The Last Storyteller (35 page)

Did the same thoughts course through Venetia’s mind? I had no idea. She wanted to get out of this stupidity; of that I felt sure. But to settle with me again? From her demeanor, I couldn’t begin to guess.

Unclear and confused, I tried to buy time. Once we were clear of the city, I drove down a small country lane, looking for quiet, linking roads. It led nowhere. I turned the car in the tightest of spaces and headed back the way we’d come.

“Where are we going?”

I didn’t answer, and I didn’t look at her. Some miles later, I turned right. The previous foray had been a left turn. This road led only to a farm lane with a lone white house in the distance. I knew the place, had visited there once, hadn’t stayed.

“Is this the place you’re looking for?”

“No, not really.”

I retraced our route. Out on the road again, I looked for signposts. It seemed that there was nobody in Ireland that day—which is to say that
every road and every yard and every village seemed empty. Far away, I saw a man in a hill field with a black-and-white dog—and nothing and nobody else.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Venetia sat up straight. “You don’t, do you?”

I said, “We’re going down here onto another main road.” True, but I hadn’t planned it.

“Shouldn’t you be avoiding main roads?”

I said, “That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

As though I’d had a plan. As though I hadn’t been screaming at myself inside my head:
You imbecile! How did you let your life come to this? What kind of fool are you? Where are you going?

She said, “Are you as frightened as I am?”

“Venetia, I don’t know what to do about you.”

For a moment it looked as though I might have made a breakthrough. It didn’t happen. She caught her breath, sat forward, braced herself—but then sagged and sat back. She closed her eyes. Catatonic again. Unreachable.

See if you can shake her out of it. Ask her. Go on, ask her the crucial question. Say to her, “Have I got this all wrong? Did I completely do the wrong thing? I’d hoped that you had continued to feel the same about me as I did about you. Was I—am I—wrong in that?”

James had a good friend who lived in a woodland thirty miles from Limerick. We now sat within his radius. I had been there twice, one time with James, once alone. The man, George Williamson, had married an Irish traveler girl, a “tinker,” to use the term they didn’t like. He interested me because he collected stories of the Gypsies and knew some of their old dialects, including Shelta, the Romany-sounding tongue in which some of them traded horses.

I admired his house, which faced south in a clearing of the woods; a member of the Guinness family had built it as a love nest for a nineteenth-century mistress. It had oriel windows hanging out over a quiet garden. Bookshelved walls swung open to reveal secret rooms. The main fireplace had been carved in white marble and had birds on branches, warbling etched notes by a vivacious fountain.

We drove the mile-long avenue through the forest that George Williamson
maintained with love and passion. A self-educated arborist, he knew how to graft, to bud. “I like trees to marry,” he said over and over, and on any walk near his house you’d find interesting and cultivated hybrids. Half apple–half pear was the least of it.

He held to the same principles of hospitality as Randall: turn up any time, stay as long as you like. George had a quiet army of servants—“the H. H.” he called them, the “hired help,” and in his deep seclusion he lived the life of a Renaissance prince. He even dressed for dinner each evening, typically in a brocade smoking jacket with a stiff dress shirt, white bow tie, and monogrammed slippers that had belonged to his grandfather.

Under the arch, past the peacocks on the acre of lawn, the house glowed in the sun. The crenellations around the windows looked like the lacework of a giant seamstress. George’s butler stepped from the great doorway, immaculate in a black suit.

“Good afternoon, madam, sir. How nice to see you. Mr. Williamson will be so pleased.”

Such an intriguing house—such excellent taste. A Parisian hostess might have created it. Not for the first time did I wonder about Mare, his dark-eyed tinker wife, whom I’d met briefly on my two previous visits. True, she had been dressed exquisitely, but that didn’t answer the question of where and how she’d acquired her dazzling sensibility.

George knew that we all had such questions. Mare said nothing; I had never heard her utter a word. James, who had spoken to her, said that she had the same fast, undulating accent of her people, whom he knew on the road in their bright horse-drawn caravans.

“Ben!” George Williamson had a handshake of oak. “How. Welcome. You. Are.” He spoke every word one at a time, as though sentences hadn’t yet been invented. I introduced Venetia; she didn’t flinch when I said, “My wife.”

George took her hands in his. “Such. A. Delight.”

Within minutes, a tray of drinks had appeared in the hall. Whiskey. Nothing else. With six glasses. He drank as I’d always seen him do: one, two, three, and then he relaxed with the fourth glass. As I’d often done myself.

“How long can you stay?” Before I could answer, he turned to Venetia and said, “My wife died last month.”

We both gasped. I said, “George, I’m very sorry.”

“She walked across this floor, I was watching her, she went to fix some branches that she had arranged in that tall pot over there. I heard her grunt. She put a hand to her head. Swayed. Side to side. Fell. Dead when she hit the floor. Brain. Hemorrhage.”

His eyes shone. Tears? I thought so. Later I wasn’t so sure.

A maid showed us to a room. Venetia made for the window seat and looked down at the garden. I bounced on the four-poster bed. A large engraving of Napoleon hung above the fireplace.

“What a strange man,” Venetia said. “Hidden in the woods.”

“He doesn’t allow photographs,” I said. “People have wanted to write books about this place.”

“I can see why.”

I said, “Not just the architecture. During the building, a feud broke out between two local families—stonemasons and carpenters. Each killed members of the other family.”

“Look!” Venetia pointed.

Across the grass, behind tall hedges, two maids in full uniforms of black dress and starched white cap and apron were leading—I counted—four, five, six small children to a perfect stable block.

“Whose are they?” I mused.

At dinner we asked. “We saw some children,” Venetia said.

“My. Dear. You must have been mistaken. When the shadows fall here, the light does. Strange. Dances.” He knew how to close down a topic.

Three of us sat around the end of a long table, Venetia on George Williamson’s right. We finished a starter course of piquant smoked trout with lime jelly. When the three manservants had taken our plates away, George stretched out his right hand and caressed Venetia’s breasts. Casual. Relaxed. Interested.

What do you do? Venetia did nothing. I did nothing. George said, “Very beautiful.”

The next course came, potato and onion soup. Repeat performance. This time Venetia, more prepared, caught George’s hand. She pushed it away.

“Don’t you like me touching you?”

I said, “Venetia hasn’t been well.”

“So. Tactful.” George beamed at me. “Not many guests know that you don’t insult your host.”

And not many hosts know that you don’t insult your guests. Try it one more time and I’ll break every bone in your face
.

But I smiled, and we all dined on.

After dinner, we walked to a drawing room—big house, long walk. George put his hand on Venetia’s backside. I didn’t see it, but I guessed it from her little forward trot away from him. I made sure to sit beside her for the last hour of the night.

Back in the four-poster Napoleon room, Venetia lay down at once. She fell into a sleep so deep that I was able to pull the bedding out from underneath her and cover her without waking her. All night she remained immobile. I sat on the window seat for hours, looking at the starlight and the shadowed garden below. From time to time I checked that Venetia breathed.

Somewhere around one o’clock in the morning, I heard a noise in the passageway outside our room. When I eased open our door, I saw one of the aproned maids leave a doorway and walk in the opposite direction. The next morning, as we walked down to breakfast, George Williamson came from the same doorway.

The lovers spent their third night on the shores of the lakes in Westmeath. There they found an empty castle …

Though far from Westmeath, I knew a castle. Within a few hours’ drive.

When Venetia woke the next morning, she sat up and grabbed her hair with both hands.

“Easy, easy,” I said.

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

“You’re fine, you’re with me, I’m here.” The ironic voice in my head added,
If that’s what you think of as “fine.”

Like a cat with quick paws, she ran her hands around her face. She made little whimpering sounds, scarcely audible. And then made hand-washing gestures.
Don’t rub off your skin
.

I knew these symptoms: habits of fear. This woman woke up every morning afraid. It would take me years to heal her. If I got the chance. I knew enough to understand that keeping her from returning to Jack Stirling, no matter how illogical that action would be, might be the battle I’d have to fight.

“There’s a place we can go,” I said.

“Well, we’ve stayed with the bear. And we met the wolf last night,” said Venetia.
Good. Touch of her old humor
.

“How about an empty castle?”

She said, “I thought that’s what you were doing. Does this mean that you die when all this is over?”

“Think of it as a play,” I said. “How would Shakespeare have written it?”

This engaged her. She half-smiled. “By now he’d have poisoned somebody. And stabbed somebody else.”

“We can change the ending of the legend,” I said.

She sighed and yawned. “Take me to your castle, Sir Ben.”

More humor? This might be good. Don’t push your luck; keep it light
.

The hours of wakefulness had given me my plans for the next three days. My confusion had abated. At last I knew where I was going and at what pace.

We stopped at a village shop for supplies, enough to keep us going for a night.

The gate to the castle estate stood open.

“What’s the name of this place?” Venetia asked.

“Kilshane,” I answered, and I told her the story—the not unusual family argument, with one member of the family keeping the place in
some kind of order and the others fighting over who should pay for it and, ultimately, inherit it.

“None of them wants to give it up, but they refuse to meet the full upkeep. It has a hundred and thirty acres, though most of it needs to be cleared.”

At the steps to the terrace, two bicycles stood together, interlinked like lovers.

“Wait here,” I said, and parked at the edge of the overgrown lawn. I tiptoed up the high steps to the open front door. In the hallway stood two teenagers kissing. I coughed, and they jumped.

Neither tried to run away; both came forward. Fifteen, I guessed, and tall for their ages, she dark-haired, he with fair curls and green eyes.

“Hallo,” he said. Local accent, but well-spoken. “Are you lost?”

“Are you staying here?”

The girl blushed, and the boy answered: “No, this is where we meet. To be private.”

I said, “I understand.”

The boy said, “Do you know this place? It used to belong to the O’Connor family. They were descended from the high kings.”

“I’ve stayed here once or twice.”

“The roof is all caved in.” He beckoned me, and I followed them. The pair had impressive composure. “Look,” he said. “Isn’t that awful?”

Most of the roof’s rear slope had collapsed. We looked up through the jagged rafters at the clear blue sky. “It has affected the whole house,” he said.

“What did it?”

She answered: “We’d like to think it was a mighty creature. But it was a huge branch that fell in a storm.”

The boy said, “Well, that was a kind of a mighty creature, in a way.”

I said, “Where are you from?”

She answered for both: “I’m from the town; he’s from over the hill.”

He added, “That’s right. I’m the boy from over the hill.”

The girl asked, “Are you by yourself?”

“No, the car is over there at the top of the avenue.”

She darted away, and in a moment I heard voices.

“I’d be getting lonely out there if it was me,” said the girl returning.

Venetia followed the girl to where we stood in the desolate rear of the
building. Part of a bird’s nest from last year lay on the floor. The main shank of the fallen branch stuck up outside the door like a broken limb.

Venetia said to me, “You found your woodland creatures.”

The boy, quick and bright, said, “That’s what we are, Bea, isn’t it?”

“We wear clothes made from leaves,” she said, and they laughed. Impossible not to laugh with them.

“So you’re escaping,” I said.

“From prying eyes,” said the girl.

“We’re allowing ourselves to flourish,” said the boy.

“And we’re intruding,” said Venetia.

I couldn’t resist the tease. “They were kissing,” I told Venetia.

She defended them: “I hope so.”

The girl blushed, but the boy, self-possessed and relaxed, said, “It was practicing, really. We both want to get good at it.”

Venetia laughed—my heart strengthened.

We said goodbye to them. The boy apologized.

“I’m sorry you can’t stay here,” he said, as though he owned the place. “But it’d be uncomfortable for your wife.”

As we drove away Venetia said, “What charming children.” After a moment, she added, “Are you sorry that we won’t have birds and squirrels and badgers serve us berries, nuts, fruits, and mead?”

Padlocks on the front gate kept us out. But I had read someplace that bringing a distressed person face-to-face with a deep and important memory can help. Time to try it. We drove through Mr. Treacy’s gateway and down his farm lane to the front of the house.