The Ground She Walks Upon (8 page)

"I've heard all about it."

Ravenna nodded, her eyes filling with damning tears. They would take her away and then there would be no one to take care of Grania. Perhaps Grania would die because of her stupidity. Suddenly she wanted to die herself.

"Grania thinks it time you go off to school, lass. What do you think of that?"

Ravenna raised her dark head and looked at Grania with eyes full of unshed tears. "Is this to be my punishment?"

"Don't think of it as punishment, me girl, think of it as..." the father looked to Grania for help. The old woman's eyes were themselves filling with tears. "... think of it as a privilege. There aren't many young girls in County Lir who can go off to a fine school for ladies."

Ravenna watched the priest, taking no comfort in his words. The only schools she had ever heard of were thinly disguised workhouses. There would be nothing but misery there, but she had no choice but to go. She'd been caught and she would have to pay.

"Are you excited about the idea, child? You'll see other young ladies such as yourself and make friends with them— a much better class of friends than these ragtag boys you go running with now."

"Who will care for Grania if I'm gone?" she asked, her voice desolate. Her grandmother was the only one she had ever truly loved and who ever truly loved her. Her whole life had been spent with Grania. They were both outcasts in a hostile land, a land Ravenna now loved fiercely, for Ireland was the only home she knew. So they couldn't rip her from it. They just couldn't.

"Fiona has offered to come every day to see to Grania."

"But who will pay for her services?"

The priest looked uncomfortable. He glanced at Grania. "Child, you mustn't bother your head with pennies and figures. Your grandmother has the means to take care of herself. If she has money to send you to school, then she has the coins to pay Fiona."

"But the money doesn't come from my father, so where does it come from?" Ravenna brushed the quiet tears streaming down her cheeks. Her gaze shifted from the priest to Grania. Neither one spoke.

"Lord Trevallyan is sending me off to punish me, isn't he?"

"Please don't think of it that way." Father Nolan looked at Grania. "Your grandmother was the one to decide to send you to school, and she will pay for it out of her own funds— funds that, no doubt, were given to her by a generous soul who once sought her cures."

Ravenna appeared to accept the explanation, but she did not accept the reasons why she was being sent off. It was Trevallyan's doing, she knew it. Trevallyan was punishing her, and she could not escape the punishment, for she was guilty.

She stood quietly, listening to the priest recount all the plans, but her gaze was glazed and distant as she thought of the man who was forcing her from her home and from her dear grandmother. No matter how she might deserve punishment for her crime, the master of Trevallyan was taking away all she had, and all she cared about.

"Ravenna!"

Ravenna heard her name on the wind as the hired hack pulled out from the lane of Grania's cottage. It was three days later, and all of Father Nolan's plans for her departure had come true. She was dressed in her most hated dress, a dark blue wool with a welting of black around the collar and basque. A corset held her upright, completely flattening any bosom she might have possessed, the laces so tight she could hardly breathe. Her hair, normally a thick black tangle that streamed down her back, was now severely plaited and pinned to her nape. Worst of all, her feet, scrubbed pink, were encased in a pair of black leather boots so new and stiff, every step was agony.

The hired carriage had come, with a dour, black-gowned woman who was to be her chaperone for the trip to the Weymouth-Hampstead School for Young Ladies in London. Ravenna had said a grave, tearless farewell to Grania, forcing herself to be brave and to take her punishment. Even so, it took an extreme amount of self-control not to break down sobbing when Grania hugged her only grandchild to her bosom and looked down at her, pain making her dear wizened face appear even older than it normally did.

The coach departed, and once away from Grania's eyes, the tears had come, Ravenna unable to hide them from the stranger dressed in black. Her heart was being ripped out.

"Ravenna!" the voice called out again.

Ravenna ignored the chaperone's dour, disapproving expression and stuck her head out the carriage window.

"Malachi!" she cried, extending her hand.

Malachi ran behind the carriage looking as dirty-faced and ragtag as usual, his running figure half-hidden in an early morning mist from the sea. "Ravenna! Where are they takin' ye?" he called out, his ruddy expression one of awe at her fancy hired conveyance and of fear that he might never see her again.

"I'm going to England, Malachi! I never got his lordship's hair! Pray for my quick return!" she cried, letting her tears stream into the wind.

"Trevallyan did this to ye?" he called to her.

Ravenna didn't answer. She looked at him longingly just one last time before her traveling companion lowered the shade. The hired black carriage rolled into the mist until Malachi could see it no more. Defeated, the lad stopped his running and stared at the fog-shrouded emptiness of the road, the Trevallyan name on his childish lips, whispered in a curse.

A violet...

The perfume and suppliance of a minute;

No more.

WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE(1564-1616),
Hamlet, Act I, scene III

IRELAND 1847

P
eter Maguire
, Mayor of Lir for forty years, died at sunset eight weeks after Lent. He was not a young man, if seventy-five could be considered old, which it was not in Lir. Many a citizen had lived to be near ninety, quite a feat for a poor Irish county, yet Lir was a place of renowned abundance and good fortune. They said the faeries watched out for Lir. Sometimes that was easy to believe.

Peter Maguire was buried in the parish graveyard. Father Nolan held the Mass, and every man, woman, and child left the fields and attended. Almost everyone in Lir was there.

But Trevallyan did not attend, not out of disrespect to the mayor, but because he was in London and word of Peter Maguire's death did not reach him in time to return to Ireland.

Grania did not attend either, for she was becoming too old and feeble to leave her house. She sent another to the funeral in her place.

The young woman came to the funeral the way she had left Lir many years before. She arrived in a hired trap, her face solemn, her feelings cloaked behind a calm, unreadable expression. She kept to herself, standing in the back of the crowd. Her eyes were uncommonly beautiful, the color of violets at dusk as the blossoms become cloaked in blue shadows. But if eyes were truly the windows of the soul, this woman kept hers shuttered, as if she didn't quite trust the world around her.

" 'Tis good to see you again, child, but a child you are no more, I see," Father Nolan said to her when Peter Maguire had been consigned to the ground and the Mass for the dead had been completed. The priest clasped her hand in his and pressed it warmly.

"It's good to be back, Father," Ravenna answered with a poise she had not possessed when she was thirteen.

"What a fine woman you've become. Grania is beside herself with joy that you've returned."

Ravenna looked at the old priest, the one who had sent her away all those years ago. As a girl, she'd cried herself to sleep countless nights at the Weymouth-Hampstead School, fearful about Grania's health, despising the institution's headmistress, who upon Ravenna's first day, had publicly condoned the practice of backhanding "the Irish girl with no proper family" should Ravenna display any of her "inbred pagan defiance." Many a night, she had stared at the light from the gas streetlamp streaming across her blankets, and she had wondered if Malachi had ever lain awake hating the man who killed his father as she hated Trevallyan.

Her punishment for her transgression at the castle had been just and full. The other girls at the school hadn't liked her. She'd been ostracized from the first day, for it was clear even to children she was out of her element. She wasn't used to fine things, nor to servants, and she quickly became a source of malicious amusement on the part of the other young ladies. The night of her arrival, when the servants came to clear the table, she had already taken her plate and saucer to the kitchen. The other girls snickered behind their soft, pretty hands and from that day on looked down their noses at her, all with the blessing of the headmistress, who clearly considered her a cut below the rest of the students. She'd been forced to learn English tradition the painful way, by viewing it from the outside, her nose pressed against the cold glass of her Irishness. Ravenna had no choice but to live with it, for tradition dictated her every waking hour,

from her toilet (ladies
never
wore their hair loose) to her meals (the Englishwoman's pasty-faced complexion was best achieved by a diet of cold mutton and gruel; crisp carrots, plump sugar peas, and scarlet love apples that Grania grew in the kitchen garden seemed anathema to a Londoner). She'd been expected to embrace the English life, yet it had been impossible, as it is impossible to live a life one views only from the street.

If she'd ever had the chance to fit in, her schoolmates saw to it that it would never be. The Weymouth-Hampstead young ladies had laughed at the clothes that Fiona had sent with her, clothes that, while new, despaired of any pretensions to fashion; and they laughed at her Irish accent, calling her all sorts of names she still heard chanted in her nightmares. Being a newcomer from another land, she'd never been informed of the singular traditions of the Weymouth-Hampstead School, one of which being that every girl sent to it was expected to have her own set of silver flatware engraved with her initials. The first night Ravenna sat down to supper with the girls, she had discovered to her dismay that she had no eating utensils, and none would be forthcoming until her family sent her some. Meal after meal she sat with the headmistress and the girls, only gnawing on bread and sipping her tea, until finally a servant took pity on her and brought her a battered pewter spoon from the kitchen. For six months, she'd made do with that one crude spoon. She never wrote to Grania asking that a set of flatware be sent to her because she knew they didn't have the money for such frivolity. It was doubtful Grania could even afford the Weymouth-Hampstead School; Ravenna was convinced Grania had been forced to send her there to keep Trevallyan quiet about her crimes. So Ravenna resigned herself to eating every meal with the bent pewter spoon, defying anyone who dared look her way. She held her head high through every meal, but at night, alone in her tiny room, she cried enough tears to run rivers through Ireland. Six months later, a set of silver flatware mysteriously appeared at her place at the dinner table, given to her by an unknown donor. The pieces were engraved with one single initial, the letter R, and nothing else. At first, she had thought there was a generous soul at the school who couldn't stand to see her without. She had hoped that somehow she had a friend sitting at the table who had given them to her, but no friend had ever come forward. Whoever sent them remained anonymous, and perhaps that was best, for in the end the utensils only became another source of torment. The girls were quick to see the lack of multiple initials on her silverware. They tortured her endlessly about not having a father and conjectured that no doubt the man who had spawned her was English and wanted nothing to do with her. The rest of her years at the school seemed to be lived through an endless stream of insults, wounded feelings, and singsong taunts. But now she was free. She had paid her price, and never would she go back.

" 'Tis a shame a funeral's the first thing you see of Lir upon your return, Ravenna."

The priest's words lured her from her dark thoughts. "But it was a fine service. Peter Maguire would have been very happy with it, could he have heard it," Ravenna commented. She studied the father and realized the years had been kind to him. His wrinkled skin was a pleasant pink color, scrubbed by the cold winds of the Irish Sea, and his blue eyes still twinkled with quickness and wit though he had to be past eighty now. He was a right handsome old man for a priest, she thought. Many of the Irish were. Trevallyan, for one. She heard he still had his fine looks though he was almost forty now and led such a debauched life one would expect him to be red-nosed and corpulent. "Will you come to tea, Father?" she asked, ruthlessly shoving aside the past that had been her fault and forcing away all the memories that still hurt her little-girl heart.

"Tea? Why, 'tis quite kind of you, child!" Father Nolan exclaimed, looking as pleased as he was surprised by the invitation. "Peter Maguire has little family to comfort. May I come in an hour?"

"Grania and I would be honored, Father." Ravenna gave him a small, welcoming smile. She picked up her dark blue skirts, and she stepped across a soggy path. Now that she was finally back in Lir, she walked home, no longer bothering with the pretense of the hired trap.

"What are ye to do now, Ravenna?" Grania asked as Ravenna was setting out the tea. "Have ye given it any thought, now that ye be back from the fancy school?"

Ravenna's grandmother was near blind, and she had difficulty walking, but Grania's mind, like Father Nolan's, was as sharp as ever, and Ravenna, no longer a child, began to mourn the waste of youthful souls forced to grow old.

"The first thing I must do is see Malachi. He was not at the funeral." Ravenna inspected a chipped cup, then set it on the tray.

"Ye shouldn't be thinkin' of him, child."

Ravenna glanced at Grania and for once was glad for her grandmother's blindness. Malachi seemed a sore subject. She didn't want to risk upsetting her. "But I do think of him," she said tentatively. "He wrote to me, you know. All those years. He had to have Father Nolan pen them, of course, for he cannot read or write, but they were from Malachi nonetheless." Ravenna smiled. The letters had kept her going when despair and loneliness seemed ready to engulf her like a tide. She kept every single precious letter bundled with a blue satin ribbon and even now reread them. Malachi's veiled references to his ongoing troublemaking still made her laugh, and to this day she wondered how he had managed to pass them by the censorious pen of the priest.

"Ye be wary of him, Ravenna. He be a boy no longer." Grania grew quiet.

Ravenna frowned, arranging a plate of shortbread.

"So what'll ye be doin' tomorrow, child, and the day after that, and the day after that? 'Tis the true question I was askin'."

"Perhaps I'll advertise," Ravenna answered evenly, picking up the boiling teakettle. "Yes, that's probably what I'll do. Someday. I'll advertise for a position as governess... or shopkeeper. What do you think of me selling... oh... shoes?" She arched one eyebrow. The first thing she had done when she returned from England was to remove her shoes and walk about the house barefoot like a hoyden, something she'd
never
been allowed to do at the Weymouth-Hampstead School.

" 'Tis as likely ye to be sellin' shoes as I am to be dancing at a
ceili."
Grania cackled and rubbed her time-ravaged knees.

Ravenna laughed too and missed her aim at the teapot, sloshing hot water onto the tray.

"But, child, have ye really given serious thought to the future?" The old woman's voice grew raspy as if she were speaking a most pressing thought.

Want and worry crept into Ravenna's eyes. Both she and Grania knew she had to do something with her life, but she couldn't see ever leaving Grania again, for she knew the old woman would probably not live to see her return. Besides, there was indeed something she wanted to do with her life, and she had given it much serious thought, though it seemed an unlikely possibility. Amid the harsh, lonely atmosphere of school, she had turned to living in a fantasy world within her head. It was peopled with beautiful princesses, and knights, and dragons, and sorcerers. At sixteen, she had begun to write some of her adventures down, and now she wanted to keep writing them. She dreamed of having them published, but she was only too aware that any Dublin publisher would accept her only if she were a man, and she had too much pride to submit her works under the false pretense that the author was something she was not. Besides, it infuriated her to think a man's story would be judged better than hers simply because a man told it. She was determined that her writing would be judged by content and not by her sex.

"Ye haven't answered me, child."

She looked up at Grania. Hesitating to speak what could only remain a dream, she murmured, "I told you. I'll most likely go to Dublin and advertise."

"And when will ye be doin' that?" Grania sat in a straight chair, leaning on her blackthorn, her old bones uncomfortable in the worn upholstered armchair.

The fragility of her age made Ravenna ache inside. It wasn't fair to know a loved one only at the end of her years. Grania had lived a whole life that Ravenna could know just a small part of. "I hadn't planned on going so soon. Are you chasing me off?" she teased.

"No, child, it's just that..." Grania paused.

"It's just that, what? Have we money problems? If so, I will find work at once. But you must promise to come to Dublin with me."

" 'Tis not work I'm thinkin' of, child. Ye be a grown woman now. 'Tis time to be thinkin' of marryin' and startin' yer own family. Have ye given thought to that?"

"Yes." Ravenna looked away. She thought of marriage often in her tales of knights and princesses. But, as for herself, she tried not to think of it, for she had never fallen in love with a man, and her writings made her yearn for true love, or nothing.

"What have ye thought, child?" Grania stared at her with milky, rheumy eyes, her hand shaking on her blackthorn.

"I'm not going to marry for a while. I've just come home." Ravenna prayed that would be the end of it. She didn't want to discuss the subject. Grania was obviously wanting her taken care of before she died, and Ravenna couldn't blame her for that, but instinctively she knew the subject was volatile. Malachi's name might come up, and she didn't want to risk upsetting her grandmother for nothing. Even she herself knew it was an absurd notion to think of marriage to Malachi. She hardly knew him anymore, letters or no. He was indeed a man now, and they would have to reacquaint themselves. But his name was the only one she could think of when the subject of marriage came up. There was no other whom she could even remotely imagine herself with because she didn't know anyone else. Still, none of that was what made her reluctant to speak of marriage. It was instead the fact that she was determined not to marry until she fell in love. She was a girl from the Weymouth-Hampstead School. She'd rubbed elbows with daughters of the peerage long enough to know that love played little part in determining who was fit for a husband. But in her case, it would be different. She would marry a man she loved. And if she never met that man, then she would go to her grave a spinster.