Tyringham Park (2 page)

The clock on the nursery wall chimed three. Teresa Kelly would be leaving Ballybrian about now, Lady Blackshaw would be bringing Victoria back soon, and then the long dreary evening would
begin.

With the once-placid Victoria, the pretty one, beginning to show signs of alarming wilfulness, Dixon was glad that someone else would be wasting years of effort trying to straighten her out,
only in the end to find her turning out like Charlotte, the plain one. How wonderful to leave the Park and marry Manus at last, escaping the bone-aching tedium of rearing two rich brats! Her own
children when she had them would be hard-working and sensible and a credit to her. And, of course, bonny. How could they escape being bonny with herself and Manus as parents?

She sat down to rub lemon juice into her hands, and let her mind turn, as it often did, to the injustices in life. If fate had been more kind to her and less kind to Lady Blackshaw, they could
be sisters: both light-brown-haired and attractive, both tall and strong, both young. She wouldn’t mind the gulf between them so much if Her Ladyship made the most of her position by
indulging in a life of luxury and fashion, but she went around all day with her untidy hair piled on the top of her head with a single comb that couldn’t cope with the straggly bits, and
worse, wore men’s riding breeches stained with saddle oil and horse sweat and didn’t even dress for dinner while the master was away, which was most of the time. Dixon remembered the
day she saw Lady Blackshaw in the full riding habit – top hat, veil, fitted jacket, silk stock, tailored skirt and fine leather gloves and boots – and how she had almost swooned at the
elegance of it, and how she couldn’t believe it when she heard it was the last time her mistress would dress like that as she intended to switch from the side-saddle to riding astride, as she
had done as a girl, so that she could fulfil her ambition of riding like a man. “If it was good enough for Joan of Arc and Marie Antoinette to ride like that, it’s good enough for
me,” she was reported to have told a conservative old neighbour who admonished her for adopting such an immodest and unladylike style. “And look what happened to them,” the old
woman responded with relish. “And served them right.”

As the wait for the servants to arrive lengthened, Edwina, after retracing the route around the stables that Manus had already followed, took the steps up to check the
first-storey quarters where the stable lads lived. If Victoria could climb, the steps up to it might have caught her eye. Only one door was open – it revealed a small kitchen – and it
took only a moment to see that there was no one in it. The three men had gone to a shebeen in the village as they did every Friday afternoon. She already knew of their routine and hadn’t
expected to find anyone in their quarters.

Standing on the balcony, looking down on the enclosed courtyard, she sensed that the baby carriage and tartan quilt were accusing her from the opposite wall.

She would not allow herself to think of the child and the river and the open door in a single image.

What Manus had told her earlier came back to puzzle her like a half-forgotten refrain. Teresa Kelly, he’d said, was so devoted to Victoria he couldn’t believe she would let herself
be parted from her, and right up to the last minute he had thought she would change her mind and, for the sake of the child, not leave the Park. But he’d been mistaken. She had left. She was
already gone.

It was the word ‘gone’ that resonated with Edwina and the fact that Manus, a man not given to idle conversation, had thought the woman’s leaving worth mentioning in the first
place.

Twenty minutes after he’d told her about Teresa Kelly, Victoria was gone as well.

She wished he hadn’t ridden off so abruptly before she’d had time to question him further. It was a seven-mile stretch of river from the Park to the sea. If he had to ride the full
distance it would be hours before she saw him again.

It was only when the gravel dug into the soles of her feet that Miss East realised she was wearing her indoor shoes, now wet and looking two sizes larger with all the mud
clinging to them. Under ordinary circumstances Lady Blackshaw would be cross if she saw her housekeeper inappropriately shod, with soil stuck to her usually spotless clothing, but at a time like
this she would surely hardly notice such things. Was that Sid driving off in a pony and trap along the avenue towards the gate lodge? How had he harnessed up so quickly? Had she miscalculated the
time she’d spent in that blackout of anguish after the servants had left her?

Ignoring her tears and her status, she ran the rest of the way to the stables.

Edwina’s absent husband, Lord Waldron Blackshaw, at present working in the War Office in London, was one of the most hated men in Ireland, though he wasn’t aware of
it. Nor were most of the inhabitants of Tyringham Park, cocooned as they were in a self-contained kingdom, physically distanced from the local community by the estate’s vast stretches of
farms, tillage, parkland, gardens and woodlands, and socialising only with their peers in similar Big Houses across the country.

Only three people on the estate knew the reason for the particular hatred: Manus, horse-breaker and trainer, and Teresa Kelly, seamstress – the only two employees from the locality –
and the steward, a Tyrone man, who oversaw all the operations of the estate and collected the rents from the tenant farmers on Lord Waldron’s behalf.

For more than a year, the steward had been expecting some kind of retaliation for what Waldron had done, so when the young boy burst into his office with the news about Victoria, his first
thought was that the time for it had come. But when the boy added, “Manus fears that she is drownded and is searching the river,” he allowed himself to hope that the disaster he would
be dealing with was domestic rather than political.

When the steward came into the stable yard to find Lady Blackshaw he thought that, with her hair hanging loose about her face, she looked like the twenty-year-old innocent she
had been when she first arrived from England as a bride nine years earlier.

“Good man,” she said. “You take over here. I need to talk to Miss East and Nurse Dixon.”

She turned and strode out the stables' doors, almost colliding with Miss East who was hurrying in.

“There you are, Miss East. What kept you?”

She took the housekeeper by the elbow, turned her around to face back towards the house and walked ahead, now full of purpose, forcing the older, smaller woman to do half-running and skipping
steps to keep up.

“You’re just the person I want to see. Tell me which servants weren’t in the walled garden this afternoon and everything you know about Teresa Kelly. And stop that
snivelling.”

Sid Cooper, the coachman, had been sent by Lady Blackshaw to look along the avenue in case the child had wandered in that direction. Rounding each tree-obscured bend, he
expected to see Victoria, either on her own or in the care of a solicitous servant who had chanced upon her, but there was no one at all in view. Instead of returning to report, he used his
initiative and carried on past the empty gate lodge and the stone pillars to the main road, turned left and continued a quarter mile to the village of Ballybrian. Best ask there. When he arrived in
the main square his urgency and the pace of his over-excited pony prompted some villagers to call out to him, to ask if there was anything the matter. The youngest child from the Park was missing
and had anyone seen her or anything suspicious? They would ask around immediately – and would they be of any help in a search? They would, and it would be much appreciated, he said, taking it
upon himself to issue the invitation – now was not the time to be worrying about formalities. Would they have a look around the village first?

Sid’s last place to check was the train station. With the part-time stationmaster not on duty, he looked into all the unlocked rooms himself and found them deserted.

By the time he turned for home, the villagers were already on the move, some spread out along the main road but most already on the mile-long drive up to the house, some of the older youths
cycling ahead and the younger boys running alongside, jostling and shoving one another. The sombre cathedral-like atmosphere created by the two-hundred-year-old beeches arching over the length of
the avenue had the effect of heightening their spirits rather than dampening them.

Nurse Dixon looked down through the front windows of the nursery and saw the beautiful Lady Blackshaw and the old witch Miss East walking quickly along the gravel drive towards
the front entrance. No sign of Victoria. Just as she predicted. Fobbed off on to one of the maids, no doubt, after waking and needing attention. She knew that Lady Blackshaw, with her lack of
interest in anything that happened in the nursery, wouldn’t know what to do with a child that wasn’t asleep.

Crossing to the back windows, she saw that, unusually at this hour, no one was making use of the walled garden. Now that her only friend Teresa Kelly was gone, would she ever have the courage to
go there to join the others of an afternoon? Probably not. Hardly worth worrying about, really, seeing as she would be leaving soon. No one liked her. Never had. All down to the old witch Lily
East, the very one who should have smoothed her path or ‘let her in’ to the established circle, seeing they came from the same parish in Huddersfield in England, but Lily had done the
opposite. To be reared on tales of Miss East’s success and arrive in awe of her and then find herself pushed out in the cold was an upset she didn’t intend to forget.

She had slept fitfully the previous night, what with her sadness at Teresa’s departure and the disruptions of Victoria’s restlessness and Charlotte’s talking in her sleep. I
need a catnap before Victoria is brought back, she concluded, fetching an eiderdown from her room. If Charlotte comes in, she’ll know better than to wake me – she’s been warned
often enough.

The steward’s plan was to search the estate so thoroughly that when Lord Waldron returned from London at the end of the war, there would be no miscalculations or
oversights for him to pinpoint and criticise.

Tyringham Park estate, the most impressive in County Cork, consisted of a fifty-two-roomed stone mansion, splendid enough with its single turreted tower to be referred to as a castle, and 19,000
acres of land. It wouldn’t be easy to organise a comprehensive search. He would concentrate for the present on everything inside its boundary walls, seeing that was his responsibility, with
only a cursory survey of the village and its surroundings.

The only crowd the steward thought he would ever see at the Park in his lifetime would be a hostile one, so he was doubly grateful for the scores of villagers who immediately came to help, and
for the hundreds more people who, as the word spread, arrived later in the day from neighbouring Big Houses and from outlying villages.

Lady Blackshaw, in a fit of pique years previously, had decided not to employ anyone to live in the lodge to open and close the gates and check the movements of people entering and leaving the
estate. “Why bother when no one visits?” she had said, intimating that it was Lord Waldron’s fault, because of his long absences, that there was never any social activity at the
Park. Why have someone sitting there doing nothing? she had argued. Let them plant barley on the land instead and make themselves useful.

She must regret that directive now.

Like Manus, the steward had concluded early on that Victoria had drowned, but felt it was his duty to issue instructions to exhaust all other alternatives in the hope the child was still
alive.

When Edwina was forced to ask about Teresa Kelly, she left Miss East standing and sat far enough away so she wouldn’t have to tilt her head to look up at her. To hear her
husband Waldron constantly praise the housekeeper, one would think she was perfection personified, and to hear her speak and observe her attitude, one would think she considered herself the
mistress of the house rather than the mere servant that she was, so Edwina didn’t like to lose an opportunity, even in circumstances such as these, to put her in her place.

After a quick check on the servants who had been in the garden, Edwina said, “Tell me all you know about Teresa Kelly.” She didn’t mention Manus’s remark about
Teresa’s attachment to Victoria and his belief that she would never leave the Park because of it. “And pull yourself together. Your blubbering is most unseemly.”

Miss East was finding it difficult to concentrate when all she could think of was a lost and frightened Victoria, but she forced herself to speak.

Teresa Kelly was a woman from the village who had run into trouble at home with a difficult sister-in-law. Miss East, who had been friends with her for years, gave her a live-in position after
Victoria was born, with instructions to divide her time between sewing and assisting Nurse Dixon in the nursery.

“Two grown women to look after two children?” Edwina interrupted. “Verging on the excessive, one would think.” She couldn’t very well say ‘Why didn’t
you consult me?’ seeing she’d made it clear from the beginning that she wanted nothing to do with domestic matters, and Waldron had instructed Miss East accordingly, but she was still
peeved that Miss East was able to exercise such authority. She also disliked the fact that Waldron insisted the woman be addressed as Miss East, rather than just East, which, to Edwina’s way
of thinking, would have been more in keeping with tradition.

“The local parish priest arranged for Teresa to travel to New South Wales,” Miss East continued, “to marry a farmer and look after his aged mother. She has a friend living out
there.”

“Did she have a special attachment to Victoria?”

“She was very fond of both girls. She was an affectionate, big-hearted person.”

Lady Blackshaw raised her eyebrows as she said, “How very admirable.”

“Yes, she was admirable,” Miss East agreed, pretending not to notice the sarcasm. “She made such an impression in the time she was here it was as if she had been here all her
life.”