Another Heartbeat in the House (16 page)

Lady Charlotte was fondling her pug, oblivious to the uproar beyond the snug confines of her sedan. She was feeding the animal shortbread, which she had purloined from the supper table and stowed in her sizeable reticule. Lord Doneraile was asleep again in the corner of the carriage.

‘You may expect a letter from Sir Silas tomorrow – he has you in mind for a governess,' Lady Charlotte told me. ‘His wife, Lady Sybil, has eight children under the age of ten who are in need of schooling.'

I had danced with Sir Silas, who had practically salivated over my décolleté. He had spoken in a choked voice of his love of poetry – especially that of Catullus and Rochester (poets whose works I was familiar with and knew to be obscene). He was especially fond, he told me, of certain of their verses which he would be pleased to have me translate into French and declaim aloud for his delectation, in the seclusion of his study.

‘Sir Silas seems to be a most learned man,' I remarked.

‘Yes, and a cultured one. He is forever tearing up to town to see the opera. He has travelled a great deal, and has imported some noble pictures and statuary from Greece to beautify his house.'

‘It is quite the fashion to collect antiquities. I understand Lord Elgin has purl – has accumulated quite a hoard from the Parthenon.'

‘Good for Lord Elgin, I say! It's perfectly acceptable to help ourselves to their antiquities, since ancient Greece is an idolatrous country.'

I wasn't sure how to answer this, for I believe Lady Doneraile thought ancient Greece to be some separate geographical entity entirely to the new Republic. Thankfully, she continued without waiting for my answer, glancing at her husband and lowering her voice. ‘I hear Sir Silas has a private chamber in his house painted in frescoes that he has had copied from the walls of Pompeii.'

I nodded cordially and refrained from pointing out that Pompeii was in Italy, not Greece.

‘Did you benefit from a classical education, Miss Drury?'

‘I did, Your Ladyship.'

‘I, alas, had few opportunities to peruse the writings of Homer and his antique ilk.'

The carriage swung suddenly to the right as the coachman swerved to avoid a hobbledehoy cutting capers on the cobblestones. Lord Doneraile jerked awake momentarily, snorted, then lolled back against the upholstery with his mouth open.

‘In my husband's family the only book they study is the Racing Calendar,' remarked Lady Charlotte, with a sigh. ‘His great-uncle established the flat race at Doncaster, you know.'

‘The sport of kings,' I murmured, politely.

‘Indeed. It has become a much celebrated thousand guinea championship, the St Leger.'

I stiffened. ‘I beg your pardon, Your Ladyship. Did you say St Leger?'

‘Yes,' supplied my companion. ‘Lord Doneraile is a St Leger. The title was created for his family by King George III – the second title, that is. The first was created in 1703. And here we are at last, at Grattan Hill.'

EDIE WOULD HAVE
stayed up to read more of Eliza's story were it not for the sputtering sound that told her the Aladdin lamp was running low on oil. In the kitchen she lit the storm lantern, shrugged into her polo coat and ventured abroad with Milo.

‘Remember the satin shoes we found, Milo – with the Louis heels? I wonder were they the ones she wore that night, with the blue taffeta, and the turquoises? I'd so love to know what she looked like! We shall never find out, of course, because there were no photographs then. Oh, don't do it there, darling – I'm bound to tread on it if you do it there. Come this way a little, over here – good boy! Maybe there's a portrait somewhere? A little one, hidden, that we haven't found yet – a miniature. And him! St Leger. Do you know who he reminds me of? Sergeant Troy, in
Far from the Madding Crowd
. Dashing and handsome and heroic, and yet a cad! Do you think he's a cad, Milo? I'd say she could whistle for him! Have you finished yet? Oh, do hurry up, it's freezing out here.'

It was colder than previous nights; the sky was clear, with that crystalline quality that presages frost. Beyond the roofs of the stable yard Edie could see the tops of trees surrounding them on three sides. The fourth side was, of course, all lake and hills.

The house would have been virtually inaccessible before the new road was built, she conjectured. One would have had to approach it through the forest, via the track that ran at a tangent to the avenue. It was an unlikely location for a dwelling, so far removed from the town. But Edie supposed the situation outweighed mere geographical inconvenience. Imagine waking up to that view in the morning!

Breathing in the cold air, she savoured the aroma of woodsmoke. ‘I do love an open fire, Milo! I know it would make more sense to just live in the kitchen here, but there's something so indulgent about sitting by a blazing library fire. If I had lots of money, I'd have a library. How grand! Imagine, on the telephone: “I'm working from home today, correcting galley proofs in the library.” La-di-da! Are you all done now? Let's go.'

She started to stroll back towards the house. But Milo didn't come scampering to overtake her as he usually did. When she turned round to chivvy him on, she saw that he was standing rigid, staring out past the stable to where the trees were fenced off from the yard. Behind the fence, all was forest.

‘Milo? Come on!'

Edie took a couple of paces towards him but the dog remained in the aggressive, stiff-legged stance that even the smallest dogs adopt when there's something up. It convinced her to stop and listen, and for a while she could hear nothing but the gentle soughing of the trees. Then she became aware of a sound she had never heard before. Milo was growling.

Edie had slept well since coming to Prospect House – a blessing she attributed to a combination of bracing country air and hard physical work. But on that clear cold evening after she had dragged Milo back into the house, locked and bolted both doors, pulled the shutters over the French windows, crawled into bed, extinguished her bedside lamp and curled up with Milo at her feet, fatigue hadn't been enough to tumble her into the arms of Morpheus. She had lain there clutching at hazy rags of sleep as they drifted past her, before starting awake again.

She remembered the ghost story that the girl in Doneraile Stores had told her earlier that day, of the lady in the old-fashioned dress who had walked the lakeshore road alongside her cousin. Edie didn't believe in ghosts. Nor did she believe that Friday the 13th, black cats or walking beneath a stepladder brought bad luck. She had read too many rubbishy manuscripts sent in to Heinemann about curses and hauntings and black magic to give credence to such superstitious tommyrot. But in that case, why had she locked Hilly's photograph in the drawer of her bureau?

Edie slid out of bed, wrapped herself in her dressing gown and went to the window. Outside it was pitch black, and the sound of the wind infiltrating the cracks between sash and window frame was tuneless as a gap-toothed whistler. How dark and wintry and steeped in misery the months had been, after Hilly's death. She had woken each morning to the same thought – ‘What is wrong? Something is wrong' – before remembering that of course her friend was dead and that it was her fault.

‘It wasn't your fault,' said Milo.

He was sitting on the bedspread watching her.

‘Are you eavesdropping on my thoughts?' she asked.

‘Yes. It wasn't your fault,' Milo said again. ‘You did it because you felt Hilly had betrayed you. And when a friend betrays you, a big lump of anger starts to build up inside you. So you did the only thing you could. You cut away the anger and shut it up in a drawer.'

‘And then she died!'

‘If you really believed she was going to die, you would never have done it.'

‘But I did do it!' wailed Edie.

‘And it didn't kill Hilly. A car killed her, silly. Come back to bed, Edie. Come and cuddle me.'

She slid back between the sheets and took the dog's warm little body in her arms.

‘Please don't cry on me. I hate having soggy fur,' said Milo.

Edie wiped her nose on her pyjama cuff. Together they lay, each listening to the other's breathing until it was synchronized. 'What made you growl, on the edge of the wood?' Edie asked sleepily.

‘I was practising being a guard dog.'

‘How brave you are.'

‘My great-grandsire saved the life of his mistress by leaping at the face of an intruder and ripping his beard off.'

‘He actually ripped his beard off?'

‘Yes. He was a great big fat man all dressed in red with a fur-trimmed hat, and my great-grandsire tore his beard to shreds.'

‘Oh, Milo, I do love you.'

‘I love you too, Edie.'

The following morning she awoke realizing that although Milo's queer behaviour on the edge of the forest had unsettled her, if she scraped away the layers – like a palimpsest – she could trace a creeping sense of unease back to yesterday, when Seán the Post had told her about an apocalyptic event that had killed a million people.

In the kitchen she riddled the stove, put a kettle on for coffee and poured herself a bowl of cornflakes. Then she went into the library and took from the box file the folder that she had earmarked for old newspaper cuttings, so that she could go through them while she ate her breakfast.

The first cutting was from the
Cork Chronicle and Munster Advertiser
, and it was dated May 1846:

Ireland must behold her best flour, her wheat, her bacon, her butter, her live cattle, all going to England day after day. She dare not ask the cause of this fatal discrepancy – the existence of famine in a country, whose staple commodity is food – food – food of the best – and of the most exquisite quality.

The next was from the the
Cork Examiner
, and it was dated December of the same year:

There is disease and death in every quarter – the once hardy population worn away to emaciated skeletons – fever, dropsy, diarrhoea, and famine in every filthy hovel, and sweeping away whole families … seventy-five tenants ejected here, and a whole village in the last stage of destitution there … dead bodies of children flung into holes hastily scratched in the earth without shroud or coffin … every field becoming a grave, and the land a wilderness.

But it was the editorial that had been cut from the London
Times
of September 1846 that made Edie put down her spoon and push away her bowl.

There are ingredients in the Irish character which must be corrected before either individuals or Government can hope to raise the general condition of the people. It is absurd to prescribe political innovations for the remedy of their suffering or the alleviation of their wants. Extended suffrage and municipal reform for a peasantry who have for six centuries consented to alternate between starvation on a potato and the doles of national charity! You might as well give them bonbons.

Edie couldn't bear to read more. She dumped her breakfast dishes in the sink, shrugged into her pinafore, swathed her hair in a scarf and worked and worked until the sun sank into the lake and it was time to light the fire in the library.

The next day I received a letter from Sir Silas, by messenger.

It came as I was sitting with Maria in her apartment. The former drawing room, which had been divided with flimsy lath and plaster partitions into two or three smaller rooms, still bore traces of its former grandeur: gilt cornices that had not been dusted for a decade, faded yellow satin hangings, a magnificent soup tureen which now served as a coal scuttle, and the aforementioned portrait of the deceased Mr Fagan in his rococo frame. A bust on a pedestal bore the likeness of the Earl of Bandon, Maria's father. Because the coat of arms engraved on the base was a constant reminder of her lost status as scion of a noble family, Maria snubbed the heirloom by making it a convenient repository for her bonnet.