Fingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor (12 page)

“What’s all this rubbish I hear? You’ve brung in a lady doctor, O’Reilly?” Bertie leant closer and said over the noise, “Bloody great waste of taxpayers’ money, women in medicine. I know all medical students pay something, but the government pays a lot more per student. I hear tell the marquis give a scholarship to Helen Hewitt too. Load of bullshite. They should never let women into medical school, if you ask me.”

“I don’t believe I did, Bertie,” O’Reilly said. His euphoric bubble had been pricked and he could feel his nose tip blanching. “But by God if Jenny Bradley’s good enough for me, and she is, she’ll be good enough for you.”

*   *   *

“Hey on, Arthur. Hey on out, boy,” O’Reilly roared. “Push him out.” By the time the marquis had aligned the guns, O’Reilly’s choler over Bertie’s remarks had subsided. The man had sputtered a bit after O’Reilly’s riposte, but had uncharacteristically lapsed into silence. He was quite simply a solid-gold twenty-four-karat gobshite and nobody would ever change him. To do so would need a Road to Damascus experience, and as far as O’Reilly knew, Damascus was about three thousand miles away. Forget him and enjoy the day, he’d told himself. And he was. This was the fifth beat. “Hey on, boy.”

As if the gundog needed encouragement. The big Labrador quartered the ground, completely in his element, nose down hunting for scents, tail erect but barely moving. Sunlight made his coat shine.

O’Reilly carried his shotgun across his chest, muzzle pointing safely up, butt ready at the instant to be tucked into his shoulder. From the surface of the barrels came a faint whiff of three-in-one oil. Wildfowling on Strangford Lough’s salty shores was hell for making gunmetal rust. The smelly oil was preventive.

With Kitty slightly behind and to his left, he followed Arthur as the shooting party climbed a rise, all ears, human and canine, alert for any hint of grouse breaking cover. “Hey on, boy. Hey on.”

The two springer spaniels as well as Arthur were working the cover ahead and he could hear their owners’ cries of encouragement. O’Reilly caught the toe of his boot, stumbled, and regained his balance. Watch where you’re going, eejit, he told himself. You know well enough about the gnarly twisted roots of the heather up here. The group had already covered a broad strip of such territory as they walked toward Ballypatrick Forest. When they reached its fence, they’d rest for a few minutes, maybe have a smoke, then wheel and retrace their steps over a new beat for a mile to the heights above the valley of Glendun, one of the famous Glens of Antrim. He murmured a few lines of an old song,

Where the gay honeysuckle is luring the bee,

And the green Glens of Antrim are calling to me.

O’Reilly, a County Down man who thought Strangford Lough was as near to Heaven as mortals could get, had no difficulty understanding why folks from these parts, folks like Ballybucklebo’s schoolmistress, Sue Nolan, who came from Broughshane, felt just the same about their glens. He wondered how Barry’s romance was progressing. He’d find out at dinner tonight.

O’Reilly was nagged by an ache in his calves. Not as fit as you should be, he told himself. He’d know about sore muscles tomorrow, but then you couldn’t make a kipper without killing the herring. If you wanted a day’s rough shooting that meant lots of hiking where the guns and their dogs covered the ground on foot, starting the game in front of them. There were no gamekeepers, no beaters, no pickers-up like at the driven grouse shoots, which were now too expensive for all but a very wealthy few. There the guns were accompanied by loaders and waited in butts. When beaters drove the birds, usually in groups of five, over the butt, the hunter would fire the first gun’s two barrels, hand it to the loader, take the second gun of the matching pair, usually of James Purdey & Sons manufacture, use the next two barrels, and if necessary accept the first gun reloaded. King George V was reputed regularly to kill five birds out of five. The names of those of the aristocracy who usually missed with all six barrels was, tactfully, not recorded.

O’Reilly’s ruminations were cut short, and the second he heard the alarm call of a sharp
Goback, goback, goback,
he raised his gun to his shoulder. With a rapid whirring of stubby wings, four red grouse broke cover immediately in front of Edna. Her shot. He’d not poach until she’d fired twice, but he slipped off the safety catch and covered the bird nearest to him. From a corner of an eye, he admired how in one effortless motion she brought her weapon up, sighted, fired at a bird, and as it collapsed in a puff of russet feathers, she took the next with the left barrel before the first had hit the ground. She’d taken her chance well.

His bird was now in a rapid downward glide. The butt thumped his shoulder when he squeezed the trigger, his ears rang, and the smell of burnt smokeless powder tickled his nose. The fourth grouse, calling,
Chut, chut, chut,
curled away to O’Reilly’s left to land safely in the heather well outside the paths of the approaching sportsmen. Good. Breeding stock for next season.

At the sound of the shots, Arthur stopped in his tracks, marked the falls, and looked back at O’Reilly.

He heard Kitty say, “Good shot, dear.”

He smiled at her and said to Edna, “Nice right and left.”

“Thanks, Fingal.” She broke her shotgun, ejected the spent cases, and reloaded. When the party had assembled this morning and parked on the Loughareena Road, he’d admired the walnut stock and blued barrels of her new Boss twelve-bore. Those gunmakers had been supplying sporting weapons to the gentry since 1812, the year Napoleon Bonaparte had defeated the Russians at Borodino, which Tchaikovsky had commemorated in his famous overture. “Hi lost, Arthur,” O’Reilly called and, pleased with his own shooting, sang a few cheerful bars. “Pom tiddle iddle tiddle om pom pom, Pom tiddle iddle iddle om pom pom,” with great stress on the “om pom poms.”

The dog ignored the mangled music. He took his line and sped ahead. A springer was heading in the same direction. In moments, the Lab had returned, sat at O’Reilly’s feet, and offered up a cock grouse with russet plumage, white legs, and a black tail. There were white stripes under the wings and a red comb over each eye. “Good boy. Hi lost.” O’Reilly took the bird and slipped it into a game bag slung over his left shoulder. It didn’t matter who collected the birds. At the heels of the hunt, the marquis would give each gun a brace—O’Reilly happily imagined Kinky roasting his to make a tasty snack for him and Kitty. The rest of the day’s bag would be sold to Belfast restaurants to help defray the costs of the shoot.

In a short time, Arthur returned with a second bird, was relieved of his burden, complimented, and sent out to a new command of “Push ’em out now.”

O’Reilly noticed that the springer was once again quartering the ground, so it must have retrieved the third bird and, like Arthur, was hunting again. The line of guns advanced with several more shots fired before they neared the boundary of the coniferous forest, its piney smell drifting on the breeze. He saw the marquis hold up a hand, and as the other guns reached the rusty barbed wire, they walked along it to join him. “Good sport, so far,” his lordship said. “The reports that it’s been a first-class breeding year are true.”

“I’m not so sure Jenny Bradley would agree about sport,” Kitty murmured.

“She’s not backward in coming forward with an opinion,” O’Reilly said, wondering if he was altogether happy with Jenny’s propensity for questioning, then remembered how Phelim Corrigan had responded to Fingal’s challenges back in ’36. The young woman had every right to speak her mind. It showed spunk.

“They’re such pretty little things, the grouse,” Kitty said, “I could feel sorry for them myself, but I do know how much you love your shooting.” She looked down at a grinning Arthur. “And so does he.”

“Don’t you worry about the grouse. As I told Jenny, grouse rear large clutches every year so their populations soon recover. Conservationists like my brother Lars carry out annual counts. There are five thousand breeding pairs in all of Ireland alone and another two hundred and fifty thousand in Britain. Their greatest threats are from natural predators like martens and kestrels, and possibly a nematode worm.”

“Not from hunters like you, Nimrod, then?”

“A grandson of Noah, I believe,” he blew her an imaginary kiss, “and, ‘a mighty hunter before God,’ to quote. No, we really don’t do much damage to the population.”

“I’m glad.” She laughed and said, “And I love to see you so happy, Fingal, taking a bit of time off. It’s beautiful up here and we couldn’t have had a better day for it. That sun’s wonderful.”

Not everyone bred and used to living in cities like Belfast or Dublin, as Kitty had been, thought highly of trudging over hills and through bogs. He smiled at her. A remarkable woman, Mrs. Fingal O’Reilly, and dressed more sensibly than he. O’Reilly lifted his hat and drew a sleeve across his forehead. “I,” said he, feeling a bead of sweat roll down his back, “am baking.” He stopped, made sure the safety catch was on, and handed his gun to Kitty. It took only a few moments to take off the game bag, get out of his jacket, and strip off his gansey, which he handed to her. “Carry that for me, will you, love?” He didn’t wait for a reply, redressed, and took back his gun. “We’d better catch up,” he said, and lengthened his stride.

“Wait for me.” Kitty trotted after.

“You’ve shown us good birds this morning, sir,” Richard Johnson was saying as O’Reilly and Kitty joined the party. “Thank you very much.”

“And I hope the next beat will be profitable too,” the marquis said. “It’ll take us back to the cars and—” He looked sideways at O’Reilly. “I think we’ll break for lunch.”

On cue O’Reilly’s gut rumbled. “Good idea, sir,” he said.

“Fingal,” Kitty said sotto voce, “behave.” She smiled at him.

“Sorry, but John always puts on a marvellous spread and we breakfasted early.”

“One change,” the marquis said. “I don’t think Edna’s had her share of birds yet. I’d like her and Bertie to change places.”

“Certainly,” said Bertie. Etiquette called for the councillor to comply without demur.

The line formed and off they set down the gentle slope, Bertie walking on O’Reilly’s left.

He looked ahead to where the heather moor ended, and narrow, stepped, cultivated fields ran steeply down to the Glendun River as it meandered to the coastal village of Cushendun, meaning the bottom of the brown river. If memory served,
Glendun
was the name of the boat Barry had raced on this year. O’Reilly grinned. He was looking forward to dinner tonight with the young man. Barry’d said he’d made reservations for six thirty at the Ballymena Arms Hotel.

All around them the air was filled with humming as honeybees toiled in the early heather blossoms, making their prized pure heather honey. He pointed downhill to where the dogs were approaching a neat row of narrow vertical white boxes. “See those hives, Kitty? The apiarists bring them up here every August so their bees can work in the heather. The hives are taken back to the valley in the autumn.”

“I remember my mother getting heather honey. I loved it, but I never really stopped to think where it came from. Now I can picture it coming from these beautiful purple moors.”

A long-eared brown form leapt from the ground a few feet in front of Arthur, who stopped and looked expectantly at Bertie Bishop. It was his shot.

O’Reilly swung his gaze along the line Bertie must take to hit the hare, gasped and yelled, “Don’t, Bertie. For God’s sake—”

Boom
.

O’Reilly watched the action play out, as if in slow motion, as the hive directly in front of Bertie exploded.

“Kitty. Quick. Wrap my gansey round your head and lie down facedown.”

Once he was sure she had obeyed, he lay down and pulled his jacket up over his own head, lay prone, but kept his head sufficiently high that he could see what was going on.

What looked like a curl of smoke rose from the hive and made a beeline, O’Reilly smiled at the unconscious pun, for where Bertie stood. A high-pitched “Yeeeow” came across the moor and Bertie Bishop, arms flailing like a demented windmill, took off at a gallop downhill, heading for the shelter of the marquis’s shooting brake a hundred yards past the hives. The swarm of enraged bees followed in hot pursuit.

“Are you okay, Kitty?”

“All right so far,” she said, peeking out from the gansey. “The bees seemed to know who was responsible.”

O’Reilly shook his head. “The man should not be allowed within six feet of a gun. I’ve my bag in the Rover.” He made sure no insects were heading their way, then stood. “And I’ve got the blue bag to ease the pain of stings, and adrenaline and cortisone if I need them. I’d better get the marquis to run me and Bertie down there. Bring Arthur, will you?” He unloaded and set off trotting behind the line of guns to the marquis, leaving Kitty to make her own way. Multiple beestings could be life-threatening, and she, if anybody did, would realise that the patient must always come first. With a bit of luck, Bertie wouldn’t be too badly stung and they might get in a few beats after lunch. From the steeple of a church somewhere near Cushendun he heard, borne on the breeze, a clock’s bell chiming two.

11

One … Comes to Meet One’s Friends

“I like the look of this place,” O’Reilly said, rubbing his hands and peering around as he walked with Kitty along a carpeted hall in the Ballymena Arms Hotel.

Motes caught the evening light spilling in through mullioned windows and there was a hint of a certain aroma, a combination of old plaster and furniture polish, that he always associated with establishments of elegant, long-standing permanence. The original manor house had been designed and finished in 1846 by the same architect who had drawn up the plans for the 1849 additions to the campus of Queen’s College, later the Queen’s University of Belfast.

Here the panelled walls were hung with nineteenth-century sporting prints of fox hunts and shooting scenes, probably originals. Two red grouse, exemplars of the taxidermist’s art, stood proudly in a glass case set on an antique bog oak sideboard. A flintlock fowling piece with a single barrel of Damascus steel was mounted on the panelling above. He knew the gun had to be at least 250 years old.