The Blood Upon the Rose (15 page)

But the idea had its possibilities. ‘If he is running from the army like me, your Hans will need a woman to give him food and shelter, too,’ he said.

She looked at him, and nodded slowly.

He stayed there for two months. By the end of the first evening he had decided she was simple, and unhinged by the loss of her husband. He was terrified that she would run and fetch someone while he was asleep so he made her sleep with her hands tied to the head of the bed. Also he told her that if anyone arrested him, he would inform them about Hans.

By the end of the first week he had realized just how much young Hans was missing. In the evening Elsie walked up into the woods, collecting wood and listening for Hans's voice, and Andrew followed her because he was afraid to let her out of his sight. Then she looked over her shoulder and began to run, he chased her, and there was a repeat performance of their first meeting. This happened nearly every day. It became a game they began to elaborate on. He said that she could only go out into the woods without her shoes, then without her skirt, then without any clothes at all. Still she ran. Always he caught her, always she pulled him down on to her, into her. Andrew had never known any game could be so exciting.

At night, when he tied her wrists to the bed, she writhed and looked up at him as she did in the forest. He took off her clothes and looked at her, and she moaned and shifted her hips. Then he discovered, by experiment, how a woman could be brought to her climax with his hand, or his tongue, and that it was as much a pleasure to do that and watch her as it was to have an orgasm himself.

After a week he had known he was in love with her. The horror of the war in France, the fear of arrest and return to the squalor of the prison camp, were always in his mind as a threat and a contrast which made their lovemaking more desperate and urgent. They made little conversation; she was not talkative and had no knowledge of the world beyond her valley. After a while he came to trust her, too. An old man and woman came up from the village. She talked to them while he hid in the house, but she did not give him away. But the escape games continued, for their own sake.

He might have stayed for ever but one day in October the old couple told her that a detachment of recruits had been billeted in the town at the foot of the valley, and the next day a platoon marched up to the house behind a mounted officer with a map, reconnoitring. Andrew hid in a cupboard until they had gone. That evening he had tried to persuade her to leave with him, but she refused. Hans would come back, she said, she had to wait for him.

Andrew left the next morning, before dawn, walking south towards Switzerland. He never saw her again.

Andrew escaped from Germany to a world where his father was dying, his mother had been killed by rebels, and the Empire faced defeat. He returned to the trenches, embittered, not caring whether he lived or died. For two more years he fought in the mud, expecting death every day, sometimes seeking it, and gaining a reputation for cold, detached ferocity. But death only mocked him, dragging a cruel finger down his face and giving him medals. So when the war ended he had come back to Ireland as an unwanted war hero, a landlord, and a recluse. He had gained the habit of warfare, and lost his hopes of love.

New Year’s Night came a fortnight after the visit of the Sinn Feiners. Henessy, the butler, had worked for fifteen years in Scotland, and grown attached to the Scottish custom of Hogmanay. Andrew's father had indulged him, and Henessy had introduced various inventions of his own, including a midnight game of football with a burning whiskey barrel, so that before the war the New Year’s festivities at Ardmore had become something of a local tradition - not least because of the obvious need to consume the contents of the whiskey barrel before burning it.

Despite his age, Henessy had asked permission to welcome in the year 1920 in the traditional way. So for an hour or two Andrew had sat in the great kitchen, listening to the stories and songs of his servants and the villagers and friends they had invited. But he was not in convivial mood, and soon after midnight he went to bed, knowing that he was lifting a pall of respectability from the proceedings, which could now take life without him.

He lay in bed and fingered the long raised line of his scar. It was the main reason he gave himself for avoiding human company. When he had visited the girls in brothels in London and Paris they had gawped at it in pity or disgust, and he had caught the same look in the eyes of the serving maids here. And yet the right-hand side of his face was handsome enough; he could speak clearly, see, had good lungs, all his limbs intact; more than dozens of poor fellows he had known.

He wanted Ardmore to be a great house again but he hated company. He had begun to buy in horses, with the idea of starting a stud, breeding perhaps for the turf. But it was a slow business, needing a stock of patience which he lacked. Some days he could be charming, on others he sank into a black mood, brooding. The little devil in his mind whispered to him of the pleasure they had had in Germany, on the run; and he told himself there was no place for that in peacetime, at Ardmore. He wanted the place to be the haven, the paradise it had seemed in his childhood. But for that he would need a wife and children. And a wife would have to be as dashing and handsome as his mother, as thrilling as Elsie. He fingered the ridge of his scar, and remembered the way the new housemaid had winced in distaste at the sight of it this evening.

If she thinks you're so horrible, the devil inside him whispered, why don't you strip the clothes from her and lash her little pert buttocks with a riding crop until they look the same? He smiled to himself, knowing it could never happen. Ardmore was a peaceful, civilized place now. In time, perhaps, it would grow into something he could be content with. He fell asleep, listening to the distant sounds of revelry and laughter downstairs.

Four years of war had made him able to sleep through any noise, so the whoops and shouts did not disturb him. Not until five o'clock did he wake, and realize that something was wrong.

It was still dark, and the noise downstairs was as loud as before. He sighed, and pulled the pillow over his head.

Then he heard a scream, and smelt the smoke.

He leapt out of bed, and dragged back the curtains. Light flickered over the lawns - huge tongues of red light and shadows, dancing across the grass. He saw figures running. One, who looked like a housemaid, was lugging a bucket of water from a pond.

He flung the door open and ran out into the corridor. But he could see nothing; great clouds of smoke billowed round him and there was a draught, like a gale, blowing past him up the stairs. He couldn't breathe. His throat was like sandpaper and he began to cough continually. Using his hands to feel the way, he floundered back to his room and slammed the door.

He pulled off his nightshirt, dunked it in the ewer, and put it over his head, like a gas mask. It might do. He pulled on a pair of trousers, opened the door, and hurried along the corridor.

He remembered burning buildings in Flanders. Keep low, he told himself. Go below the smoke. As he reached the head of the staircase, he saw flames rushing up it like a chimney - ten, twenty feet high. What could it be, in the stone hall? Ah, God - as he watched, blisters burrowed like moles across the surface of the oil painting of his grandfather, and then the portrait exploded into flame.

There was no way down there. He struggled back along the corridor to the servants' staircase. But there was a solid wall of black smoke pouring up there too. If he did not get air in a moment he would drown in all this smoke. He reached up and pushed open the door of the nearest bedroom. It was the one his mother had used, before her death. The smoke poured in, but he slammed the door shut behind him and for a few precious moments he was able to breathe.

He stood there, his bare chest heaving, gasping in the clean air. The light of the flames from outside the window flickered luridly over the soft shell-pink of the armchairs his mother had so liked, the damask bed-hangings, the mirrors of the walnut dressing table. That would all be burning beautifully soon. Already the floorboards were hot under his feet.

He hurried to the window and opened it. Outside there was a windowsill, then nothing - a twenty-foot drop to a gravel drive. Too far. He ran to his mother's bed, ripped the counterpane off, smashed a small pane of glass beside the stone upright in the window frame, and tied the counterpane to it. It was thick, heavy, difficult to tie. As he did it he had a sudden vivid memory of hiding under this counterpane as a child, pretending to fight the lions and embroidered Chinese dragons, while his mother laughed indulgently. Never again. The flames were licking under the door. He tugged hard on the sheet. It would hold. He climbed out of the window and walked backwards down the wall with the counterpane in his hands, his bare feet pressing against the stone.

Some eight feet down he reached the end of the counterpane. Below him he could see the curtains in the library window blazing like a blast furnace. He swung out from the wall, let go, and dropped.

He hit the gravel, rolled over, and stood up. Stones had embedded themselves in his skin, and he brushed them off. Then the library window burst and he stepped back, shielding his face against the sudden blast of heat.

Flames were blazing out of every window on the ground floor, and great gouts of black smoke were pouring out of the chimneys and windows upstairs. As he watched, there was a crack as something important fell in, and a tongue of flame roared through the smoke over the roof.

‘Dear God.’ He ran round the side of the building to the stable block and heard the screaming of terrified horses. The stables themselves weren't ablaze yet but a hayloft was beginning to burn. Inside it was bedlam: three horses rearing and screaming and old Henessy struggling with a bolt on a stable door as though it were as hard to open as a bank vault.

He pulled Henessy aside and set the horses free. But it was a mistake. They clattered out nervously, saw the blazing straw, and bolted back inside. They were shuddering and kicking at shadows. Andrew managed to lead one free and tie him to a tree. As he ran back he saw Henessy staggering towards him with the second. But the stable roof was alight now and before Andrew could get near the third it collapsed, trapping the terrified animal inside.

Andrew stood, watching, until the screams ended. Then he walked to the pump behind the house where he found Mrs Macardle.

‘What happened? How did it start?’

‘I don't know, sir, truly I don't. We were all singing, and then some more fellows came from Youghal and they was playing the game with the whiskey barrel, and I went to bed. And then this!’

‘Who were the other ones who came?’

‘I don't know, sir. But it was the whiskey barrel …’

‘Never. One fire in a whiskey barrel couldn't cause the whole house to go up like this, all at once, without any warning. This was deliberate. And I know who did it.’

He walked away, round to the front of the house again. The upper floors were ablaze now, and the roof was caving in. He stood in the middle of the lawn and watched. Shortly before dawn, the main chimney stack collapsed, bringing down the rest of the roof and smashing through the two upper floors. When daylight came, there was nothing left but four blackened walls, and the ashes blazing merrily within.

8.

THE WIND SWEPT in from the northeast, howling round the corners of the tenements, picking up leaves and rubbish and whirling them along the streets. Somewhere a tin bucket rolled to and fro, clanging against railings. The wind brought rain with it too, stinging cold sleety rain that lashed the faces of the few pedestrians foolish enough to be out, making them hurry to their destination, their hands thrust into their pockets, their chins tucked deep into the upturned collars of their coats.

Catherine and Sean clung to each other, struggling with the small blue umbrella she had brought. A few minutes ago they had been in the little tenement room, the heat of the fire glowing on their naked bodies; Catherine gasped with shock at the icy, stinging contrast of the sleet lashing her face. Inside her coat her body was still warm, languorous; and as she struggled along the street into the storm she could feel the pressure of his hips against hers and imagine every line of his body moving beside her.

Because of the rain they took a less roundabout route than usual, but still they stopped once or twice, shivering and kissing in doorways while they glanced up and down the street for anyone following. Once Catherine thought she saw the same tall young man for the second time, but before she could point him out to Sean he was gone, and they did not see him again.

Catherine insisted on leaving him while they were still out of sight of her house in Merrion Square. ‘It's too much of a risk, Sean,’ she said. ‘Father will be back tonight, and it would spoil everything if anyone saw us together.’

‘He’ll have had a rough trip, in a storm like this,’ said Sean. ‘Even the sea hates Ireland’s enemies.’

‘Don’t speak of him like that, my lover.’ She kissed the freezing rain from his lips, and licked a drop from the tip of his nose with her tongue. ‘He only does what he sees as his duty. And I have to live with him, after all.’

She thought for an instant, that he would say: ‘No, you don’t have to live with him, you can leave home and marry me.’ But he didn’t; and anyway it would be far more complicated than that. If she left home she would lose her inheritance, and the power and freedom which that would give her. She could use her parents’ wealth to build hospitals, and benefit the poor from whom it had been taken. But to do that she had to get control of the wealth in the first place.

She had never discussed this with Sean. She was not quite sure he would understand.
I will defy my father if I choose but that doesn’t give my lover or anyone else the right to mock him.