Another Heartbeat in the House (40 page)

‘Some of those girls are on the job,' said Maria, elbowing her way across the room. ‘I'll have no charges of brothel-keeping levelled at me.'

Straight away the new arrivals fluttered to the supper table. Glasses chinked, silverware clinked, the hubbub and bustle rose tenfold, and across the room laughter rang out as the dragoon started to belch the alphabet.

As the actresses helped themselves to savouries and sweetmeats, I diverted myself with a little eavesdropping. I heard details of a dispute with a leading lady, a
diner à deux
in a private dining room, a scandalous
crime passionnel
– and then someone dropped a name that caused me to freeze mid champagne sip.

‘There's a horse race called that, isn't there?' said a girl with blue eyelids and blackened lashes. ‘The St Leger Cup.'

I gripped the stem of my champagne coupe, and helped myself randomly to some tasteless tidbit.

‘A jockey, no less!' smirked another girl. ‘That explains the bruises.'

‘He's a gentleman, not a jockey; they're love bites, not bruises, and they're worth it every one, for the brooch he gave me.'

‘Show us!'

‘I sold it. For forty pounds.'

‘Lydia! You lucky rogue!'

Forty pounds! I stopped pretending to scrutinize the buffet and stared openly at the girl. Lydia was a svelte little thing, exotic and dark. She was not rosy or blond or kittenish like most of the other girls there. There was a shrewdness in her veiled eyes that meant business. She was competition.

‘Are we going to meet him?'

‘He's coming tonight.'

‘Isn't this place too seedy for a toff like him?'

Lydia gave an oblique smile. ‘Toffs love to slum it.'

Just then her eyes met mine, and I nearly spilled the contents of my glass. She regarded me as if she knew me, even though we had never met, with an insight that startled me.

Suddenly Maria was at my elbow. ‘St Leger's here. I've just seen him at the front door.'

‘Stall him, Maria!'

‘How?'

‘I don't know. Start a row, set fire to something, push someone down the stairs. Just give me five minutes. Please.'

Maria knew better than to quiz me. Abruptly, she scooped the Griffon dog up from the floor and made for the door, holding it ostentatiously aloft, the way she had Lady Charlotte's pug after it had been mauled by the house cat.

‘This stinking animal has fouled my premises,' she said loudly. ‘I am evicting it.'

The doxy to whom the dog belonged leapt to her feet. ‘Leave him be!' she shrieked, as Maria sailed towards the door. ‘Somebody stop her! She has my little Pantaloon!'

The drunken dragoon reared up, caught the toe of his boot on a rug, and toppled to the floor. Girls clucked and squawked and scurried in Maria's wake, protesting clamorously, and in the melee I slid unobtrusively from the room, and went to my own chamber.

Clara Venus was there, sleeping soundly through a din that would have awoken Perrault's sleeping princess. Setting down my fan, I reviewed my appearance in the flyblown glass. I bit my lips and pinched my cheeks to add colour, I rearranged my décolletage, I tugged a tendril or two away from my coiffure, so that they ringleted becomingly onto my bare shoulder. Then I smoothed my daughter's hair, gathered her into my arms, and sallied forth.

A crowd had gathered on the landing to watch the eviction of Pantaloon. His ribbon was askew – lending him an incongruously jaunty look – and amongst the battalion of painted ladies lolling against the balustrade, Lydia's laugh sounded the most deliciously flagrant of all. Between her fingers her folded fan looked as deadly as a poniard. As I watched, she laid it against her left breast, just above the heart, and aimed her gaze downward.

In the stairwell below, St Leger was lounging against a pillar, looking up at her. There was something in the impertinence and bland mockery of his smile that made me almost shudder with longing for him. I determined to stake my claim in a manner that would brook no dispute.

‘Excuse me,' I murmured to the nearest gallant. ‘May I pass?'

Seeing the child slumbering picturesquely on my shoulder, the gent stood back at once. ‘Make way! Make way for the lady!' he hollered, and the sea of iridescent satin sighed and parted. I arranged my face in attractive lines, and descended the steps.

‘Jameson,' I said, pointedly using his Christian name, ‘I am so glad you are come. Clara has been hoping and hoping to see you. I trust you are not too tired after travelling such a distance?'

He shot me a look. I sent one back that I contrived to make warm, alluring, compassionate, soulful, humorous and full of promise. Oh – and Madonna-like, too, because I had our daughter in my arms. In short, I managed the look hankered after by portrait painters since Hans Holbein.

Above me, I heard Lydia's fan snap open, but it was too late. Jameson stepped forward to embrace me, and over his shoulder I saw my opponent's face glaring down at me, taut with suppressed fury.

‘Does anyone want this hideous dog?' Maria had dropped Pantaloon to the floor and was wiping her hands fastidiously on her skirt. ‘It's slobbered all over my fichu.'

Later, when the burnt-out wicks of the lamps were glowing red within their globes and the merrymakers had dragged themselves home to bed or on to the next party, Clara Venus crawled onto her father's lap and fell asleep. Her sprawled limbs pinioned him to the sofa where we sat, I with my feet tucked beneath my gown, Jameson with an arm slung around my shoulders. The room had that strange, haunted air that seems almost tangible after parties; the grey, otherworldly light that filters through closed curtains just before sunrise makes me think for some reason of the drowned city of Atlantis. The only sound was the cry of gulls, come in from the coast to start their daily scavenge.

Now that the menace posed by Lydia had receded, I felt limp and velvety with relief. It was as though Jameson and Clara Venus and I were the only people left alive in the world; everyone else had receded like shingle with the tide.

‘I am glad you are here,' I said. ‘Were you surprised to see me?'

‘Yes. How did you get here?'

‘In my jingle.'

He slapped my arm lightly in reprimand. ‘Eliza. You know I don't approve of you going abroad unaccompanied.'

‘Who is to accompany me? I should go nowhere if I sought an escort every time I travelled beyond the bounds of Lissaguirra.'

‘Driving alone is hazardous. You're exposing yourself to danger at the hands of brigands, and our daughter, too.'

I felt something clog the air. We were not the only ones in the world after all, the three of us cocooned in our auroral bubble.

‘There are no brigands,' I told him. ‘The people have not the vigour for violence. They are
dying
, Jameson!'

I looked at the pretty face of our daughter with her tumble of golden hair and her perfect peachy skin and rose-petal mouth, and I remembered the boy whose eyes had been dull as stones, the boy who had fallen on the road to Mallow, and as a great fathomless sorrow began to rise within me, tears pooled in my eyes and started to stream down my cheeks.

Jameson's arm around me tensed. ‘Don't,' he said. ‘I cannot bear to see you unhappy.'

‘Then do something to help!'

‘I am not a landlord, sweetheart. I am not responsible –'

‘We are all responsible.' I shrugged away his arm and sat up straight. ‘We
all
have a responsibility to help people in need. It says so in the holy writ.'

‘Hush, darling. You'll wake Clara. I will help. I promise that I will do whatever I can.'

‘Don't promise. Vow. Vow on your daughter's head.'

He set his hand on Clara Venus's forehead, and gently pushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. ‘I vow to do whatever I can to help.'

I dashed away my tears and wiped my nose with the back of my hand, and then he reached in his pocket for a handkerchief and held it to my nose and said, ‘Blow.'

I blew my nose, and Jameson said: ‘Do it again.'

‘I don't need to.'

‘I want to hear it. The noise you make is like a little pig.'

I blew my nose again, and because it did sound like a pig, I started to laugh, and Jameson started to laugh with me, and soon I was weeping with laughter rather than distress.

Clara Venus blinked sleepily and said: ‘Stop it. I'm having a dream about ducks,' and then her head lolled back against her father's chest and she was fast asleep again, and the cocoon-like feeling was restored. I sighed with a contentment so profound that when the breath expired I scarcely dared inhale again.

‘You told me you were a pagan,' said Jameson, wiping away the last of my tears. ‘How do you know what it says in the Bible?'

‘I read it in Miss Pinkerton's academy. It says: “for the poor will never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land”.'

Jameson smiled. ‘You should be teaching Sunday school,' he said.

THE NEXT HARVEST
came, and this time the potato blight was even more widespread. In the second year of
an Gorta Mór
, as well as famine, disease began to spread – typhus, dysentery and dropsy. The contagion was not confined to the starving poor: doctors, nurses, hapless do-gooders and members of the clergy succumbed to fever.

We did what we could, Jameson and I. He sent money to finance the building of extra accommodation in the poorhouse in Mallow, and I and some others who lived in the locality volunteered at the soup kitchens that had been set up by the Quakers. It was not much, but when I likened our efforts to bailing out a sinking ship with a sieve, Young Biddy scolded me roundly.

‘You're doing all you can, ma'am, and you're doing it with a heart. The Relief Committee is full of ignorant blackguards. My cousin got some of that Indian corn they're after bringing from America, and it made her babby sick to his stomach.'

The Indian corn that had been imported arrived unground, and was largely inedible – even when cooked after hours of soaking. Nor was it distributed freely. It was paid for with money earned by starving people labouring on building projects set up by bureaucrats – senseless schemes designed by insensible people: canals and roads that started nowhere and finished nowhere, thoroughfares that no barges would ever navigate or grain carts traverse.

And the crews of the sailing ships continued to load cargoes of Irish-grown provender – now under armed guard lest they be set upon by starving indigents – and transport them overseas to the country where the landowners lived.

A rare letter came from Cork, from Maria:

Here is news that breaks my heart to write. The mayor has decreed that anyone suspected of carrying disease be denied entry to the city, and now there are thugs employed to guard the city gates. But still poor wretches come from the country in their thousands. They linger until evening, when they creep in under cover of dark, and when they see there is no help for them, many simply lie down and die. As I write this, there is a child lying dead in the street outside my house. He has lain there several hours by the side of the footway, and I dare not go near him for fear of disease. I have heard hellish reports of dogs eating the flesh of the dead bodies.

My sister is repairing to London and has invited me to join her. I shall shut up the house in Grattan Hill and depart post haste on the boat to Bristol. I can no longer bear to stay in this benighted place. Eliza, I beseech you to do the same. Ireland is no place for you or Clara Venus.

I, too, had heard the reports of dogs eating the bodies of the dead. The notion of emigration had occurred to me, but it seemed that leaving the country could no longer be done in any orderly or rational manner. It had become the last refuge of a population so desperate that they were willing to risk the hazards of long sea voyages in dangerously overcrowded vessels.

I was at a loss what to do. It was a bitterly cold winter, the worst in living memory, Old Biddy said. The prevailing winds blew from the south-west into the north-east, bringing gales of hail, sleet and snow. I discontinued my visits to the soup kitchens and ventured out only when absolutely necessary. I gave Christy money to go to Doneraile to stock up on dry goods, for whilst food was in short supply everywhere, it could be got there at a price. We had our hens for eggs, a couple of goats for milk, our vegetable garden, and meat in the form of whatever game or fowl Christy could shoot or trap. He ignored the proscription on fishing, and took what he could from the lake.

I discouraged the Biddies from stirring abroad, for I did not want word getting out that there was food to be had at Lissaguirra. I think they were afraid to, anyway. There were ghosts roaming everywhere.

And then one day when I was stamping through the snowy wood with Clara Venus, gathering pine cones for kindling, and singing her current favourite nursery rhyme (it was ‘Who Killed Cock Robin', and though it was a grisly ditty, it afforded me more amusement than our ABC song), I heard a horse approaching. I thought it was Christy with a rabbit he had promised for the pot: he had come earlier that day with a letter – the first I'd had for weeks on account of the weather. The thaw was starting at last, he told me, and we were no longer snowbound.