Another Heartbeat in the House (52 page)

But George seemed unperturbed by the clutter. ‘I should love a room like this,' he remarked, allowing his eyes to travel over the accumulation of
objets trouvés
. ‘A room of my own in which to seed my own private chaos.'

‘Don't you have any number of rooms of your own at Roesworth House?'

‘Not with a view like this.'

‘Make yourself comfortable,' I said, hefting the manuscript of one of my novels off the seat of a rush-bottomed chair. ‘I shall tell Young Biddy that we have a guest for tea. She will be overjoyed.'

Young Biddy was not overjoyed when I told her that George, Duke of Roesworth and Marquess of Cholyngham was in the library. She went into a flap and hurried into the pantry to dust down the best china, bemoaning the fact that she had had no time to bake.

‘Do griddle cakes,' I said.

‘Griddle cakes!' she said with scorn. ‘Griddle cakes are so passé.'

Biddy had been given a present of
Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management
by her daughter, and spent hours poring over it, making corrections. The pages were covered in marginalia written in her neat, girlish handwriting, such as
1/2 lb of suet = far too much!
or
Isabella Beeton is a fool!

I hung my shawl on the hook by the kitchen door and went back to the library, leaving Biddy to her conniptions. George was standing with his back to me, looking out over the lake where the swans sailed serenely, followed by a trail of cygnets.

‘They will chase their babies away in a few weeks,' I told him. ‘They like to have the lake to themselves.'

‘How lucky you are to live here.'

I made a noncommittal hmm-ing sound. Since I had only just met the man, it would be churlish to dispute the remark.

‘It is a perfect place for a writer,' he continued.

‘How do you know I am a writer?'

‘I guessed.' He gestured at my desk, where a half-finished manuscript sat alongside my pens, the silver-gilt inkwell I had bragged to William about, and the mother-of-pearl blotting book that Jameson had bought me many years previously in a swanky stationery shop in Dublin.

‘What are you writing?'

‘Rubbish. I have had manuscripts rejected by every publisher in London.'

‘Oh. I am sorry to hear it.'

‘Not as sorry as I am to say it. My head is full of stories, but I don't seem able to express them in the way Messrs Chapman and Hall would like me to.'

‘Who are Chapman and Hall?'

‘The men who publish Dickens and Thackeray. And that simpering sap Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Have you read
Aurora Leigh?
'

‘No.'

‘Well, don't. And don't bother with
The Pickwick Papers
either. It is not Mr Dickens's best effort.'

‘I am a great admirer of Mr Thackeray.'

I laughed shortly. ‘Pah! William was a frightful plagiarist. Oh, here is Young Biddy.'

Young Biddy stumped into the room and dropped a curtsey, which must have been painful on her poor old knees.

‘Begging your pardon, ma'am,' she said (she
never
called me ‘ma'am' nor ‘begged my pardon' these days). ‘We are out of whiskey. Will you have rum in your tea instead?'

‘Oh, rum will do nicely, thank you, Bridget,' I said with exaggerated
politesse
.

‘And I'm sorry to say that there has been a run on Bermuda arrowroot in Mr Shinnors's shop, so I have not been able to bake your favourite Snow Cake. Will griddle cakes do you?'

‘Griddle cakes! I love 'em!' said George.

She shot him a grateful look, and stumped out again.

‘Young Biddy has been with me since I first came to live here,' I said. ‘For many years her daughter, Martha, lived with us, too. But she is married now, and headmistress now of the school in Doneraile. She is a bright and beautiful creature of whom we are both inordinately proud. Here she is, as a girl.'

I showed him a daguerreotype that I had had framed and hung on the wall. It had been made two decades ago by a journeying photographer, who had put us standing stiffly on the terrace beyond the French windows: Christy and Young Biddy and Martha in a gingham pinafore, and me. George looked at it with an expression of polite interest. Manners precluded him from asking questions about the domestic set-up, and me from boring him with answers – even though I could have sung songs of praise to kingdom come and back about the people grouped around me in the photograph, for they had saved my life.

In the years since Old Biddy and Christy had died, a retinue of housemaids and manservants had succeeded them, but not one had matched those two in loyalty or affection, and when a kitchen maid from Carrigtwohill had scarpered with the few trinkets I owned (most had been presents from St Leger), Young Biddy and I had decided that we would manage very well without live-in staff. Families were putting down roots again in the vicinity, and I was glad to be able to provide the newcomers with ad hoc work.

I saw George's eyes go to the display case, saw his brow furrow as he contemplated the treasures contained therein: the drawing titled ‘Mama, Papa and Clara Venus in the Woods'; the baby shoe; the double miniature that Jamey had commissioned of himself and Clara as an infant, that had been modelled on a portrait of her baby brother.

‘Family mementos,' I said airily. ‘What a sentimental old fool I am to keep them!'

He looked at me curiously. ‘Who is Clara Venus?'

For a heady moment I longed to be audacious, and tell him the truth: that Clara Venus was his twin sister, and I, his natural mother. Instead I said, ‘Clara Venus is a ghost. A glimmer child.'

George looked nonplussed by this non-sequitur. How liberating it felt to be a dotty old lady! I could say whatever I wished without anyone challenging the veracity of my pronouncements.

‘Do you have any children?' I asked.

‘Yes. I have three girls. Georgiana, Beatrice and Florence.'

‘And your wife's name is …?' I had heard he had married some
contessa
whom he had met on his Grand Tour.

‘Consolata. She is Italian.'

‘Is she beautiful?'

‘I think so.'

‘Three children is perfect. Mrs Dickens had to endure ten.'

I wondered if poor Consolata would be obliged to endure more pregnancies in order to produce a male heir. I wondered if the title and the estate would revert, in the absence of a boy, to some male cousin, as once it would have reverted to that syphilitic halfwit, Silas Sillery. And for the first time, I wondered what would happen to Lissaguirra when I died. I had not made a will, and it was about time I did. I had thought of leaving the house to Martha, but she would not care to live here, and the place would end up being sold to the kind of person who would have their fish stuffed and mounted in glass cases instead of eating them.

‘Where are you staying?' I asked George abruptly.

‘I have taken a room at the inn in Doneraile.'

‘You surprise me. I should have thought a coaching inn rather déclassé for a duke.'

‘I am not particular.'

‘Then come and stay with me,' I said.

He looked so startled that I almost laughed.

‘Why look so flabbergasted? It makes sense. You want to fish in my lake, why shouldn't you stay in my house?'

‘It is most generous of you, Miss –'

‘Eliza.'

‘Eliza, but –'

‘Listen to me, George St Leger. If you will not do me the honour of staying here as my guest, I shall not grant you permission to take my fish.
C'est la règle du jeu.
'

He went to protest again, but I made a baroque gesture of indifference and said, ‘Fa la la! Do what you like. It makes no odds to me.'

He must have seen the yearning behind my affected nonchalance, because he smiled and said, ‘The honour will be all mine.'

‘In that case, I shall ask Young Biddy to prepare a room for you. Ah, here she is with the tea.'

The tray had been set with the Chinese porcelain I had not laid eyes on for over thirty years. How pretty it was! I had forgotten all about it, and I resolved there and then that we should use it every day from then on, for what was the point of it gathering dust in a cupboard?

I turned to George. ‘Do I refer to you as his His Grace?'

‘Please don't.'

‘Lord Roesworth will be staying for a few days, Bridget.'

Young Biddy looked both alarmed and animated at the news.

‘You might want to consult the fish department of Mrs Beeton,' I continued. ‘We shall be having salmon for dinner tomorrow.'

Setting down the tea tray, Young Biddy gave me an inscrutable look. ‘Salmon à la Genevese. Without the essence of anchovies. Mrs Beeton does tend to be overzealous with the anchovies.' She moved to the door, turned, and ‘bobbed' a curtsey. ‘I'll make up the Blue Room, so,' she said.

George stayed for three days and three nights. Every morning young Biddy wrapped bread and cheese in oiled paper for him before he set out, and every evening he came back with the pick of the day's catch for her.

I spent the mornings sorting through my papers, trying to make some sense of this chronicle, the most recent instalment of which – if it has not been destroyed – you are holding in your hands. The whole was put together with the help of sundry journals I kept while I was an articled pupil at Miss Pinkerton's academy, and thereafter right up until the death of Clara Venus. When she died, I no longer had any inclination to keep a journal. It was not until the demise of poor William that I re-embarked upon my inchoate career as a lady novelist. By then St Leger was dead, too, of course, and it seemed a fitting time to tell our story at last. That's an imperative, I think, one of the most pressing imperatives in life: to want a story for oneself, even though life alone should be enough. But it never is, is it? We feel compelled to record it in word or in image, to leave behind some tangible evidence that we were here once, that we lived and breathed and laughed and cried and suffered and celebrated and mattered, in some small way.

I knew that no reputable publishing house would touch the manuscript on account of the scandal it would generate, and I did not wish to falsify the story, or present it in a sugar coating, because that would be to compromise its worth. So I did not send it to Messrs Chapman and Hall. I sent them other, invented stories. But somehow those fictions seemed pallid in comparison to my story, no matter how I tried to embellish them. No glimmer child that I conjured could move me in the way that Clara Venus had moved me, no antihero rouse me to such passions as St Leger, no archimime inspire me as William had inspired me, no soubrette make me laugh as Maria had.

As I write this, I remember an evening spent in her apartment in the house on Grattan Hill, when we had sat together at her out-of-tune piano and made up songs about the snobs who paraded the Mall in Cork. I remember how we laughed and laughed until the tears rolled down our cheeks as we composed verses such as the following:

So it is with proprietorial fondness that I look upon the reams of paper upon which I have penned the tens of thousands of words that constitute my story. For me this memoir is a treasure chest as precious as the album of keepsakes to which Isabella Thackeray was so attached, the one in which she pasted picture-sheet characters from fairy tales.

The story will be over soon. But before I let it go, let me tell you of the pleasure that three days in the company of my son afforded me. Every evening he would come home and change for dinner into the clothes that his valet had packed for him (the valet remained in the inn in Doneraile – I wanted no liveried servants in my house). I too dressed for dinner. Young Biddy redeemed from the camphor-wood chest the finery that had been acquired for me by the two men whom I had loved: the dress edged in Venise lace, the cinnabar-red velvet, the dark green silk damask.

Ah!
Vanitas Vanitatum!
But it made me feel happy to do it, and – as I have already said (and William, more famously, after me) – which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied?

During those three days Young Biddy was as animated as I have ever seen her. She spent the best part of an hour each morning bragging to George, as she stirred his porridge, about Martha the prodigy, singing the praises of her beautiful daughter – who had, for the most part, been schooled at home. You will remember that St Leger once said that Clara Venus would learn more from me than from any schoolteacher in the entire county of Cork? Well, I had not been given the chance to educate my daughter. But I had been given Martha Callinan, née Cassidy.

As well as regaling George with tales of her daughter's brains and beauty, Young Biddy was delighted to have the opportunity to put upon the dining table not only Salmon à la Genevese, but Trout with Caper Sauce and Stuffed Baked Bream. I came upon her the day after George departed, happily scribbling contumely beside a picture of a cod's head
here
of Mrs Beeton.

If George thought it peculiar to dine with an elderly lady dressed like something out of
Pippa Passes
, he did not show it by his behaviour. He was courteous, witty, thoughtful and engaging, and I felt very proud that he was my son. Huzzah for Sophia St Leger! She deserved to enjoy every hour of her gilded widowhood in the Dower House of the Roesworth estate, for she had raised a perfect gentleman; I am not so deluded as to imagine that George would have flourished half so well under my aegis.

On the morning of the fourth day, he left. I was sorry that I had nothing to give him; no Pautrot bronze or engraved silver penknife or other manly gewgaw to remember me by. I searched the house to see if I might perhaps find something that had once belonged to his father – a snuffbox or a half-hunter or other such trinket – but there was no trace left of St Leger's paraphernalia.