Thou Shell of Death (24 page)

The meeting then adjourned to a whitewashed cabin at the far end of the village. The crowd lifted up its voice and summoned the widow to come on out of that till she heard what this gentleman had to tell her, and he after coming all the way from America, God help him, with his pockets full of gold. At this point Flanagan turned ferociously upon the crowd and shooed them away like a pack of geese. He then seized Nigel’s arm and hissed into his ear, in tones that would have done credit to a Lyceum melodrama: ‘Don’t let on you’re one of the police, now, or th’ ould lady will folIa ye with a hatchet.’

Widow O’Brien showed no marked homicidal tendencies, however. She was a small, fat woman, with faded blue eyes, a face crinkled and mellow as a nut, and a red shawl over her head. She curtsied to Nigel and stepped aside for him to enter her cabin. It was reeking with peat smoke that seemed in no hurry
to
escape through the hole in the roof that served as a chimney. Nigel sat down on a three-legged stool, blinking and coughing, trying to accustom his eyes to the gloom. A hen attempted to roost on his lap, and a goat inspected him over the half-door in a deprecating manner. Widow O’Brien was fussing about somewhere in the darkness. Then she produced a teapot and began pouring out two cups.

‘A cup of tea, sir, after your journey,’ she said with exquisite courtesy. ‘It’s nice strong tea, so it is. Ye could trot a mouse on it.’

Nigel felt an insane desire to be able to produce a live mouse out of his breast pocket, with the immortal Boy Scout alacrity of Harpo Marx. Instead, he took a gulp of the tea, and opened the conversation. It was difficult in these parts to feel any urgency, even when Georgia’s peace of mind was at stake.

‘I’ve come over to make enquiries about a family called Fear, who lived at Meynart House. They tell me that you are the best person to ask for the information.’

‘Is it the Fears?’ said Mrs O’Brien comfortably, leaning back in her rocking-chair. ‘Indeed and I can tell ye about them. Didn’t I live at the Big House from the day me husband died on me, God rest his soul, till it was burnt down by them blackguards the Tans? They was Quality, Mr Fear and his lady. The like you’ll not find if you walked on your bare soles from here to Dublin.’

‘I suppose you were the housekeeper, Mrs O’Brien?’

‘I was not,’ replied the old woman, highly flattered. ‘I went up to the Big House to be Miss Judith’s nurse, when she was a baby. Ah, a dotey little love she was. And her brother Dermot. He was a right young gentleman, too. But bold!’ Mrs O’Brien lifted her hands and rolled her eyes to heaven. ‘Manny’s the time I’ve had him across me knee—and Miss Judith, too—and belted them with a slipper. Imps of mischuf they were, leadin’ each other on and tormentin’ the life out of every wan in the place. But ye couldn’t be angry with them for long, shur’. They come and look up in yer face and smile at ye like two angels, and they just afther throwing stones through the greenhouse or painting the poony blue or some ijjut prank.’

‘It must have been fine for them, running wild in a place like this. I expect they were a credit to you when they grew up, Mrs O’Brien.’

The old nurse sighed. ‘They were so, while they were spared. Master Dermot was a right young man. Shur ahl the young girls in Wexford and Wicklow was runnin’ afther him. He was a grand lepper on a horse and won ahl the steeplechases in the sooutheast and a cup at the horse show up in Dublin. But he was a wild unaisy creature, and he wouldn’t rest quiet till he’d gone traipsin’ off to fight for the English. He and that young limb of Satan, Jack Lambert, just went off one day widout a word to annyone except maybe Miss Judith. His mother, poor soul, got a letter
from
him two days after—and she tearin’ her hair out with anxiety—sayin’ how he and Jack had joined the English army and they’d bring her back a lovely present from Berlin.’

‘Who was Jack Lambert?’

‘He was under-gardener at the House. Viscount Ferns recommended him to Mr Fear, and he worked hard enough—I’ll say that for him—except when he and Master Dermot went stravaguin’ off on some wild spree or other. But he was only here for a year, when Master Dermot and he got it into their mad heads that they must go and join the English, as though they couldn’t get ahl the excitement they wanted here. What happened to um after, I don’t know at ahl. Master Dermot was killed in France, the year of the Easter Rising. His da never overed it. A shtrong, shtern man he was, God help him, but that was the finish of him. He died in the next year, and poor Mrs Fear didn’t live long after. She was the last of the Fears, and I’m thinkin’ ye’ll be hard set to find a more unlucky family.’

‘Miss Judith died, too?’

‘She did. Before her brother, the darling. It was like having me own child taken away. What cut me heart was for the poor thing to be so unhappy when she died. She killed herself, ye see—and only a year before she’d been merry as a sunbeam the day long, the way ye’d think nothing would ever come nigh to harm her.’

The old nurse fell silent. Nigel felt something pricking his eyes that wasn’t peat smoke. Ridiculous to feel this way about a girl he had never set eyes on. Or hadn’t he? Light began to flood into his brain, as two images made contact.

‘Wait till I brew another pot of tea,’ Mrs O’Brien was saying, ‘and I’ll tell ye the whole story.’

She moved witchlike to and fro in front of the fire. Nigel got up to stretch himself, but collided with a side of bacon that hung from the rafters and sat down again hastily.

‘Miss Judith grew up to be a lovely big girl—the apple of her da’s eye, she was. Everyone loved her; the horses and cows would come gallopin’ up when she called them; and she was so tender-hearted she’d give her shift to a beggar. A right madcap she was, too, like her brother. But sweet and innocent as the Mother of God. Too innocent, I do be thinking, for this world. Well, now, there was a relative of the master, Mr Cavendish, that used to be staying at the house every summer. He came first when Miss Judith was a girleen, no more than thirteen years old. He used to play with her, and she called him Uncle Edward. He was a fine upstanding man, with grand clothes and a motor car and all, the like she’d seen few enough of round here, where the gentry was so poor, even in thim days, they’d bite the nobs off a hearse for hunger. After a few years the way it happened Miss Judith thought she was in love with him, and he old enough to be her father as the story-books say. Mind ye, now, I’m not saying
annything
against him: he was a gentleman though a bit starchy in his ways for us Irish people. Miss Judith used to tease the life out of him and he took it very well. He fell in love with her, annyway. Ye’d not blame him if ye’d seen her; she’d a beauty that took the shine out of every girl in County Wexford. And, as I’m tellin’ ye, she thought she’d fallen in love with him. Now her da was a stern man and had a temper like Satan, the way she was half afeared of him even though she had the spirit of nine. She knew he’d be in a powerful rage if he found out about her and this Mr Cavendish, she being so young and her da still thinkin’ her only just out of the cradle. She was a great book-reader, too, and had romantic ideas the way young girls will. So what must she do but keep this precious love affair a secret. She’d write letters to Mr Cavendish and make me smuggle them out of the house to post them, her da having half a suspicion of the affair, I’m thinking. She ahlways could twist me round her pretty finger when she’d her heart set on something. And Mr Cavendish used to send letters to a girl friend of Judith’s to send on to her, the way her da wouldn’t find out by the handwriting.

‘It was wonderful folly, and often enough I’d be tellin’ Miss Judith no good would come of ut, but shur’ it only made her mad. But that was nothing to what happened next. This Jack Lambert I’m telling ye about came along.’

‘What date was this, Mrs O’Brien?’

‘Young Lambert went into service with Mr Fear in 1913. I remember he came the autumn after Mr Cavendish left. And it wasn’t many months neither before he had Miss Judith bewitched entirely. Ah, he was a bold young devil; he had a tongue would make St Peter hand over his keys in a jiffy, and he’d look at ye with thim dark blue leprechaun’s eyes of his the way ye’d be afther reaching out for a stoup of holy water against him. Well I remember the day—it was the next spring, and spring does be a fearful time for young maids—Miss Judith coming to me, halflaughing and half sobbing she was. ‘Oh, nannie, she says, ‘I’m so happy. I love him. I don’t know what to do at all, at all.’

‘“Bide ye patient, my pretty lamb,” says I, “sure he’ll be coming back this summer and ye’ll be eighteen then, and maybe your da will let ye be fiancied.”

‘“Ah,” says she, “it’s not that one is in it. It’s Jack Lambert I love,” says she, looking proud and haughty as an empress and half-frightened with it like a little girl afther finding a purse of money in a boreen.

‘“Glory be to God,” says I, “not that young spalpeen! Shur’ he’s only your da’s gardener.”

‘But divil a bit of good it was talkin’ to her. Gardener or no gardener, she loved him and she’d marry him. She was frightened, though, that Mr Cavendish would find out ahl about ut when he came over in the summer, and she was so tender-hearted she didn’t want him to be hurt. Mr Cavendish didn’t come, after all, for the war broke out that time. But he went on writing to
her
, and she wrote to him, though not so often; but she couldn’t quite bring herself to break it to him that she didn’t love him anny more. And ahl the time she was slippin’ off to Jack Lambert on the sly or ridin’ with him about the country, her da having made Jack her groom. And when she wasn’t with him she’d be dreamin’ about him, the way annyone but a great gom like her da could see what was amiss.

‘So it went on the rest of that year. But Miss Judith got so lovesick in the latter end she swore she must marry him, and she’d run away with him if her da didn’t let her. I knew well enough he would not, he being a proud, austere man, would rather see her a tinker in a ditch, for all he loved her, than marrying into the common people. So I thought I’d best write to Mr Cavendish and ask him to come over and see if he couldn’t win Miss Judith out of her madness. The day I wrote to him, she came to me and told me in secret that Master Dermot and Jack were going to join the English army, and everything would be ahl right now, because he’d be made an officer and come back with great renown, and her da couldn’t deny her after that.

‘It was almost the last time I ever saw her lookin’ happy. It may have been that she couldn’t really live widout Jack. She was spry enough at first. But the weeks went by and she got pale and silent and wouldn’t take pleasure in annything. Her poor mother thought it was the green sickness, but I knew better. Miss Judith used to go walkin’ by herself, like a ghost.
Manny’s
the time I saw her starin’ into the lake, still as a tree. She was so still and pale and sad, shur’, ye’d be hard set to tell which was herself and which was the reflection. Mr Cavendish had written to her once or twice that time, but it didn’t seem to do her anny good. One night I found her cryin’ over a letter of his. She hid it away quick, but she’ d not deceive me. “Oh, nannie,” she said, “what am I to do? It wasn’t my fault. What did I do to him that he’s so cruel. If Daddy finds out—”

‘“Holy Virgin,” says I, “are ye tellin” me ye “re going to have a baby, Miss Judith?”

‘With that she burst out wildly, half laughing and half crying. “Oh, you funny old dear! No, of course I’m not. I almost wish I was, though.” And she’d never tell a lie, God rest her. Then she turned very calm and quiet, the way I was frightened out of me skin lest her wits had gone. “I’ll never renege. I’ll write to Jack. He’ll know what to do. I’ll ask him to come back. He must come back. Aren’t I his beloved?” she said in the grave, serious, story-book way of hers. So she up and wrote to him, and for a few days she was like her old self, expecting him anny moment to be sailin’ across the wather. But he never came, the heartless young devil. A week after that they took her up out of the lake. Her pretty cheeks were so wet ye’d think she was cryin’ still, and she dead seven hours, maybe.’

There was a long silence in the cabin. The old nurse was wiping her eyes on her sleeve, and Nigel trying to control the lump in his throat. He could see nothing but
a
girl looking into a lake, so sad and still and pale that she might have been her own reflection. After a bit he asked the nurse if she had a photograph of Judith Fear. Mrs O’Brien got up and fumbled about in a chest of drawers. Then she handed a photograph to Nigel. He took it to the door, to see more clearly—though it was only for confirmation of what was already a certainty in his mind. From the faded cardboard there looked out at him a dark-haired girl, a shy teasing smile on her lips, and in her eyes a sadness half guessed: a thin, elfish face, promising beauty and generosity and danger. It was the same girl, without shadow of doubt, whose photograph Nigel had seen in O’Brien’s cubicle the day he had arrived at the Dower House. After that it seemed almost superfluous to produce the snapshot of his aunt on the donkey. The old nurse at once identified the young man as Jack Lambert. The circle was complete: a noose for someone.

Mrs O’Brien was astonished to hear that the wildcat young rogue, Jack Lambert, had borrowed her own name and become the great airman, Fergus O’Brien. His features had been altered quickly enough by wounds and whatever insatiable demon it was that drove him on, so when his photograph began to appear in the press, no one in this remote part of the world would have recognised it, even if they had seen it. It was strange, though, Nigel remarked to the old woman, that nobody ever seemed to have linked Fergus O’Brien with his early days in Ireland. Had he
no
relatives at all? No schoolfellows? What had he been doing before he turned up at Meynart House?

The nurse assumed that expression of shocked relish with which old ladies anticipate a nice bit of scandal.

‘There can’t be anny harm in telling ye, you being a friend of the family and everyone concerned in their graves. They did say around here that Jack Lambert was the natural son of Viscount Ferns. A girl over at Macmines, a farmer’s daughter, went away suddenly to Dublin. There was rumours about it, the man being Viscount Ferns’ tenant and he often visiting over that way. The girl was never heard of again and her da wouldn’t so much as lay his tongue to her name. But when Jack Lambert came along, and his lordship afther using his influence with Mr Fear to get him taken on at the big house, people did be talking about ut and saying among themselves that Jack was the spit and image of the Viscount. Shur’ I don’t know if it was true; but his lordship was a lonely old man without childer of his own, the way he might have wanted the young man nigh to him, though he was a bastard, God help him. A poor weeshy old fella his lordship was at the latter end. After the Tans burnt down Meynart House, he took me into his service. A great one he was for his garden, though he would be calling all the flowers by heathenish names the like ye never heard of. Antirrhinums was his favourite, I do remember. Everyone around came to look at them. One time during the Civil War, when his lordship was
in
England, the Staters and the Republicans had a battle in the garden, a right battle. After the battle was over, James Clancy—him that was the head gardener then—showed both armies round the garden, and he told me they particularly admired his lordship’s antirrhinums.’