Songs of Love and War (12 page)

‘Isn’t this a lovely ball, Grace,’ said Laurel, as Lady Rowan-Hampton joined them.

‘The castle looks beautiful with all the candles,’ said Grace.

‘Beautiful, simply beautiful,’ echoed Hazel enthusiastically.

‘Have you seen the ballroom? They’ve had a fire in there for the last three days to get rid of the damp,’ Laurel told her. ‘It took O’Flynn and an army of boys
three weeks to take down the chandeliers and polish the pieces. Imagine all those candles, but the effect is quite magical.’

‘Then I shall dance until dawn,’ said Grace happily. ‘Ah, my dear Maud, you look lovely,’ she gushed as Maud glided through the crowd to join them. Grace kissed her
cheek. ‘Goodness, you’re cold. You should go and stand by the fire.’

‘Yes, you really should, Maud,’ Hazel agreed.

‘Are you quite well?’ asked Laurel, her round face shining with sweat. ‘It’s almost too warm in here for me. It’s enough to make me wilt.’

‘I’m perfectly fine,’ Maud replied.

‘Where are the girls?’ Hazel enquired. ‘We haven’t seen Victoria since she went to London but we hear that she created quite a sensation. It won’t be long before
there’s a wedding, no doubt.’

‘Ooh, I love weddings!’ exclaimed Laurel gleefully. ‘I expect she’ll win the heart of an English aristocrat.’

Maud sighed melodramatically. ‘And leave Ireland, as they all do. I shall end up alone, see if I don’t.’

‘She might marry an Irishman,’ said Grace optimistically. ‘You never know, there are some very handsome ones here tonight.’

‘But they’re poor,’ said Maud, casting her eye about the room and catching sight of the DeCourcey brothers, both high-born and good-looking, but lacking in the one thing that
would enable them to marry girls like Victoria and Elspeth: money.

‘Tom and William DeCourcey,’ said Grace, following Maud’s gaze. ‘There, two of the finest huntsmen in Ireland with a castle to boot.’

‘But precious little land,’ said Maud disparagingly. ‘And no money to last through to the next generation. Tom will inherit Dunashee Castle, William will flee to America or
Australia, and Tom’s children will be left with nothing but a shell to live in when Tom’s inheritance runs out, which it surely will. No, I’d rather rich Englishmen for my
daughters.’

‘But
you
married an Irishman,’ said Grace softly. ‘And you haven’t done half badly.’

‘We are the last generation to enjoy
this.’
Maud swept her long fingers through the air. ‘Harry will one day be Lord Deverill, but our lands are shrinking, the tenants
we have left rarely pay the rent and Hubert is much too lenient – they take him for a fool. It is only a matter of time before they all rebel—’

Grace laughed. ‘Oh, they are much too lazy for that!’

‘Bertie will be just as incompetent as his father. He’s more interested in hunting and fishing than pawing over the accounts. He thinks there’s a limitless pot of gold at the
bottom of his rainbow and that the sun is always shining. He’s considering buying a new hunter, for goodness’ sake, but he already has a dozen. Harry will have nothing to live on and I
will sit back in my threadbare sofa and say “I told you so”. But by then it will be too late. Yes, I hope my daughters marry Englishmen because there will be nothing left for them
here.’ Laurel and Hazel, usually so bright and jolly, looked at Maud in confusion. Neither knew what to say or what to make of her bitter outburst.

‘Well, that’s not very jolly,’ said Grace, trying to make light of Maud’s grim soliloquy. ‘I hope my girls marry Irishmen, because Ireland is the most beautiful
place on earth. I wouldn’t leave it for all the money in the world.’

The Shrubs smiled again. ‘Neither would we,’ they trilled in unison.

‘Come, Maud, let’s go and talk to Roddy Fitzgerald. I hear he’s over for the summer, staying with the Claremonts, and he is such a charming fellow.’ Grace and Maud
disappeared into the party.

‘What was that all about?’ Laurel asked.

‘She’s not very happy,’ said Hazel.

‘She was born unhappy, that one,’ said Laurel. ‘I’ve always found her cold.’

‘Yes, indeed.
Very
cold.’ Hazel sighed. ‘Poor Bertie. I hope he finds comfort elsewhere.’

‘My dear, that’s just the problem. If he found comfort at home his wife would have no reason to be bitter at all.’

Kitty and Celia were having a delightful time wandering around the rooms. The grown-ups they knew made a fuss of them, the ones they didn’t found them as charming as
pretty dolls and made a fuss of them too. Dinner was served in the long gallery upstairs where a table for two hundred guests had been laid up among large gilt-framed paintings of ancestors going
back to Barton Deverill, the first Lord Deverill of Ballinakelly. The children were once again put together at the very end, because Adeline had never subscribed to the notion that children should
be kept out of sight. Victoria was seated between two boys her own age whom she had known since childhood. But they struggled to make conversation with a girl who had lost interest in Ireland and
set her sights on the stately homes and castles of England. Her cousins, Vivien and Leona, were only too happy to have the dashing DeCourcey brothers to entertain them with stories of hunting and
had agreed by the main course to ride out with them the following morning. Elspeth had always found Peter MacCartain incredibly handsome. He was a stunning tennis player and masterful on a horse,
but her mother had told her often enough that she would never consent to an Irishman unless he was the Marquess of Waterford. George and Harry found friends from school who had also returned to
Ireland for the holidays and spent most of dinner discussing cricket.

Dinner was long and by the end the children were restless. The candles had burned down and the plates been taken away. O’Flynn had clearly been at the bottles of wine for he was weaving
around the room as if it were a ship in a storm. At last the sound of music wafted up from the ballroom downstairs and one by one the adults were lured away from the table like rats in the town of
Hamelin. The DeCourcey brothers disappeared with Vivien and Leona and Elspeth agreed to dance with Peter MacCartain, but Victoria refused all offers with a graceless yawn. Kitty and Celia hurried
downstairs to watch the dancing. The ballroom was magnificent, lit up with hundreds of candles whose golden flames reflected in the mirrored panels along the walls. The crystal chandeliers
glittered as if they weren’t made of glass at all, but Cousin Digby’s diamonds. A small orchestra had been set up on a raised platform and the music rose and fell in an irresistible
waltz. Couples took to the dance floor and began to glide around the room in a glorious kaleidoscope of colour. Kitty and Celia watched in wonder, longing to be old enough to be swung around the
room. ‘Elspeth has flat feet,’ said Kitty with a laugh as her sister plodded a clumsy waltz.

‘Vivien is no better,’ Celia added.

‘But look at the Shrubs!’ Kitty exclaimed, pointing at her two great-aunts who were dancing with Kitty’s uncle Rupert and a reluctant Sir Ronald. ‘They dance better than
everyone!’

The girls watched for a long while. Kitty noticed Peter MacCartain’s hand drop dangerously close to Elspeth’s bottom. She also saw that the adults had grown unsteady on their feet.
The women’s faces flushed with the effects of champagne while the men had become ruddy and dishevelled, puffing on their cigars, filling the air with the sweet scent of tobacco. No one
noticed the children now; they might as well have been invisible as they wandered around listening to snippets of conversation, giggling when they heard something inappropriate.

It was well after midnight when Kitty and Celia, weary of spying on grown-ups, decided to wander the corridors upstairs. Candles in hand, they crept through the rooms like a pair of mice.
Suddenly Kitty saw a shady figure at the end of the corridor. Curious, she strode on, her cousin following after. The music got fainter as they made their way further into the depths of the castle.
Every time Kitty felt they were getting nearer the ghost, it disappeared again. ‘Come on, walk faster.’

‘Why the hurry?’ Celia whined.

Just as Celia was about to lose courage, Kitty stopped walking. The ghost, who she could now see clearly, was Egerton Deverill, Barton’s son. Of all the Deverills stuck in Limbo, Egerton
was her least favourite. He had a mean and menacing energy. He was staring at her with dark eyes and a scowling face, standing by a door beneath which there spread a shallow puddle of light.

Celia put a hand on Kitty’s arm. ‘There’s someone in there.’

Kitty grinned at her. ‘Aren’t you even a little curious?’ she asked.

‘I’m frightened!’

Just then Barton Deverill loomed out of the dark. Kitty caught her breath. Barton began to remonstrate with his son but Kitty couldn’t hear; she could just feel the anger in the atmosphere
and the chill that now enveloped them. She knew Barton didn’t want her to go in.

Kitty was too courageous for her own good. While Celia backed away, Kitty, unable to surmount her curiosity, turned the knob and pushed open the door an inch. What she saw inside was so terrible
it smothered her daring as surely as peat on fire. Her father was on the four-poster bed with his trousers pulled down, thrusting into Grace, whose legs were wrapped around his waist and hooked at
the ankles. She hadn’t even taken her shoes off. Kitty was disgusted. Barton slipped through the wall. In a moment he was by the mantelpiece. With one swipe of his hand he swept a decorative
ceramic shepherdess onto the floor. It landed with a loud crash and shattered into many pieces.

Kitty didn’t wait to see what happened next. She backed away and hurried down the corridor with her cousin following close behind. She didn’t look back. Sick to her stomach by what
she had witnessed she wanted to be as far away from that room as it was possible to be.

Bridie sat on the edge of her bed and gazed out of the window at the moon. It was so round and fat it looked as if it were pregnant with lots of little moons. She watched it
for a moment, hypnotized by its mystery. High in the sky it could surely see half the world below it. Countries that Bridie would never visit, people she would never meet, seas she would never
sail. Was her life to be always here, in Ballinakelly, following her mother’s well-trodden path? Was there another future out there for her if only she could find the key to unlock the secret
door? Was it simply a question of searching for it? But where would she start?

Was she to leave school and work for the Deverills as her mother did, until she was old and worn out just like her? Was that all she could expect? Would she find a husband among her people, here
in Ballinakelly, raise a family and watch her daughters live the same life of drudgery as she did? Was there nothing else? Bridie blinked, releasing a tear which trailed slowly down her cheek.
Kitty had given her a glimpse of a world to which she could never belong, and with that glimpse something of the attraction had been taken from
her
world, and a seed of discontent planted in
its place. Kitty would leave, as Victoria had done. She claimed to love Ireland, but one day she would go to London with Celia and marry an Englishman. Little by little the gulf between them would
grow bigger until Kitty would become out of reach altogether. She, Bridie and Celia were all born in the year 1900 but no amount of nines could change
her
destiny.

Bridie opened the shoebox and took out the black patent-leather dancing shoes with their large silver buckles that Lady Deverill had given her. Holding them to her chest she made a vow.
One
day when I am grown, I will leave Ballinakelly and make something of my life. I will find the key and I will go. And when I return I will put on my dancing shoes and no one will call me a tinker.
As God is my witness, no one will look down on me, for I will be a lady.

Co. Cork, Ireland, November 1914

At the outbreak of the war Maud had taken to her bed, complaining of a mysterious malaise, from which she did not emerge for weeks. Bereft of her husband and precious son, who
were fighting the Germans in France, she found herself alone in the Hunting Lodge with only Elspeth, now twenty-one and still unmarried in spite of a marginally successful London Season, and Kitty,
fourteen years old and almost entirely unbiddable. Victoria was now Countess of Elmrod, married to Eric, a dull and chinless aristocrat eighteen years her senior with a minor stately home in Kent
and a white stucco townhouse in Belgravia, living the life Maud had once envisaged for herself. She could not deny that she envied her daughter, even though Victoria, too, was bereft of her husband
and fearful of losing him and all the material comforts that went with him. As yet, she remained childless, which, for the wife of an earl, was a very great worry indeed.

On top of her anxiety about war with Germany, Maud felt insecure in a country whose people were waging their own war against their English oppressors. Small attacks here and there by radical
Irish nationalists in defiance of the British State gave the country an air of unrest and instability, which made her want to dive deeper beneath her quilt and recall the good old days when the
great British Empire had ruled supreme. She hoped this mad fever for Home Rule would peter out; after all, the Irish were an uncivilized lot in dire need of a firm hand. Didn’t they know what
was good for them? How she wished Bertie were home to reassure her. Her father-in-law was no use at all with his irrational rants about the ‘bloody papists’ and his growing paranoia
that they were lurking in the woods, awaiting their moment to scale the castle walls and do away with the lot of them. The sound of his gunshots echoing through the estate did not make Maud feel
any safer. If anything it made her feel even more desperate.

Then there was Kitty. For all Miss Grieve’s efforts Kitty had not been broken into submission. Try as she might, Maud had not managed to overcome the fear that gripped her whenever Kitty
stared at her with those large and eerie eyes – the eyes of a stranger – and the guilt that came with knowing that her lack of affection for her child was unnatural. The fact that Kitty
had long been aware of her mother’s feelings, albeit not the reason why, had only compounded her shame. As she lay in bed, tossing and turning in misery, Maud began to grow feverish and
delusional. She cried out for ‘Eddie’, which bewildered the servants who didn’t know who Eddie was, and cried ‘I don’t want the baby!’ which only fuelled the
gossip downstairs. She told herself that if she hadn’t experienced the pain and discomfort of the child leaving her body she would have sworn Kitty did not belong to her. Kitty was
Adeline’s, to be sure, she reasoned, and in her confused state of mind it seemed perfectly logical: one way or another, her mother-in-law had surely used sorcery to replicate herself.