Another Heartbeat in the House (47 page)

‘And fishies from the lake,' said Clara, balancing a penguin on the poop deck.

Christy harrumphed and looked shifty.

‘Take all the fish you want,' Jameson said, ‘for I have bought the rights.'

‘The fishing rights?' I asked.

‘You got the rights off that poxy –' began Christy, but Old Biddy cut him off with a ‘La la la!'

‘His Lordship needed little persuasion to sell them to me,' said Jameson.

‘That
amadán
. You heard he burned the roofs over the heads of his tenants in Aill na Coill?'

‘La la la la la, Clara Venus!' trilled Old Biddy. ‘Let's have a song! Did you learn any new ones while you were across the sea in England?'

‘London Bridge is falling down!' sang Clara Venus as the penguin toppled off the poop.

Christy leaned back in his chair and gave Jameson a level look. ‘It is still against the law for a Catholic to take fish from a lake,' I heard him say in an undertone.

‘Anyone can take fish from my lake,' replied Jameson. ‘There will be no censure from me. Besides, I don't imagine the law has stopped you before now.'

‘Nor would it have stopped the people in Aill na Coill, so desperate were they. But they had no means of catching fish. And they are all dead now.'

‘London Bridge is falling down!' I pulled on a smile and clapped my hands as I sang along. ‘Falling down! Falling down!'

And so we continued in a merry vein, as if the abominations and the atrocities that lay beyond the enchanted woods surrounding Lissaguirra did not exist.

Later still, Jameson accompanied me to the bedchamber, where the bed had been aired and a fire lit.

‘What made you decide to come back?' he said, as he divested me of my shawl and started to undo the small buttons that ran from the neckline of my bodice to just below my waist.

‘Everyone has asked me that,' I said. ‘I came back because Clara Venus was homesick.'

‘It's the Irish blood in her. Help me with this, darling.'

I raised my hands to his and freed a button from its eyelet. ‘I had thought of going to Paris.'

‘Paris is no place for a child. There is political unrest there. Stay here a while. You have a roof over your head here.'

‘A roof over my head is not the same as a home.'

‘It is,' he said, dropping a kiss on the declivity of my collarbone, ‘for you built it.'

He continued to unfasten my bodice with unhurried fingers. He was right. Lissaguirra had been my home from the day the last slate had been nailed down. Intended as a cynical profit-making venture, the house that had risen from St Leger's bothy had become more than stones and mortar; it was my anchorage. I had designed it, I had overseen the building of it, and I had grown to love it. It was, I realized, my most cherished possession.

‘Give it time, Eliza,' he said, as I shrugged my shoulders free from my sleeves. ‘The situation cannot worsen here. In a year, things will have changed. When Ireland is in the whole of her health, she is the loveliest country in the world. You cannot continue to travel hither and yon searching for a place to call home when you have found it already.'

From beyond the window there came the hoot of an owl, and the ragged soughing of the wind through the trees.

‘What if I become one of those women who wander in the wood?' I said.

‘What do you mean?'

‘It is something my friend Isabella said to me. She feels as if she is lost in a wood, drifting aimlessly in search of … she knows not what.'

‘Give it a year at least. A year is no time. Then you will know better what to do.' He tugged gently at a silk ribbon on my chemise until it gave way. ‘If you settle here, Clara Venus can go to school. I can visit. When this crisis is over, I shall have every reason to come, and Sophia will not begrudge me time spent here.'

‘How so?'

‘Investment in bloodstock will be one way to get the country on its feet. Dromomore will thrive again.'

‘But how am I to live?'

‘As you have done. Have I ever kept you short of money? I am sorry if I have, for I should not like to think that you might feel obliged to earn a living.'

‘It's not about –'

Jamey was not listening. He was fingering the broderie anglaise trim of my chemise, the opening of which had parted to reveal my breasts. ‘And you will have income from fishing rights – for I have signed them over to you.'

Once this news would have filled me with jubilation. I could have sold the house and sallied forth into the world with my own independent income, a woman of substance. But everything had changed since the day Clara Venus made her unplanned entrance into the world hot on the heels of her brother. My Ananke.

I realized I had spoken the word aloud.

‘Ananke?' queried Jamey.

‘It means “Destiny”. It's from the Greek.'

‘She speaks Greek, too, my accomplished lady-love!' He dropped a kiss on the sweet satiny place where the pulse beat, just below my ear. ‘What about your writing? That would keep you employed. Didn't you have an idea for a book?'

I laughed. ‘William Thackeray has written it. It's called
Vanity Fair
.'

‘Then write your own book.' His voice was low, cajoling. Pushing me onto the bed, he reached down and pulled up the hem of my petticoat. ‘You are a clever woman, Eliza. You can write a book that will outsell any of Thackeray's feeble scribblings. You are the cleverest woman I have ever met.'

Those were the most seductive words he had uttered yet. I smiled and stretched and sighed with bliss. Jamey always brought me to the brink of
la petite mort
before I even realized I was ready.

The next morning I rose at first light, before anyone else in the house was awake. Wrapping myself in my peignoir, I made my way to the library, where I heaped cushions onto the window seat overlooking the lake and made myself comfortable. It had rained during the night; outside everything was fresh and dewy and silent. The swans were abroad, cruising as if they had no care in the world, as if they had no reason to be there but to admire their own beauty in the aqueous mirror. They mated for life, I had heard.

A year. Give it a year, Jamey had said. There would be no hardship in staying here for a year. I looked around at my beautiful room, at the belongings I had accumulated: my writing desk and accoutrements; the bookcases, with space still on the shelves for more; the wing chair by the fireplace where I curled up on winter evenings – a novel always within arm's reach; the Japanese
cloisonné
vase that I had admired in a shop during one of my visits to Dublin and which Jamey had promptly bought me; the Isfahan rug upon which Clara Venus had learned to crawl; the display case in which I kept my most precious things: a drawing titled ‘Mama, Papa and Clara Venus in the Woods' that she had made; a baby shoe; a shell into which she told me I could whisper all my secrets; the double miniature that Jamey had commissioned of himself and his daughter as an infant.

There was no hardship here.

I felt cold, suddenly; I needed a shawl. I hauled my trunk from the storm porch where it had been dumped the previous day by the carter, and dragged it into the centre of the room. Undoing the catches, I opened the lid and rummaged among the contents.

There was my honey-coloured morning dress, and my velvet dinner gown, and the dress I had worn to Lord Cavendish's ball in Devonshire House. There was the day dress that William had encouraged me to buy in Regent Street, printed with tiny heliotrope-purple flowers and boasting gauze undersleeves, and the wool-and-silk dressing gown to which I had taken a fancy in a fine India shop on Ludgate Hill, and an evening dress in dark green silk damask, made for me by a modiste in Oxford Street.

Flush with the success of
Vanity Fair
, William had paid for all three garments, and I had not demurred, for had I not advised him on Becky's wardrobe? Had I not suggested details of her toilette – her
mouchoirs
, caps and satin scuffs; her rouge, curling papers and frizettes; her eau de cologne and pomades and other intimate female gimcracks of which poor William had but scant knowledge? I had earned the clothes.

It made me smile to think of the dividends Becky Sharp had reaped. So desperate was the reading public to keep up to date with the exploits of our godless little governess that they queued outside the bookshops every month, paying one whole shilling to find out where her chicanery and stratagems would take her next. When I had left the house in Young Street, I knew that Becky's next goal was to be presented at court: I had given William a clue as to how she might acquire the diamonds to wear there.

It had struck me more than once that I deserved formal acknowledgement for my contribution to the book, but I shook off such snippety concerns, upbraiding myself for an ingrate. William had provided me with a home and friendship and a job: indeed, he had paid me over the odds for looking after his girls. For a fallen woman who had borne a child out of wedlock, I had done very well.

And yet, and yet … when I had read
Jane Eyre
, I had been full of envy. Despite my quibbles, I knew that its author had achieved something remarkable.
Jane Eyre
was a story written by a woman for other women, to show them that life could be lived on a divergent path. The heroine was not the kind of person with whom I could ever be friends – for she took herself too seriously – and it irked me that she ended up with Mr Rochester, for he took himself
far
too seriously, but I understood that it was an important book, and I wished that I had written something like it.

As I drew from the trunk the silk moiré that Mrs O'Dowd had given me when I first came to Ireland (over seven years ago – how long ago that seemed!), I wondered when I might wear such finery again. I would have to ask young Biddy to make wrappers for the gowns and store them in the camphor chest, where the moths would not get at them. In the meantime, while Jamey was here, I would make myself easy on his eye. Today I would don the heliotrope print dress with the open sleeves.

Searching for the fine crocheted pelerine to wear with it, I found a parcel of what appeared to be books. I loosened the string and unwrapped the canvas in which they had been tied. One was an edition of William's
Irish Sketch-Book
, dedicated to me; the other a volume of Shakespeare's sonnets. On the flyleaf was written in William's most careful hand, the following verse:

Oh, what a tiresome booby William could be! Waxing maudlin like a lovelorn swain. Still, it was a very pretty edition of the Sonnets, leather-bound with gilt-edged pages and marbled endpapers. I slid it onto the shelf between Keats and Shelley, and then I closed the trunk and went to make myself a cup of tea.

Young Biddy was descending the narrow staircase from her room above the kitchen. Wiping sleep from her eyes, she was tousled and yawning and limp-looking.

‘Ma'am!' she said, when she saw me. ‘You put the heart across me! Didn't I think you were a ghost?'

‘There can be no ghosts in a new house,' I said, moving to the range to warm myself.

I thought – but did not add – that whilst the house itself was unlikely to be haunted, there were bound to be plenty of tormented souls roaming the environs of Aill na Coill and beyond.

‘Sit down, ma'am,' she said, all anxious, ‘and let me make the tea. You must be fierce tired after coming all that way.'

‘I'm not at all tired.'

I felt full of a kind of exuberant impatience; I could not wait for Clara Venus and Jamey to rouse themselves, so we could embark upon the day in earnest. I did not know how long Jameson planned to stay in Lissaguirra, but while he was here I was determined that we should enjoy our time
en famille
. The day was fine – we might take a picnic on the lake if the boat was in good repair, and Jamey could teach Clara to row. I hoped I had remembered her fleece-lined gloves.

‘Tell me how things have been, Biddy,' I said.

She took up a poker and started to stoke the fire. ‘For us here, things have been grand, ma'am. It is true, what Old Biddy said yesterday – we want for nothing. We are lucky, for we are away from the main thoroughfare. It is to the cities that everyone is headed, in the hope that they might find food. There is nothing for them in the country. I was afeared that someone might take the hens or the goats, but no one has been near us. Apart from the fox, that Christy has been after, that helped itself to a chick the week before last.'

‘What of your families?'

‘Mine are gone to Liverpool. Old Biddy's daughter and her son are in service in Dublin.'

‘And you are in good health?'

She would not meet my eyes. She looked pale, still, after the fright I had given her.

‘Yes, ma'am.' She set aside the poker and turned to busy herself with the teapot and the caddy. ‘How could we not but be in good health, for Mr St Leger makes sure that we have everything we need.'

I had not known that Jameson sent money. I had sent what I could, fearful always that it would not be enough, but now I saw that young Biddy was spooning tea liberally into the pot, and that the sugar bowl was full and that, under a square of gauze, a bowl of oats was soaking for the breakfast porridge. Outside the kitchen door I heard the cock crow, the clucking of hens in the yard, the bleating of my goats. If I wanted an egg, I could step out and help myself to one, freshly laid; if I needed milk, I could ask Young Biddy to fetch me a pitcher.

I moved to the larder. Inside, it was redolent with the smell of apples. The shelves were lined with bottles and jars of preserves and jam and pickles and frames of honeycomb; a sack of flour, one of rice, and one of legumes were neatly stowed in an alcove; on the cold counter a ham stood alongside a slab of cheese and a tub of butter. A rabbit hung from a hook. It would not have surprised me to see a cornucopia spilling cherries and strawberries, or a hog's head garlanded with a wreath of bay leaves, or a five-tiered cake iced and decorated with candied fruit.