The Woman from Kerry (9 page)

‘Oh Rose, yes. Yes, please. I’ve always hated having to write, but it would be different writing
to you. I could still ask your advice then. You won’t be a servant any more, so you can say what you like and not have to pretend you don’t see things you’ve always seen. Think, only a few more days and you’ll be Mrs John Hamilton.’

‘And only two more months and you’ll be Lady Harrington of Tobercurry.’

‘I sometimes can’t believe it.’ She suddenly looked grave. ‘Will I always be this happy, Rose?’

‘I’m sure there will be many happy times,’ she replied, carefully, unwilling to spoil the moment with too cold a touch of reality. ‘What my mother says is that you must always gather up all your happiness in your hand and look at it and cherish it, because whoever you are and whatever your station in life, there will always be sad times.’

‘Then I shall gather up all these days we’ve had since Harrington came and you promised to help me. I’ve never been so happy in all my life. I’ll never forget them, Rose and you mustn’t either, whatever happens. Promise.’

‘Yes, I promise.’

‘And you must also promise you’ll wear the little veil I’ve found with the pearls round the edge to match the ones on your new silk blouse.’

‘Yes, I will,’ she said steadily, suddenly aware the days were passing so swiftly. In such a little while she would be gone into an unknown world to live amongst people she didn’t know with customs she
hadn’t met, to live a future she couldn’t possibly imagine at this moment.

She knew she would still have said yes to John, but it was only now, sitting in the window seat with Lady Anne, the picture of a wedding veil spread out between them, did she understand fully what had made him hesitate to ask her. Yes, she would miss so many things, the people she knew so well, the countryside she loved, the gardens and the sunlit rooms, the comfort of her own tiny bedroom, the small fireplace where she and her mother drank a cup of tea last thing at night. She knew that would be the hardest of all, saying goodbye to her mother after all these years, bound so close by ties forged in adversity.

‘Well then, has the bridegroom arrived?’ Hannah asked, as Rose came up the stairs and pushed open the door, her arms full of clothes from the ironing room and small packages from the fellow servants who’d just wished her joy.

‘Yes, he has. And you’ll be glad to hear he’s bought a coat that fits him. He sends you his regards and says he hopes he’ll not disgrace you tomorrow.’

‘Ah, he’ll not do that, good man that he is. But it’s a big expense.’

‘It was indeed, but he says it will do him many a long day if he only wears it for christenings, weddings and funerals.’

‘Are you not going for a walk this evening, Rose?’

‘No, Ma. Not this evening. I think perhaps Sam and his friends have plans to entertain John, but I said I would see him in church.’

They settled by the small fire that always burnt in the fireplace, even in summer, and waited for the kettle to boil. Usually she made their tea in the evening, but tonight Hannah told her to stay where she was and rest herself before she did her packing and washed her hair.

She did as she was told, leant back and let the weariness of a long day flow over her. Her last day in service. The last day on which someone might ring, someone might call her, someone might come to her and demand that she do what they wanted. From this moment on, she was free to make up her own mind. Free to say ‘no,’ even to those she loved. She could not imagine refusing John anything, any more than she could refuse her mother or Sam, and yet this new sense of freedom and power excited her.

‘It’s a long journey you have ahead of you,’ said Hannah, as she handed her a cup of tea.

She nodded, thinking of the coach journey to Dublin with Lady Ishbel and John and Paddy.

‘They came down in three days, but we don’t start till four tomorrow, so it may take more.’

Hannah smiled and Rose realised she wasn’t thinking about the journey back to the north. At the same moment, she noticed that the cup she was drinking from was just as familiar as the breakfast
china, but smaller and prettier, and it was one they never used. It was the cup and saucer she’d seen for the first time the day the men came to put them out of their home in Ardtur. She looked up at her mother, surprised.

‘I want you to take it with you. And maybe, sometimes, if things go a bit hard with you, you’ll sit down by yourself and drink from the cup, even if it were only spring water you had,’ she said quietly. ‘My mother gave it to me the night before my wedding and I did as she asked, many a time, when I was anxious or perplexed,’ she said, looking deep into the orange embers glowing in the grate.

‘I planned to give it to your sister, Rose. But that wasn’t to be. And then I thought to give it to Mary, but she married far away in Donegal. And maybe that’s the right way of it after all. Maybe it was meant for you.’

Rose sat silent, tears welling in her eyes, but her mother leant across and took the empty cup from her hands and set it down on the nearby table.

‘Sure we’d better start packing or we’ll be up half the night. I can’t have my lovely Rose wilting when she goes to marry the love of her life,’ she said, dropping a kiss on her cheek and drawing her to her feet.

The Molyneux coach with its well-matched greys, its experienced coachman, its newly-married groom and its two passengers, Lady Ishbel Molyneux and Mrs Rose Hamilton, made good time on the journey to Dublin, but once there, the uncertainty as to what was to happen next grew wearisome. The departure for the north depended upon Sir Capel’s business in the capital and Lady Ishbel’s decision whether to stay in Dublin, or return home ahead of him.

Rose longed to complete this longest of journeys. Until she reached her new home, her life was suspended. Though no longer a servant, she was still entirely dependent on the decisions of others and although Lady Ishbel treated her very courteously, it was her nature to be very demanding. Throughout each day of the journey from Currane Lodge to Dublin she’d talked continuously. Sometimes interestingly, at other times her monologues filled up with minute details of people and places quite unknown to Rose.
She’d responded as best she could, but the effort wearied her. It was particularly hard to bear when all she wanted to do was sit quietly and absorb the passing countryside, storing it up, delighting in its newness, its variety, its difference from all she had yet experienced.

There was a more personal reason too. The short nights spent in different hostelries on the long road brought pleasure and joy. John was as tender and passionate a lover as she imagined he would be. Sometimes when Lady Ishbel was in full flight and only required an attentive appearance, the occasional nod, she smiled to think she was separated from her lover only by the thin walls of a coach and the interminable chatter of an old woman who found travel tedious and boring.

After a week of delays in Merrion Square, only partly offset by visiting the sights of the city, Lady Ishbel made the decision to remain in Dublin. Anxious for John to return to his own work on the estate, Sir Capel decided to send them north by train, an unexpected gift which delighted them both.

‘So where are we now, John?’ Rose asked, as they stopped at a small station, somewhere beyond Portadown. There they’d left the great gleaming express gathering steam for the last stretch of its run into Belfast, while they made their way in the opposite direction on a small local train bound for Armagh, Monaghan and Cavan.

‘Sure we’re nearly home, Rose,’ he said softly. ‘This is Richhill.’

Rose glanced at the small station and gazed up the lane she could see running between the end of the platform and a nearby goods shed. A girl with ginger hair was leading a horse on a rope away from them, up the rising slope of the lane between high hedges. A dozen yards away, a handful of cows crossed the lane itself, moving slowly towards a long, low building, whitewashed, its thatched roof recently patched with new straw that caught the long fingers of evening sun filtering through the nearby trees.

‘It’s not a very big village, is it?’ she said cautiously, as she watched John smile contentedly as he ran his eye over the familiar place.

The cows were followed by a man with a stick. As the whistle blew and the train creaked, vibrated and began to move, he spotted John, raised his stick and waved it in a vigorous salute. John lowered the window and leant out.

‘Good evenin’, Tom. Are ye well?’

‘Aye, the best at all. An’ yerself, an’ the wife?’ he asked, a broad beam on his face.

‘Grand. Grand. We’re on our way home,’ he shouted, as the whistle blew again, the train now gathering speed, a cloud of smoke and steam enveloping their carriage.

By the time John had pulled up the window, the
grey-white cloud had dissolved and they were once again moving between green fields and orchards, the railway banks bright with ox-eye daisies, long-stemmed buttercups and the rusty spikes of sorrel and dockon.

‘That was Tom Loney,’ John explained. ‘His brother James works for Sir Capel. He’s a forester.’

‘And that was Richhill?’ Rose prompted him.

‘Ach no, that’s only Richhill Station. Richhill is a mile or more away.’

‘That’s not much good if you live in Richhill,’ said Rose, laughing.

‘It’d be worse if it weren’t here at all,’ he replied promptly. ‘Sure when the line was built, talk was there was to be no station at all between Portadown and Armagh, but some of the big business people had their say. There’s fruit growing all round this area,’ he explained. ‘A lot of farmers send boxes of apples and soft fruits up to Belfast in the season forby the milk and eggs that goes every day. There’s a tannery too and furniture workshops at Stonebridge. Sure it’s goods the railways makes their money on, not the likes of you an’ me travelling around the place,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘I’ll be quite glad to stop travelling around the place, John. It seems such a long time since we walked down our path to the lake and had a place to call our own.’ She poked him gently in the ribs
and said, accusingly, ‘And we never did hear that nightingale of yours.’

‘Aye, but we heard your lark sing the few afternoons we had,’ he reminded her gently.

She fell silent, her eyes closing, weary from the brightness of the light. All day she’d peered through soot-stained windows to see as much of the passing country as she could, for there was little likelihood of her ever seeing any of it again.

‘Look, John, look,’ she’d whispered, when the carriage was still full of people as they made their way towards Drogheda. ‘Wouldn’t that just be Lady Anne?’

They looked down on a wide, empty beach, the blue water creating a leisurely fringe of white wavelets. A girl on horseback raced along it, clods of damp sand thrown back from the hooves of her mount. Following her, a black dog, tried to keep pace with her, its pink tongue just visible.

‘Them’s the wee hills I told you about,’ he whispered, a little later, nodding towards the window on the other side of the train.

Rose studied the smooth, rounded hill that occupied the foreground, its summit outlined by a planting of young trees. A pleasing shape indeed, as if a giant hand had taken its time to mould the countryside, finding curving hillsides more appealing than low lying fields, however rich or productive.

The low hills came and went again. They
rattled over a railway bridge and realised they had crossed the Boyne, a harmless stream far below them, emptying itself into an estuary lined with tall, stone warehouses and smaller rows of houses. Soon afterward, the carriage now empty of fellow passengers, they’d picked out the Mournes, their south-facing slopes pale in bright sunlight as they swept down to the shores of Carlingford Lough.

As they drew nearer to the mountains, the train slackened speed and they found themselves travelling more slowly through country rougher and wilder than any they’d yet encountered. Here the fields were no longer green and pleasant, but rough and filled with rushes, invaded by bracken and bramble. The farms looked poor and mean and even on such a lovely summer day there was a bleak, windswept look about the place. This much closer now, the Mournes turned their northern faces towards them, sombre, pitted with deep gullies, full of dark blue shadows.

‘Well, yer in Ulster now, Rose. Old Tom says it’s always been different t’ the rest of Ireland, but I can’t see it myself. Sure it’s the same wee hills, the same folk out workin’ on their land. Can ye see a difference?’

‘Ask me again when I’ve got my feet on the ground,’ she began.

‘It’s different from Kerry all right. But looks aren’t everything. It’s the people that make a place different.’

‘Sure you’ll find nothing but welcome where we’re goin’. My mother’s that excited she’d have had the whole house decorated for ye comin’ if I hadn’t written an’ told her to hold her horses till she’d ask ye what ye’d like. She’s been lonely since the father died. An’ forby, she always wanted a girl, an’ didn’t she have all boys, poor woman.’

‘Well, if they were all like you, she maybe didn’t do so bad. Were they like you?’

‘Ye may ask her that yerself for I was young enough when they upped sticks for Canada,’ he began. ‘I always remember George, the eldest, said he’d never work in a forge. He was kinda particular. He said it was too dirty for him. When he left school he went and served his time in Elliott’s of Thomas Street. They were grocers and thought themselves very superior. Nothing but the best. They brought in their own cigars and had a special whiskey. But he said he was fed up with the airs and graces of the customers. James always wanted to do what George did, but he couldn’t get a place in a grocer’s, though there’s plenty of them in Armagh, so he ended up in Gillis Mill watchin’ the looms, but sure he couldn’t stan’ the noise.’

The evening light was beginning to fade a little and the shadows were lengthening. In the orchards, every tree cast its outline on the long grass, the pale unripe fruit catching the light against dark foliage. The train slowed once again and came to a halt at
an even smaller station. Here there was no building of any kind, just a platform and a sign. It said: The Retreat.

John helped her down, handed her the small bags and parcels they’d brought with them, the items Rose would need to keep her going till the coach came up from Dublin with the rest of her possessions and the wedding gifts they’d had from the staff and guests at Currane Lodge.

‘Are yez right?’ called the guard.

‘Grand, thank ye,’ replied John.

She stood looking round her as he banged the carriage door shut and waved to the guard who was watching to see them safely landed. Somewhere a blackbird was singing his heart out. He sounded just like the one who perched on the point of the eaves above the stable yard clock opposite the rooms she’d shared with her mother for so long. For a moment she felt so utterly desolate, a small figure in a completely unknown world. Then John put an arm round her and moved her away from the train as it began to make steam. They stood together on the rough stones by the track and watched it move slowly away from them, disappearing into a cutting where the line curved southwards before its next stop in Armagh.

‘There now, love, it’s not far now. There’s a bit of a shortcut across the field here and then its about half a mile on the road.’

With one arm firmly round her, the other carrying their bags, a couple of parcels wedged under his arm, he set out across the field, humming quietly to himself.

They walked in silence for a little, grateful to be moving on their own feet, their limbs full of the weariness of the day, the crowded carriages of the Dublin train, the hard wooden seats in the Portadown waiting room, the creak and rattle of the elderly carriages on the local train.

Rose drew a deep breath of the fresh evening air, caught the aroma of turf smoke and found herself suddenly back in her childhood, sitting by the fire with her brothers and sister, her mother cooking bread on a griddle hung on a chain over the glowing embers.

How remote it all seemed, those far-off days. How much her world had changed. How widely they were scattered. She had come to Armagh while Mary stayed in Donegal. Michael was in Scotland and Patrick had settled in Nova Scotia. Her mother and Sam were back in Kerry, separated not so much by the distance between them, but by the expense of getting there.

They’d all survived, but not her sister Rose whose name she carried on, nor her eldest brother Sam, buried side by side in the sloping churchyard that looked out over Lough Gartan, close by the remains of Columbkille’s small stone church. They
lay among friends and neighbours whose names she could still bring to mind. Not so her father, lying in a churchyard in Galloway, surrounded by good Presbyterians, every one a stranger.

She felt tears well up in her eyes and blinked them away so that John would not see. How could anyone ever have imagined what would become of the little family gathered by that glowing fire? And now, she was setting out, just as her mother had done, travelling to an unknown place, a good and loving man by her side. For a moment, she was aware just how enormous a step she’d taken, but before fear or anxiety could touch her, she heard the sound of John’s voice and her sense of loneliness and isolation dissolved. As her mother had said, she’d chosen a good man. That was all that mattered. What would come, would come. Together they would face it.

‘There now,’ he said, drawing her through a field gate and releasing her for a moment to shut it behind them. ‘Yer so close now ye might even smell it,’ he said, beaming down at her.

‘No, not a sign of garlic,’ she said, laughing up at him. ‘All I can smell is turf smoke and mown hay … and flowers, but I’m not sure what flowers.’

‘Ah, ye’ll smell flowers all right when I get you home, sure it’s only a wee bit now. Are your eyes all right?’ he asked, looking at her closely.

‘Its just the smoke and the brightness,’ she said,
lightly, not wanting to dampen his good spirits. ‘I could do with washing my face,’ she said, laughing.

The road was narrow but well-used, the cart ruts mended with loose stones. On one side, tall trees shaded the worn surface from the setting sun, on the other, beyond low hedges and tumbled stone walls, fields and water meadows were still bathed in golden light.

Rose noticed John was walking faster, but she said nothing and saved her breath for keeping up with his lengthening strides.

‘There ye are,’ he said, nodding, his arms fully occupied.

Ahead of them they saw the gable end of a sturdy, two-storey house partly sheltered by trees. As they drew closer, the light glinted from small paned windows and glanced off the fresh whitewash. A trim little house, well-thatched and solid. Very much as he had described it to her sitting by Currane lake.

As they stepped off the road, through a small gate onto a cobbled path leading to the front door, she gasped in delight.

‘John, you never told me about the garden.’

‘Ach, I had to keep a wee surprise. My mother has great hands for plants. She can grown anything.’

Rose walked slowly up the path, the perfume of roses and the heavy scent of lilies lying on the cooling air, the blending colours of delphiniums and foxgloves, rich blues, mauves and pinks, a joy
to the eye. Tired as she was, she could have stood and looked at the two broad herbaceous borders for long enough had the front door not been thrown opened, and a small, stooped woman with a stick moved awkwardly towards them.