Dark Rosaleen (23 page)

Still Sir William did not answer. She watched him as he pushed more food into his mouth and poured more brandy from the decanter. Suddenly she stood and swept her plate off the table. Food and broken china littered the floor.

‘Do you not care?' she shouted at him. ‘Are you ignorant of what's happening outside your own front door?'

She ran to the dining-room window and flung it open. ‘Smell it, Father, smell the death out there, hear how the dying are crying for help!' She collapsed onto the window seat and sobbed into her arms.

There would have been a time not so long ago when Sir William would have been outraged by such behaviour at his dinner table. He would have ordered his daughter to her room and she would have gone. But that was another age and they were now other people. He pushed his plate away and walked slowly to her. His shoes crunched on the broken crockery and his napkin dropped to the floor.

The evening fall of snow had pulled a thick, white curtain around the house and it made him feel more isolated than ever from the dreadful realities outside. Famine and now fever. What had these people done to deserve it? Their God was his God and he had always believed in a forgiving God. He reached down and touched Kate's hair.

‘Is that what you think, my darling? That I do not mourn as well? I was commissioned to save them but I seem to have become their executioner. I don't know how to stop it. This disaster has simply become too great, too vast, too overwhelming. Ireland is already dying. Things have gone too far, and it was not meant to be. We came to rescue these people, but we came with too little humanity, too little concern. It is too late, my dear, to save them now.'

Kate raised her face to him. He cupped her chin in his hand. ‘No, Father,' she said. ‘It cannot be.'

‘Oh yes, my dear, this country is dying. A metropolitan province of the richest kingdom on God's earth brought to its knees by the potato.'

‘No, Father,' she said. ‘By callous Englishmen who've never cared whether the Irish live or die.'

‘No, Kate, not callous. That would mean we are cruel when we are not. This calamity has swamped us. We could never have prepared ourselves for anything so monstrous, so unimaginable.'

‘Father, they wanted food, and you offered to sell it to them. They had no money, so you made them work for it.'

‘Listen, my dear. You asked me how we've let it come this far and I've asked it myself again and again. I have stood at this window and seen the ships in the harbour deep in the water, heavy with grain, and then I look into the streets and I see an army of hungry beggars and I ask, who is to blame? All I know is, it is not in our character to behave as we are behaving here. I know how we are elsewhere. I have spent my life with the English abroad and I know we are capable of great generosity and tolerance to those under our care. Yet in Ireland we rule in opposites. Mention the name in Whitehall or Westminster and you can say farewell to kindness and common sense. I wonder if that is how we shall be judged, how history will condemn us. Will anyone forgive us? Are all of us guilty?'

He turned again to the window and was quiet. Kate stood and touched his shoulder, but he did not turn. ‘I'm sorry, Father,' she said softly. ‘You have never spoken this way before. I never knew you felt it too.'

He sighed. ‘Be patient, my darling. Soon we will leave. I have failed here, and in the New Year I will demand to be brought home. If Trevelyan refuses then I shall appeal directly to the Prime Minister and, if he fails me, to the Palace. With the Queen's permission, we should be home early in the new year. Think of it, Kate – spring in Lincolnshire! How I long to leave. We English do not belong here.'

He turned and kissed her cheek. ‘Do you know what they're calling her here, Kate, Queen Victoria? They've dubbed her ‘The Famine Queen'. Soon she will have inherited the biggest graveyard in Europe.'

He smiled at the description and, saying no more, kissed her again. Then he refilled his tumbler with brandy and left her for his bed.

She stood listening as he climbed the stairs, heard his bedroom door close and then his habitual soft nightly coughing. His words had come as a shock to her. Could she leave now? Could she go easily and leave Una and Keegan and Ireland behind her? Suddenly she was afraid. Her heart throbbed. Life was pulling her sideways again. Her father's voice swelled around her, echoes upon echoes, rebounding, distorted, magnified. ‘Home … Spring … The Palace … Do not belong here …'

The floor moved and the room began to spin. Snow came in through the windows, clouding the room with a white flurry, snuffing out the candles. She felt she was in a children's game of blind man's bluff, spinning, not seeing, afraid to reach out. She held the edge of the table and, like a blind person feeling her way across a stranger's room, she guided herself to the door. She was in the hall, reaching for the banister rail and screamed as she saw herself in the hall mirror. Blood was trickling from her nose, and tiny red droplets speckled her arm. From his bed, Sir William heard the crash of glass as she fell.

How well she would later remember that nightmare of journeys. How perfect, how vivid the sequence of images. The clarity of her fevered dreams, the smells, the sights and the emotions would remain indelible.

She was walking across sweet-smelling heather and the ground was as soft as a cushion, the rocks like pillows. She kicked them into the sky and they soared, like puffed-up balloons. Then she was crossing the tops of mountains in great bouncing, flying steps with her toes barely touching, her nightdress billowing, caught by the wind.

She soared higher and higher until she could stuff the white, puffy clouds into her pockets like handfuls of gossamer. She pranced on tiptoe from one peak to another and the days changed into nights and back again in seconds. Then it was cold, she was naked and the goose down turned to snow and melted in her hands.

She was plummeting to earth, tumbling and twisting in the vapour clouds, the wind screaming in her head, the sky closing fast around her, black and thunderous. Her heart pounded as she fell faster and faster. She put out her hand and the earth opened up and swallowed her and she was golden and warm again.

She saw a fire and someone standing by it, pouring liquid into a glass. She tried to raise herself to speak, but in that instant he was gone and a hand pushed her down. She saw Keegan by her side, she felt his hand on her cheeks, a touch of ice on her burning skin, and it was Una, stroking her hair, her voice calm and soothing.

Again she tried to rise and again hands pushed her down. Above her she could hear the low, monotonous chanting of monks, like a funeral chorus that came nearer and louder. She screamed out for them to stop and her stomach came up through her throat and a river of bile gushed from her mouth. She reached out to stoke a fire, but as the poker touched the embers they exploded and the room was ablaze. She was burning. Water was pouring off her and yet she was on fire. The torrent turned to steam and she felt herself being dragged down it into a furnace. She watched her body begin to melt, but there was no pain and no fear any more. Fire without either.

Then the gradual coming of a beautiful peace, without guilt, without anxiety. Free of her body, she began drifting away.

‘Kate.' She heard voices singing her name together, like a choir. ‘Kate,' they called again. ‘Stay with us. Don't leave us. Stay, Kate.'

But they were faint appeals, becoming fainter. She was too far from them now and too content, travelling on that same cushion of soft, sweet heather. The voices were below her now, a long way below, down there with the fire. She turned to see them for the last time, but she saw him instead, the little boy standing in the flames, just as she remembered him on that night in Lincolnshire. His hands were stretching out to her, reaching for her, his eyes imploring, ‘Reach for me. Touch my fingers. Catch hold, catch hold.'

She reached down with her hand and clasped his and held it tight. And the fever left her.

‘What colour am I?' she asked. Robin smiled at her and wiped the sweat from her brow. ‘You have a colour, Kate, but it is not black. You've a tinge of yellow, a little jaundice, but you're here and as beautiful as ever. Welcome back.'

‘Was it typhus?' she asked.

‘No, Kate. Thank God it was not. It was relapsing fever, or five-day fever, as some call it. That's how long you've been away from us on that journey of yours.'

‘You know about my journey?'

‘Oh, yes. I reckon we all went on every part of it with you, Keegan, Una and myself. We took it in turns to be with you. Last night was the worst. We thought we'd lost you, we really did.'

She turned her head away. He saw her tears. ‘Now, now, Kate, this is not the time for a weep. We have to put some business back into that body of yours. All that travelling has tired you.'

He wiped her eyes and packed the pillows around her. Cook brought soup and he took the spoon to her lips.

‘It was such a journey, Robin,' she said, ‘I was about to give in, I know I was. But he brought me back.'

‘Yes, Kate. I think somebody must have done. Now rest. Let the soup work. Rest is all you need now.'

He got up to leave but she took his hand. ‘Who is he, Robin? Why is he always there, watching? Why does he …?'

She closed her eyes to sleep. As he reached the door she said, ‘I wasn't bitten by a rat, was I?'

‘No, Kate, you were not.'

‘Perhaps it was one of your breadcrumbs.'

And he nodded, certain of it.

Sir William was comforting. ‘You have fine friends, Kathryn. I am proud of my daughter who has such friends. Day and night they watched you, swabbing all the time to keep you cool. Your Mr Keegan was even reciting poetry to you. I think it must have been in Irish.'

The week had passed. Kate was up and getting stronger by the day. The yellow had gone from her face and the dark shadows under her eyes were fading. She felt as if she had been reborn.

‘They are my only friends, Father,' she said. ‘The only ones I'll ever have. If I leave here I shall have none.'

‘That's nonsense, Kathryn. Why, you have dozens in England. Your life there was full of them.'

She was sitting by the fire in his large, padded leather armchair. He had tucked a rug around her legs, draped a shawl over her shoulders and put a few drops of his best cognac into her lunchtime broth. It had been many years since he had had any reason to fuss over her this way.

She knew this was the moment. All week she had been preparing for it, hoping to judge it right.

‘Father,' she said, ‘I don't want to leave here.'

He drew up a stool and sat by her, a tumbler of whiskey nestling in his lap. ‘Not leave here, Kathryn? You mean Cork?'

‘No, Father. I do not want to leave Ireland, at least not yet. Not until I know how all this is going to end.'

Sir William hesitated. This was not the time to remonstrate with her. She was convalescing and still a little emotional.