Songs of Love and War (14 page)

‘Grandpa says the Bill will never make its way past the House of Lords.’

‘Then we’ll have to force them to pass it, won’t we!’ Jack leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes blazing in the candlelight. ‘We have to make them
listen.’

‘With violence,’ said Kitty.

‘If that’s the only way to make them listen.’

‘We have to get through this war first,’ said Bridie.

‘You’re missing the point, Bridie. While the English are distracted fighting the Germans we can seize the opportunity over here.’

‘What’ll happen to Kitty?’ Bridie asked anxiously, thinking also of herself and her mother who worked for the Deverills.

‘We’ll look out for her. After all, she’s one of us, aren’t you, Kitty?’ He grinned at her and Kitty grinned back and the two of them radiated a confidence that
only made Bridie feel more uneasy.

‘Ballinakelly has a high regard for Lord Deverill,’ said Bridie hopefully. ‘He’s always been good to the people here. There’s no reason for anyone to harm him, is
there, Jack?’

Jack nodded, wanting the girls to think him important. ‘No reason,’ he agreed, but the truth was he wasn’t sure. As far as the nationalists were concerned Lord Deverill was an
English usurper, loyal to the wrong side. If Michael had his way the whole family would be deported to England where they belonged and the castle razed to the ground.

That evening Kitty climbed the wooden staircase to the western tower of the castle. She found Barton in his usual chair, feet up on the stool, staring ponderously into the
half-distance as if dreaming of his life long gone. When she entered he looked up. His surprise registered on his face. ‘I know, it’s been a while,’ Kitty said, wrapping her shawl
around her shoulders. The fact that she hadn’t spoken to him in four years was nothing to Barton for whom time meant nothing.

‘I tried to stop you,’ he said grudgingly. ‘But you wouldn’t listen.’

‘I was curious and I have paid the price for my curiosity,’ she replied solemnly. ‘I need your help.’

‘Again?’

‘I’ll take it this time.’

‘I’m not in a position to help anyone, least of all myself.’

‘Oh, but you are. I saw you sweep an ornament off a mantelpiece. If you put your mind to it, I’m sure you can terrify my governess out of the castle.’

Barton grinned. The idea pleased him. ‘If that is what you want.’

‘I’m surprised Egerton hasn’t scared her away already.’

‘Egerton is a lazy man, Kitty. He was useless in life and he’s even more useless in death. It takes effort to be evil.’

‘Then I thank you in advance for your effort.’

All Barton’s meanness and frustration went into his grin. ‘Consider it done, my little friend.’

Kitty watched Miss Grieve like a leopard stalking its prey. The woman looked old now. Her pale lips had thinned to almost nothing, her cheekbones protruded, her complexion had
become sallow. Gone forever was the young woman Kitty had spied through the crack in the door crying over a letter. She wondered why women like her mother and Lady Rowan-Hampton seemed to benefit
from the soft Irish rain while it coarsened Miss Grieve’s skin until it resembled old leather. At one point she had thought her the same age as her mother; now she looked even older than
Kitty’s grandmother, whose lively face was still fine and youthful.

Miss Grieve looked up from her book to find Kitty staring at her. ‘Kitty, you’re not going to find the answers in my face.’

‘How old are you, Miss Grieve?’ Kitty asked boldly.

Miss Grieve stiffened. ‘That’s very rude.’

‘Come now, Miss Grieve, we’ve known each other for many years and I’m not a child any more. Can’t we be friends?’

‘I don’t know why you think the status of friend would warrant knowledge of my years,’ she replied, her tight Scottish accent squeezing the life out of the vowels.

Kitty grinned. Age had made Miss Grieve smaller too and somehow vulnerable and Kitty found herself feeling sorry for the woman who had once made her life so miserable. She narrowed her eyes.
‘I think you’re fifty,’ she said, believing she had given Miss Grieve a great compliment.

Two red stains appeared on Miss Grieve’s cheeks and began to spread like ink on a blotter. ‘You think I’m fifty?’ She blinked at Kitty incredulously. ‘I’m
thirty-eight,’ she stated in a strangled voice. Kitty didn’t know what to say. She watched, horrified, as Miss Grieve pushed her chair out and stood up. The governess turned her back on
Kitty but the shudder that seized her shoulders left Kitty in no doubt that she had deeply offended her. ‘Finish the comprehension. I will be in my room where I do not wish to be
disturbed.’

Kitty finished the comprehension, which had hardly posed a challenge, and wandered downstairs to find her grandmother. The sound of piano playing told her she was in the drawing room. When Kitty
entered, her grandmother stopped playing. ‘Kitty, my dear, has Miss Grieve finished with you already?’

‘I’m afraid I offended her,’ said Kitty with a sigh, running her fingers over the shiny surface of the piano. ‘I told her I thought she was fifty, but she’s
thirty-eight. She doesn’t look thirty-eight, does she?’

‘An easy mistake,’ her grandmother replied. ‘Though I wouldn’t think it prudent to discuss a woman’s age in any circumstance.’

‘We’ve never liked one another,’ Kitty said. ‘She’s the most humourless person I’ve ever met.’

‘I don’t recall liking my governess much. They’re an odd breed.’

‘Why are they so odd?’

‘Because they’re well-educated women who for some reason or other never married. The only option open to them is earning a living as a governess or companion. I feel sorry for them.
It must be very unsatisfactory never to be mistress of one’s own home.’

‘Miss Grieve is the meanest woman I’ve ever met,’ Kitty grumbled.

Adeline looked at her granddaughter wisely. ‘My dear, you must have compassion for her. Unkind people are unhappy people and I believe Miss Grieve is deeply unhappy.’

‘I don’t think unhappiness justifies cruelty, Grandma.’

‘It doesn’t, but it certainly explains it. Miss Grieve must have suffered terrible disappointments in her life. I imagine your happiness, Kitty, served only to remind her of her own
unhappiness. As hard as it is to find it in one’s heart to understand and forgive, I believe one must try.’

At that moment O’Flynn shuffled in bearing a letter on a silver tray. ‘Your ladyship,’ he said.

Adeline took the letter and looked at the handwriting. ‘It’s from Rupert. How lovely!’ She opened it with the silver knife placed beside the letter. She read a moment in
silence, then smiled wistfully, holding it against her chest. ‘Darling Rupert, he’s not cut out for war. Hubert thinks he’s not cut out for anything, but I think it’ll be
the making of him.’

‘Does he have any news of Papa?’ Kitty asked eagerly.

‘Yes, he says he’s peeved your father wears his uniform better than he does.’ She laughed. ‘Really, that’s so typical of Rupert, always seeing the funny side of
everything.’ She sighed. ‘Oh, I do hope we’ll have them home for Christmas.’

When Kitty retired to bed that night she had forgotten all about asking Barton to scare Miss Grieve away. She had dined with her grandparents and the Shrubs, who seemed to be a
permanent fixture at the dining table ever since Rupert and Bertie had gone to fight. They twittered like sparrows and talked of every sort of nonsense in the hope of distracting their sister, as
well as themselves, from the telegrams now trickling into Ireland with news of the missing, the wounded and the dead. The reality of war was beginning to bleed through the veneer of bravado.

On her way to her bedroom Kitty passed Miss Grieve’s door. She noticed that it was closed and that there was no light seeping out from beneath. Kitty hadn’t seen her since she had
left the room in tears. She paused a moment outside, suddenly feeling a wave of regret. The corridor was quiet and still; only the sound of the gale, blowing in off the sea, could be heard whipping
around the chimney stacks. Kitty crept into her room, which was next to her governess’s, and opened the curtains a little to gaze out onto the crisp winter night. Clouds as thick as porridge
scudded across the sky, parting every now and then to give a tantalizing glimpse of the moon and the maze of box hedges below, cast in an eerie silver light. She thought of Miss Grieve and her
heart flooded with compassion. She was a woman old before her time with no prospects besides tutoring girls like Kitty. She wondered whether her unhappiness really had made her cruel. If Miss
Grieve had married a man who made her happy would she have been kind?

Kitty stood for a long time staring out of the window until her head began to feel heavy with sleep. At last she closed the curtains and undressed, laying her frock across the chair. She liked
her bedroom in the castle. The four-poster bed was large and she could draw the curtains around it to keep out the cold. The remains of the fire smouldered in the grate and the rattling of the wind
against the glass was a soothing lullaby that sent her off to sleep.

She was awoken abruptly by a loud scream. It took her a moment to realize that she wasn’t dreaming and that the scream had come from Miss Grieve’s bedroom next door. She climbed out
of bed and fumbled for the matches to light her bedside lamp. Squinting in the glow and shaking her head, which was groggy with slumber, she threw on her woollen robe and slid her feet into her
slippers. The corridor was dark and silent but Miss Grieve’s bedroom door was open. Kitty hurried inside. She expected to find her governess sitting up in bed, but the quilt was pulled back
and Miss Grieve was nowhere to be seen. Then something caught her eye and she turned to see a ghostly figure at the window, but she blinked and he was gone. Kitty’s heart went cold. She
walked across the floor as if wading through water. She held her breath, fearing the worst, and looked down onto the garden below. The wind tore a hole in the clouds and the moon shone a spotlight
onto the writhing figure of her friend Jack, stuck in the box hedge beneath the ladder customarily used for cutting back the roses. ‘Jesus!’ she hissed, relieved that it was Jack and
not Miss Grieve who had fallen from the window. ‘What’s he gone and done?’

Kitty ran down the stairs and hurried out through the kitchen door. She plunged into the darkness, pulling her robe around her as the wind tried to whip it away. It took her hair instead,
releasing it from the ribbons and tossing it about gruffly, but she strode on around the corner of the castle towards the box garden, head down, bracing herself against the cold. Frost was already
crystallizing the grass beneath her slippers and she shivered suddenly as the wet seeped through to her skin. When she reached the hedge, Jack had managed to disentangle himself. He saw her and his
features flooded with relief. ‘Sacred heart of Jaysus, Kitty, I saw a ghost at the window, I swear to ya!’ He stumbled on his words, his face as white as ash, his pale eyes wide with
fright. ‘God save us all . . .’

‘It’s OK, Jack. It’s only a ghost,’ Kitty said, placing her hands on his trembling shoulders. She noticed him lift a foot off the ground, leaning heavily on the other
one. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘All I wanted to do was to frighten her but ’twas myself was nearly frightened to death instead.’

Suddenly a screech sliced through the wind with a sharp and ragged edge. They both turned towards the woods. ‘The Banshee!’ Jack whispered darkly.

Kitty heard a thud, like a sack of potatoes fallen from a great height. ‘That wasn’t the Banshee, Jack.’ Now it was her turn to blanch. ‘Oh God!’ She reeled
slightly and Jack put out a hand to steady her.

‘What is it?’

‘You must go, Jack. Now!’ She pushed him urgently. ‘Please.’

‘But . . .’

She stared at him with terrified eyes. ‘Just go, Jack. Before anyone knows you were here. Go!’

Jack limped into the darkness and disappeared. Kitty slowly walked round to the back of the castle, the sense of foreboding growing inside her. Her heart pounded against her ribs and her throat
constricted because she already knew what she was going to find. She sensed it in the pit of her belly, in the bile that had begun to rise. And she wasn’t wrong. There, lying in a heap on the
frosty ground, was Miss Grieve.

Kitty fell to her knees beside the body. With a shaking hand she pressed the woman’s wrist to feel for a pulse. There was nothing. It was as if she were a doll, broken and discarded on the
nursery floor. Hot tears burned Kitty’s cheeks in a flood of remorse and guilt. She wanted to throw her arms around her, but she couldn’t because they had never been friends, so she
threw her arms around herself instead and sobbed. In that brief time, before she cried for help, she remembered nothing of Miss Grieve’s cruelty, only her youthful face and gentle tears as
she had poured out her sorrow over the letter lying open on her knee.

The following morning the Royal Irish Constabulary arrived at the castle and Miss Grieve was taken away in an ambulance. Kitty was comforted by her grandmother in the library. The ladder was
found lying against the box hedge and the hole Jack had made was scrutinized intensely and cordoned off as a crime scene. Kitty explained to Constable O’Duggan that she had heard a scream
but, when she reached Miss Grieve’s bedroom, her governess wasn’t there. She went to the window and saw a man’s face. She must have terrified him because the ladder wobbled and
fell backwards, sending the man flying into the hedge. She ran into the garden but when she got there he had gone. That was when she heard the cry and thud of Miss Grieve.

‘Did you get a good look at the face, Miss Deverill?’ the constable asked.

‘I did not,’ replied Kitty. ‘I was so shocked to see someone there. Before I had time to look at him, he was gone. All I can tell you is that he was a man. Otherwise it was too
dark for details.’

‘I’m afraid it appears that Miss Grieve threw herself from the roof.’

‘How on earth did she get out there?’ Adeline asked.

‘She found her way into the attic, Lady Deverill, and through a small window.’