The Fox's Walk (30 page)

But the first week of May 1916 was also one during which we all waited for the next horrible thing to happen. We went through the motions of our day to day lives behaving as though the world as we had known it would continue if enough of us pretended nothing irreparable had taken place. We flinched when we learned of each new horror and, although we were still angry at the revolutionaries who had willfully caused so many to be killed and who had destroyed so much of Dublin, now we were appalled at the authorities who were compounding their initial mishandling of the Rising. And then we went on with our lives: lessons for me; the running of the household for Aunt Katie; for Grandmother, letters to my unfortunate mother—who, I like to imagine, was more concerned with her daughter's well-being in the wake of a revolt than in trying to remember some additional nuance of Rosamund Gwynne's visit that would allow the family to decide whether to clasp her to its collective bosom or turn to her a cold shoulder. Only Sonia behaved in a natural—to us unacceptable and foreign—way. She spent most of the day in her room, appearing only for meals and the immediate time in the drawing room before and after them. Listless and pale, she would occasionally venture the opinion that we would all be murdered in our beds.

Casement, imprisoned in London, would not stand trial until the end of June, but the Dublin authorities believed, as did most of England and some of Ireland, that quick, decisive, and stern measures would be the best way to deal with the first real Irish rising against British rule in more than a century.

The first rebels were shot on Tuesday, the day after I went back to lessons at Glenbeg. Ninety of those who had taken part in the Rising were condemned to death, and fifteen of them were executed the week afterward.

The most bloody war in English history was taking place in France, the newspapers scanned for war news and the casualty figures read aloud. Death in the abstract I understood. Uncle Sainthill was never far from anyone's thoughts. I had the usual morbid imagination of a child whose family life was less than conventionally secure, and I would lie awake wondering what would happen when Grandmother died and occasionally torturing myself with fears about unforeseen disasters that would deprive me of either or both of my parents. But the executions in the aftermath of the Rising were different. It was as though the headmistress of the school I used to attend in London had announced at prayers one morning that several of the less satisfactory pupils would be shot that afternoon and—this was where it most felt like a nightmare—although everyone agreed how terrible this was, no one did anything to prevent it.

The executions were spread out over the week. We waited for each day's announcement. In the end, of the ninety sentenced, only fifteen were executed. But at the time it seemed as though the executions would continue day after day until ninety prisoners—eighty-nine men and one woman—had been shot. These harsh realities made no rumor improbable; grim truth accompanied the wild stories about how the secret trials had been conducted. I waited each day for the announcement that Countess Markievicz had been executed.

Constance Markievicz was forty-eight years old at the time of the Rising, closer in age to Grandmother and Aunt Katie—who I considered to be enjoying venerable old age—than to my mother. But in my imagination the Countess was the age she had been at the time her portrait was painted. The portrait—painted well before I was born—was by her husband, Casimir. It shows a tall woman in an evening dress. Her pale skirt and one slim white arm dominate two thirds of the painting. She is in profile against a dark interior with some faintly but effectively painted furniture, and one can see a fine jawline and the kind of distinctive nose that Grandmother admired. Her hair is, of course, up; a loose knot on top of her head. I wonder where I'd seen the portrait: most likely as a reproduction in an illustrated magazine. The daily newspapers had printed photographs of the countess in military uniform but, though I studied them carefully, I always thought of her as a tall, slender beauty in an evening dress with a long skirt and a bodice of a darker material, her shoulders draped with a light shawl. If such a person should now be waiting in a cold dark cell for soldiers to take her out at dawn, stand her in front of a firing squad, and kill her, anything was possible. I was far, far more frightened of the forces of justice and order who could do such a thing than I ever was of the revolutionaries whom Sonia feared.

Public sentiment throughout the country began to change when it became known that the dying Joseph Plunkett had been shot and that James Connolly, too badly wounded to stand, had been tied to a chair for his execution. Anger and horror soon took the place of apathy and disapproval. Even Grandmother and Uncle William were shocked and appalled, although mainly at the stupidity of the authorities. The executions continued all through the week: Patrick Pearse, schoolmaster and poet; his brother Willie; Tom Clarke; John McBride, who—an inspiration to Casement—had raised a brigade in the Boer War to fight the British. Michael Collins was imprisoned; de Valera was spared the death penalty—the American Consul claimed him, not quite accurately, as an American citizen. After the first fifteen, the executions stopped, and by the end of the year the greater part of the prisoners had been released. But the dead were dead. The harm had been done.

It was a time of great uncertainty. We didn't know then that England and her allies would win the war in France, that a second and bloodier revolution in Ireland would not break out any moment, that we would not, as Sonia feared, all be murdered in our beds. I was afraid but not sure what I should fear most. There was no one to ask. I instinctively spent little time in the kitchen those days and was aware of tension when I did visit. It felt as though I'd been pushed out of the kitchen-and-children camp and into that of the drawing room.

The atmosphere was equally dark at Glenbeg, but there my curiosity was once again in play. At Ballydavid, I now dreaded hearing the latest developments in Dublin, but at Glenbeg the new light cast by the views and beliefs of schoolroom and dining room was novel enough for curiosity to balance fear. And it was here that I—and, through me, Grandmother and Aunt Katie—was most likely to learn something to add to the little we knew about Rosamund Gwynne.

Not only was I afraid the Countess Markievicz and Sir Roger Casement and the other condemned revolutionaries would be executed, but I was afraid that Miss Kingsley would lose her job. I knew that she had no home other than Glenbeg and no family of her own. I worried that Mrs. Bryce would send her away without a reference, and then what would become of her? Either Miss Kingsley did not share my fears or she no longer found her disdain for Clodagh and Mrs. Bryce, held in check during less tumultuous times, possible to conceal.

It is likely that Miss Kingsley would not have lasted the weeks following the Rising were it not for Mrs. Bryces anticipation of Rosamund Gwynne's visit and my own presence at the lunch table. Mrs. Bryce and Clodagh were proponents of a hard line—a minimal waste of time on the processes of justice and a speedy execution—for the revolutionaries and for Sir Roger Casement. Miss Kingsley was a passionate admirer of Casement—his handsome appearance, I now think, as much a part of her reluctance to think him a traitor as his heroic stand on the Congo and the Putumayo.

No one at Ballydavid, of course, suggested I listen for a few more details about the uncomfortable woman who might be about to marry into our family, but my arrival home from lessons now occasioned a greater level of attention than that to which I had previously been accustomed. Inquiries about my day and what I had learned were no longer absentminded, and any mention on my part of lunchtime conversation made me the center of attention.

“Miss Gwynne and Mrs. Bryce were at school together,” I remarked on Wednesday, coming home from my third day of lessons. The Delphic Oracle could not have had a more gratifying reaction.

“Really, dear. And where was that?” Aunt Katie asked, and all eyes looked at me expectantly. I didn't know.

“They both played hockey. Miss Gwynne was captain of the first eleven.”

“Was she indeed?” Aunt Katie said, with apparent polite interest. Grandmother closed her eyes briefly and Uncle William laughed. Sonia was resting upstairs: I imagine her immediate future was another subject much discussed while she slept and before I came home in the afternoon.

At Glenbeg, Mrs. Bryce had only me as a source for any clue as to how Miss Gwynne was regarded at Ballydavid. I can't estimate how close the friendship was between Mrs. Bryce and Rosamund Gwynne, nor can I decide whether Mrs. Bryce was merely curious or if she were trying to discover the lie of the land on behalf of her friend. Since I was a child, I was obliged only to answer direct questions and, since I was partisan, any hint or leading observation of hers could be met with the look of blank, attentive incomprehension I had by now mastered.

Rosamund Gwynne arrived at Glenbeg earlier than we at Ballydavid had expected. Some of her arrangements had fallen through, not surprisingly in light of the troubled state of the country. But it also seemed to us that the unrest and the difficulties of travel caused most people—Sonia, a good example—to stay put longer than they had planned or were expected to stay. Grandmother was of the opinion that at least one hostess had used the Rising to cancel an invitation to Miss Gwynne and another had failed to press her to stay on.

Even I, desperate for excitement not allied with fear or death, was unenthusiastic about the woman who might be about to become my aunt. My mother's disapproval and the unsatisfactory lack of clarity as to an actual betrothal were not the grounds for my reservations; if anything, they offered a possibility of some moments of always welcome drama. I thought it unlikely I would become fond of anyone who was a close friend of Mrs. Bryce—a consideration I knew also counted for something with Grandmother and Aunt Katie—but even more I felt that the interloper, as I thought her, had ousted Mara, of whom I still thought fondly, and that she had, in some way I didn't quite understand but was not prepared to forgive, caused pain to Sonia.

I was the first member of our family apart from Uncle Hubert (although I had entertained myself for an hour the previous evening with the idea that Uncle Hubert was quite unaware of her existence and that the woman claiming to be his fiancee was a German spy) to meet Rosamund Gwynne. I don't know how she and Mrs. Bryce had spent their morning, but Clodagh, Miss Kingsley, and I arrived exhausted at the lunch table. History had, as usual, been where the trouble began. That morning we had read about the Princes in the Tower: the boys, incarcerated in the Tower of London by their uncle, Richard III, and then murdered by him. There was an affecting illustration, not devoid of sentimentality, which upset me more than I was prepared to show. Clodagh, whose imagination it was almost impossible to engage, was merely bored. It may have been frustration with her pupil as well as her own emotional state that caused Miss Kingsley to make an inflammatory remark.

“The Tower of London is where Sir Roger Casement is even now imprisoned,” she said, her tone carefully suggesting nothing more than the introduction of a topical reference to make more immediate an historical moment.

“Serves him right,” Clodagh said. “He's a traitor and a coward.”

There was a moment of silence, during which I once again thought how much I disliked Clodagh and during which Miss Kingsley drew in a slow breath.

“That brings up an interesting ethical question,” Miss Kingsley said, “and we might pause for a moment to discuss it. The logical implications of whether a man who is prepared to die for his country can be a traitor. Or a coward.”

Clodagh looked at our governess with an expression of dull, offensive boredom. She preferred pronouncement to discussion and shared her mother's disdain for logic. I, too, failed to concentrate on the point Miss Kingsley was making, partly because I was in my imagination placing Casement in the surroundings illustrated in our history book. I could see that the Tower of London was a cold, dark place, and I pitied anyone unfortunate enough to be imprisoned there. I thought of the little princes, of Queen Elizabeth, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lady Jane Grey. I was sympathetic to all of them—although only to Elizabeth during the earlier part of her life, since it was she who later imprisoned and then beheaded her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots—and I had formed a very poor impression of those who did the imprisoning. Photographs of Casement, a tall, unusually handsome man with a closely trimmed beard, had appeared in the
Morning Post.
I had studied them for a long time. He did not look like a traitor; he wore a tweed suit and his posture was straight and proud. He looked like a gentleman, and his expression, calm, gentle, patient, was that of a saint.

Half listening to Miss Kingsley, I was also struggling with an idea of my own. My family had been soldiers and builders of empire for several generations, and it did not occur to me to question the moral implications of colonialism. The sun never set on the British Empire; most of the map of the world was pink. Christianity and the benefits of British law and government were justification enough—were any needed—for conquering distant, primitive, hot lands and subjugating their inhabitants. I still did not question the right and might of the Empire, any more than I did the standards Grandmother set for herself and imposed upon the rest of us. But it now felt to me that there might be other standards and beliefs that were almost as right, valid, and worthy of self-sacrifice. My sympathy for Casement, Constance Markievicz, and the revolutionaries executed in Dublin that week was also, I was beginning to see, in some way connected to my protective feelings for Mara and Sonia; all of them, I was beginning to think, sacrificed, discarded, or excluded to preserve an order that benefited me and my family. It was with these subversive, if not completely formulated thoughts, that I arrived at the lunch table.