doubt they have much choice.’

Ruby thought long and hard about the story. It felt familiar to her, as though it was a story she had heard but could not quite remember. She thought that the west of Ireland must be a very special place in the world in the whole scheme of things.

‘How long now?’ she said to Jack.

‘Not long at all,’ Jack replied. ‘You will see the castle soon enough, once the ocean is on your left.’

Five minute later, Ruby shouted out, ‘I see it, I can see Blacksod Bay,’ as the ocean came into sight.

The moon sat on the horizon like a huge watery balloon, guiding them home. Ruby noticed that it looked as though dawn was breaking in the sky ahead.

‘Would you look at that sky?’ she said to Jack. ‘It’s going to be a scorcher tomorrow.’

Jack looked up at the sky. ‘Sure, I’ve never seen a sky like that spread right across the bay, so.’

The moon disappeared for a while as they climbed up the hill and swung around and the sections of red sky appeared intense against the stars in the midnight sky, but only to to the right of the hill. To the left, the clear sky remained a deep midnight blue and sparkled clearly with the stars, which felt to Ruby to be so close to the earth.

The same question occurred to them both, at the same time. They also saw a billowing haze of smoke obliterating the stars in the red sky and hovering on the hill top, like a smouldering Vesuvius.

Jack pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator, but the weight of the van, and the steep incline, rendered his effort useless and the engine screamed out in protest. Ruby felt her heart beating wildly and looked at Jack’s profile, too scared to speak. His eyes were fixed on the road, as though he dared not look up at the sky.

‘Could they be burning the field?’ Ruby whispered, her voice barely audible above the screech of the van, yet filled with false hope. She had seen this happen at the convent farm.

Jack’s reply was curt and strained. ‘No, there has been no harvest yet, it’s too early.’

The engine screeched louder, but not for one second did Jack ease the pressure on the accelerator of his precious new van. He leaned forward onto the steering wheel as though urging his dear old horse on. Ruby leaned forward herself. Her face was almost touching the windscreen. The moisture in her breath briefly clouded the glass.

‘Jack?’ Ruby’s voice trembled. ‘Jack,’ she said again, her voice loaded with fear.

This time he answered. ‘I don’t know yet, Ruby. We won’t, until we get to the top.’

A long and agonizing moment later, as they climbed towards the brow of the hill to begin the descent down to the castle, Jack stretched to look for the first view of the castle.

‘Oh God, no.’ His words were filled with anguish and made Ruby’s mouth go dry with fear. He rammed the van into a lower gear, slammed his foot back down on the accelerator and took off down the hill as fast as he could.

The sight which greeted them left Ruby speechless. She found it impossible to breathe. Ballyford lay below them, in the valley. A beacon of flames lit their descent and fired up the night sky. Clouds of billowing smoke began to fill her lungs and made them both cough and splutter.