The Fox's Walk (29 page)

“Strangman, at the club, told me that it took Mrs. Hitchcock three days to get back to Dublin from Fairyhouse.”

“Three days? However did she———” Aunt Katie was shocked and confused, and slightly disapproving. I thought she might be imagining, as I was, Mrs. Hitchcock, fashionably dressed for the race meeting, making her way back to the city. And wondering how she had done it. I pictured her making her way along back roads over the Wicklow Mountains wearing her little slippers trimmed with swan's-down.

“It took most people four,” Uncle William said with a grin. “And of course when she got there—she'd been staying at the Shelbourne———”

The Shelbourne Hotel was the tallest building on St. Stephen's Green, and government troops had taken it over when the revolutionary unit, of which the Countess Markievicz was second-incommand, had occupied the nearby Royal College of Surgeons.

“Revolutionary martyrs are a small enough group for a certain open-mindedness about the sanity of their recruits to be necessary,” Uncle William began. I tried not to listen. Countess Markievicz was in prison.

When we first learned the Shelbourne had been occupied by the army, with shots fired and returned, we all thought of Mrs. Hitchcock. Then we thought of Sonia's words and wondered, but we had said nothing. Looking back, I can see that this prediction, so quickly and dramatically fulfilled, bought Sonia a little more time at Ballydavid. Although the political situation itself would have made travel arrangements difficult—and where she would have gone I still cannot imagine.

T
HE MONDAY FOLLOWING
the Rising was one of the most beautiful days of the year, a “pet day,” Bridie said, as she put into a soft bag the skirt and shoes that I would change into at Glenbeg. I wore over my jodhpurs a navy blue jersey that my mother had knitted. It was short at the wrist: I had grown since I had come to live at Ballydavid. There were two badly retrieved dropped stitches on the front, and I hoped the jersey would soon be replaced by one from Aunt Katie's more reliable needles.

Swallows had built nests in the barn and under the eaves, and, while Patience stood uncharacteristically still beside the mounting block, they darted about the stable yard, in and out of the barn through the wide, open doors. The morning was cool and sunny, and a low mist still lingered at the foot of the pasture below the house. It seemed as though tender new leaves had come out during the night. I felt a wave of gratitude and happiness to be part of the most beautiful place on earth. Patience was on her best behavior and I rode her with a new confidence. It was as though I saw, for the first time, spring. I longed to walk through the woods which now seemed full of, not hobgoblins and revolutionaries, but young animals and pleasant surprises.

Jock followed us down the avenue, along the road and to Glenbeg. He went home with O'Neill. Later, when I rode there by myself every school day, he would sometimes come with me and would spend the day in the stable yard or on the lawn outside the schoolroom window.

I didn't like Clodagh, but I liked and admired Miss Kingsley. I had tried to like Clodagh; she was the only candidate for a best friend or playmate, and I was sometimes, although not often, lonely.

Miss Kingsley was clever, funny, and subversive; these admirable qualities were
faute de mieux
restricted to the schoolroom. For a governess, self-effacement was a quality at least as important as being able to read, write, add, and teach basic French and the piano. Her story was not an unusual one. She was the youngest child of a rural dean and his consumptive wife, and there had never been any question but that she would stay at home to look after her parents in their old age. She was, I suppose, lucky that her father did not long survive her mother's death, although life as a governess to Clodagh Bryce would not have been most peoples idea of freedom. Despite the prospects her life held—employment as a kind of upper servant until she was too old to work and a lonely, poor old age, dependent perhaps on handouts from the fund for Irish Distressed Ladies—Miss Kingsley behaved as though she were merely biding her time until her real future revealed itself.

The morning was spent in the usual pattern of lessons. We started with a reading from the New Testament, mild religious instruction being part of the basic curriculum; then arithmetic, requiring no great effort on my part since Clodagh still had not caught up with what I had learned in London; spelling; geography, coloring in each province on our maps, marking the rivers and principal cities and some of the smaller towns close to where wc lived; French (we struggled through a page of
Madame Souris);
and history. We were learning about the Crusades: the history book we studied described brave Christians attempting to free the Holy Land, slaughtered by Infidels and dying of foreign diseases, good intentions gone sadly wrong; Richard Coeur de Lion the epitome of the good, the noble, the brave. Our governess took a different view.

Before lunch Miss Kingsley dictated a paragraph of
Children of the New Forest.
Clodagh and I then each read a page aloud, and Miss Kingsley read us the rest of the chapter. For me this was one of the most pleasurable times of my day. I loved the book; I enjoyed being read to; and Miss Kingsley was one of my heroines. For Clodagh, the chapter of Captain Marriot's tale was of no interest at all; I glanced over at her once and saw that her thoughts were far away.

“Mummy, Miss Kingsley says Richard Coeur de Lion was a thug,” Clodagh said at lunch, her apparently innocent statement filling one of the dreary silences of which conversation at the Bryce's dining table largely consisted.

“A thug? Surely not, darling.” And Mrs. Bryce glanced enquiringly at our governess.

“Thug. From
thuggee,
a Hindu word,” Miss Kingsley said, her tone that of one who takes pleasure in imparting knowledge.

There was a moment of silence, more loaded than those, punctuated by rain against the window and the sound of knives and forks on plates, that had already taken us through most of lunch.

“I see. Well. Really.”

And Mrs. Bryce decided to take it no further. I wished Captain Bryce were there, but it was some time since he had been home on leave. A good deal less exciting than Mrs. Coughlan, he, like she, bore the interesting label of an adult slur. I was still trying to work out the properties of what comprised “a temporary gent,” but this was not Captain Bryce's only charm. I was very keen to listen to anything he might care to tell me about the beliefs of the British Israelites.

The British Israelites, although they still exist, may now need a word or two of explanation. To sum up their beliefs in a few sentences, their central tenet is that Anglo-Saxons are the true Israelites, the descendants of King David's daughter Zedekiah, and—making the theory irresistible to me—“the isles of the sea” to which she and her followers escaped was Ireland, whence they reached England and became, in a way I no longer remember, the English royal family. A mathematical proof of this belief and the source of several prophecies could be found in the measurements of the Great Pyramid. Once exposed to this truth, I was astounded that no one except me and Captain Bryce was prepared to be interested in it. Aunt Katie and Grandmother were amused and dismissive; Uncle William, entertained enough to make it a running joke at my expense, hurt my feelings; even the maids, who had shown an initial interest, shunned it once they realized it to be a Protestant heresy.

“What news from the pyramids?” Uncle William was sitting by the fire in the drawing room when I got home from lessons. As the days passed, he had started to look and sound discontented. The role of head of the family in a time of crisis was wearing thin. Especially since news had started to seep down from Dublin.

The Kildare Street Club, bastion of the Ascendancy, and where Uncle William, had the rising not taken place, would have been staying, was close to the center of events; those members in residence at the time unable to leave. I had at first wondered if my uncle was happy to have escaped the rising or if he rather wished he had been in the thick of it. When I heard that page boys had been sent out with tea and trays of bread and butter for the soldiers and that a member had narrowly escaped a bullet (a government soldier had seen him at a window of the club and thought him to be pointing out the location of government soldiers on the roof to revolutionary snipers), I no longer wondered. I knew Uncle William was deeply disappointed to have missed the excitement, the male camaraderie, the illusion of a return to military life, youth, and adventure. And he would have been happier away from Grandmother's disdainful eye. There was no statute of limitations on the subject of the stolen guns.

“Captain Bryce is in France.” I sighed before I answered.

Uncle William looked at me for a moment; he recognized dumb insolence when he saw it but was not quite sure whether to reprove or ignore it. He glanced at Grandmother; I, too, watched her from the corner of my eye. But Grandmother appeared to have noticed nothing.

“And what did you learn at school today?”

“We learned ‘Lord Ulin's Daughter.' Would you like me to recite it to you?”

“Alice, dear, run upstairs and change for tea,” Aunt Katie said, looking up from her tapestry work.

When I came back a few minutes later, Bridie had brought in the tea tray and with it the second post that O'Neill and I had stopped for on the way home. Grandmother was reading a letter. It was the first mail we had received since the Rising that included letters with English stamps. Aunt Katie poured me a cup of weak tea and I went to sit beside Sonia.

Sonia was quiet. She didn't look well. She seemed smaller, paler, and older, as though she had subsided during the past week. She patted my hand and asked how Patience had behaved; her voice was quiet, almost weak, and I felt she was looking for a smile or a kind word.

“Did you ever meet the Countess Markievicz in Paris?” It was a question I had wanted to ask for some time.

Sonia looked at me vaguely, but before I could reframe my question—how many countesses could there have been in Paris?—Grandmother spoke.

“Rosamund Gwynne,” Grandmother said, when she had finished reading her letter. She folded it and put it back in its envelope. “Rosamund Gwynne writes that she would like to visit.”

Uncle William laughed; it came out as a kind of bark. “She seems rather an inconvenient young woman. An odd moment to ask oneself to stay, or perhaps she's merely unobservant and hasn't noticed they're mopping up after something damn like a revolution at the moment.”

“It seems she's already in Ireland—she's stopping with some people—an army family—in the North. She had been going to go to Dublin, but now she's thinking of changing her plans.”

“I suppose we'd better...” Aunt Katie's voice trailed off; she seemed to lack the energy necessary to set in motion the domestic arrangements of hospitality. “Does she say anything—anything that...?”

Again she left the sentence unfinished, but we all knew she was asking her sister whether the letter contained any clarification of the unofficial engagement.

“No. Just that she is
so
looking forward to meeting us. And that she's going to be staying with the Bryces. Apparently she is an old friend of Elaine Bryce—oh dear.” Grandmother sighed, then drew in a deep breath and sat up even straighten “I shall write to her and say we look forward to seeing her and then I shall write to Mrs. Bryce and ask them to come to lunch.”

“But don't you think we're meant to—?” Aunt Katie sounded increasingly unhappy.

“I'm quite sure we are. But this Miss Gwynne will be in the neighborhood in ten days, and, if I have a letter from Hubert in the meantime, I shall write to her again and ask her to stay. Otherwise we'll wait and see. I know nothing, and it will be up to her to tell me if she is engaged to my son. She won't find me as easy to manipulate as Mary.”

“I'm sure she won't,” Uncle William said. “She sounds quite a determined young woman—maybe Hugh won't get away so easily this time.”

He made it sound as though Uncle Hubert had a wake of broken engagements and breach-of-promise suits behind him. Grandmother was not amused. Her son had been a widower for little more than a year and he had also lost a child, although I don't remember that ever being spoken of, the death of small children born in foreign climes a sad but not infrequent occurrence. But Grandmother knew that if she protested she would be giving Uncle William a cue to be funny about the Russian Adventuress.

“And imagine having a daughter-in-law on cozy terms with the Bryces! I think I prefer the sound of the Russian tart he took to meet Mary.”

“William, dear,” Aunt Katie said faintly.

“So did you—did you ever meet the Countess Markievicz in Paris?” I asked Sonia.

She looked at me, every bit as puzzled as she might well be. It took her a moment to answer.

“No,” she said. “She is a girl from a good Irish family and I was a poor refugee. We didn't move in the same circles.”

And she started to cry. A handkerchief held to her face, she rose and left the room.

“And now she's in prison in Dublin,” Uncle William said grimly. “A girl from a good Anglo-Irish family waiting to be shot.”

It was my turn to burst into tears and run out of the room.

 

THE FIRST WEEK
in May. It seems to me now the change in seasons used to be more beautiful: warmth and fullness, the small green buds now open and pale, the farmyards and fields full of young animals and birds, the first fragile shoots of the year's crops pushing through the earth. It is not imagination only that makes sweeter the memory of the fresh, light smell of the countryside, the flowers and blossom on the trees; this was a time before motorized vehicles were common, and the fields were still fertilized with manure from the stables and cow shed, and, if a potato field lay close to the sea, long-tendriled seaweed would be spread over the ridges.