Hungry Hill (25 page)

“Good-day, Sam,” said John, holding out his hand, which the other took, after a moment’s hesitation.

“I’ve thought for some time I should like a talk with you, and so I went down to your shop this afternoon, but your wife sent me on here. I gathered you had not been well.”

“Ah, it’s nothing much that ails me, Mr.

Brodrick, it’s Denny that has had the sickness, and Mary and I came out here to nurse him, They say he caught it from drinking bad water up at Mundy, when we were witnessing there at the Assizes.”

“I’m sorry for that.”

“Would you come up and speak to him ? Sure, he’s in bed, but that’s no matter, and he can speak now the fever has left him.”

John followed Sam Donovan upstairs, and was shown into a small, stuffy bedroom, the same at which Mary Kelly had been standing when he arrived. The windows were tightly closed, and the air was appalling.

Sam’s brother Denny was lying in bed, and his widowed sister was sitting beside him. She had a black lace cap on her head, which John could swear she was not wearing when he saw her at the window. Denny Donovan looked thin and wretched. Whatever was the truth of the story about the bad water of Mundy, at least he had drunk something that had not agreed with him.

“You’re in a poor way, I hear, Denny,” said John.

“I’m easier now than I was, Mr.

John,” said the man, watching him over the bed-clothes, “but the fever had me racked for days and it’s a surprise to me that I am here at all, after what I have suffered. And poor Mary here, having just put her dear husband in the grave, thinks nothing of the infection, nor Sam either, but both of them come out here to tend me. There is affection for you, between brother and brother.”

“Yes, indeed,” said John, remembering how some few years ago he had seen Sam belabouring Denny on New Year’s Day, calling him a rogue and a devil, both brothers having celebrated too freely the passing of the year. “And since we are on the subject of affection, I must tell you what I have come to see you about. First of all, I am sorry for that wretched accident where your husband was killed, Mrs. Kelly, and I want you to believe it.”

“He was a fine man,” said the widow. “You would not see another the same, not this side of Paradise.”

“It was a sad business,” said Sam. “Here’s poor Mary likely to starve, and she with no sons to support her. It’s little Denny or I can do for her either, being poor men, with families of Our own. It’s what we were saying only this afternoon, that it would be a saintly act if some kind gentleman should befriend her, but where is one to be found in the country?”

“I would never have given the blunderbuss to Thomas Dowding to carry had I thought he would use it,” said John.

“It was for ornamental purposes,” said Denny.

“He liked to parade it before people. That’s what I said to you at the time, Sam.”

“If Mrs. Kelly is really in need of help, I will willingly give it,” said John.

“And don’t you think the time has come when we might forget the old quarrel between our families, and make it up ? I am the first to admit that much of the provocation has been on our side. We have been lucky, through one circumstance or another, and you have been unfortunate. Shall we say no more about it, and all four of us shake hands?”

There was a moment’s silence. The widow sighed deeply, and San? Donovan scratched his ear.

“How much would you be willing to allow my sister?” he said.

“It depends what she’s worth to both of you,”

John replied, and getting up, he went and stood by the window and opened it, breathing in the scented moorland air.

He had been an idiot to come after all. They had not understood his gesture. They thought that he wanted to buy them off from making further disturbances. It served him right. How his father would scorn him if he knew what he had done. A fool and his money are soon parted… . Meanwhile the brothers had been conferring with their sister.

“Mary thinks she could manage on five shillings a week,” said Sam.

“Very well,” said John, “I will see that she gets it.” He put his hand in his pocket, and drew out some coins. “This is the first instalment,” he said.

“You had better open an account at the Post Office; the money will be safer there.”

“Fetch Mr. John a drink, Sam,” said the sick brother, “to celebrate the occasion. There’s a bottle of whisky in the cupboard, and here is a glass for him. I’d join you but for this fever; when the spirit goes down me you would say it was molten lead, so swollen is my throat.”

This is, thought John, the most senseless moment of my very senseless life, to be drinking whisky with the Donovans, and preparing to keep Mary Kelly for life. I don’t think I shall have the courage even to tell Fanny-Rosa.

The widow appeared to have recovered her spirits, and, joining John in his glass of whisky, asked after the children.

“Handsomer boys than yours, Mr. Brodrick,” she said, “it has seldom fallen to my lot to see.

They are like the blessed angels in heaven.”

“You would not think so, Mrs. Kelly, if you lived with them,” said John.

The lunacy of the whole proceeding struck him so forcibly that he could hardly restrain himself from laughing out loud. Here he was, being flattered and patted on the back by the very people who had poisoned his dogs, and giving them money into the bargain.

“Well, good-day to you, Denny,” he said, setting down his glass. “I hope you will soon be better and about once more. Let it be a lesson to you never to drink water again.”

He went down the stairs, followed by Sam and the widow, who escorted him to the door with smiles and fine speeches.

“Good afternoon, Mr. John,” said Sam.

“Sure, if there is anything I can do for you at any time, down in the shop, you have only to pass me the word.”

“Right, Sam, I will remember,” said John, and he set off along the road back to Clonmere, shaking with laughter at the fool he had made of himself. At any rate, it might have the result of keeping the Donovans quiet for another ten years.

He arrived home to find the family returned from their picnic, and sitting down to dinner. The children had enjoyed themselves, and Johnnie had lost a front tooth.

Fanny-Rosa was flushed, and freckled, and adorable. Everyone was in high good humour, perhaps because Copper John was passing a few days in Slane, and the atmosphere in the house was the lighter for his absence.

Willie Armstrong joined them for dessert, and the curtains were drawn early, and the candles lit, and they all sat round the fire to roast chestnuts.

“By the way,” said the doctor, “you will be glad to hear, Barbara, that there is not the slightest likelihood of an epidemic after all. The cases were isolated, and have come into no contact with other people. This diphtheria, as they call it, is a very dangerous disease.”

“How thankful I am,” said Barbara. “I could not bear to think of fever in the district with the children about.”

“Dennis Donovan is an extremely lucky man to have got over it so quickly,” said Doctor Armstrong; “but they are all alike, that family, they have the strength of twenty oxen.”

John threw his uneaten chestnut into the fire and stared across at his friend. “Did you say Denny Donovan had diphtheria?” he said quietly.

“Yes,” answered the doctor. “Why, what’s the matter?”

John rose to his feet, and went over to the window. He stood for a moment thinking rapidly, and then turned about and faced his family.

“I’m afraid I have to tell you all,” he said, “that I did not know of this, and I have been with Denny Donovan this afternoon.”

His friend, his sisters, and his wife stared at him aghast. In a few Words he told them his story.

His voice was quiet and low. When he had finished he looked across at Fanny-Rosa, as though asking for her love and understanding. She stood very still, terror in her eyes that he had never seen before.

“If you have brought the infection home to Johnnie, I shall never forgive you,” she said.

So much of the room was dark. He could not even see the pictures of Eton on the wall. Nor the cases that held the butterflies. Nor the birds’ eggs. And it made a loneliness lying there, because he loved the things that belonged to him, and when he could not see them he felt shut out, a stranger, someone who tossed and turned upon a bed that was not his own. He kept falling too, into a bottomless pit, the sides of which were clammy cold like the rock-face of the mine, and his father, peering at him from above, would shake his head and turn away, saying that he was not worth the saving, he would never make anything of his life. Then his father would change into his tutor at Eton, looking at him over his gold-rimmed glasses, fingering his report. “Brodrick minor lacks initiative… .? That was the trouble. He had always lacked initiative. He had never wanted to serve his country, or practise at the Bar, or help his father run the mine at Doon-haven, or do any of the things that people expected him to do. He only wanted to be left alone. The greyhounds had understood him best; they stood beside him shivering and expectant, their long, slim bodies quivering in excitement, their eyes, keen and intelligent, waiting upon his word.

He liked to take their muzzles in his hands, shake them slowly from side to side, and whisper absurdities under his breath. Lightfoot, proud and disdainful, not even straining at the leash that held him, and the sudden spring and dive, the twist and turn, and there would be one hare the less on Doon Island.

The room was too hot, it was like a furnace closing in upon him, and when he asked for a window to be opened someone with a voice he did not recognise bade him be quiet, bade him rest, as though he were a child and old Martha was in charge again.

If only he could leave his bed and go out once more, and smell the heather and the grass on Hungry Hill. Bathe in the little lake and feel the soft wind upon his naked body. Fanny-Rosa would come too, she would not be afraid of the infection in the open air’.

“The man recovered from his bite, the dog it was that died.”

He remembered reading that to the children one evening by the fire in the living-room at Lletharrog. Somehow it suited the present occasion very well. In two days’ time it would be the twenty-ninth of October, and his and Fanny-Rosa’s wedding day. Maybe she would just venture to the end of the corridor and look in upon him, lying here in the room in the tower. She would wave her hand, and blow a kiss to him.

The darkness was upon him once again, and whether it was day or night he did not know, but in a moment of strange lucidity he suddenly saw the whole chain of incidents that had brought him to his bed, and how, but for the lending of the blunderbuss to the Clerk, he would be out in the garden now with Fanny-Rosa and the children. The Clerk riding down from the mines, with three hundred pounds in his purse.

“Jane always said the mines brought ill-luck upon the family,” he thought, “but my father will not believe it. He will still be selling copper twenty years hence, when all that remains of me is the silver cup I won for coursing in 1829.”

He must have slept a long while, because when he woke he could see a chink of daylight coming through the drawn curtains, and he could hear the pigeons in the woods behind the castle, and the familiar clanking of pails in the stable yard. He felt very tired, and peaceful, and content.

“At least,” he thought, “if I have been the dullest of the Brodricks, I have also been the happiest.”

BOOK THREE

“WILD JOHNNIE”, 1837-1858

When Johnnie looked back on his childhood it appeared to be one, long series of escapades after another, all with the sole object of provoking grown-up people to wrath. It had always seemed to him that there were two worlds, the world of fantasy that he created for himself, where he was master of a lawless band of children who did exactly as they pleased, and the true world of authority, symbolised by his grandfather Copper John, a figure of such power and might that he had only to move about the grounds or enter the front door of Clonmere to rouse in Johnnie a strange fury of rebellion. That grave, set face, that square jaw, those hard eyes, meant that young children must curb their spirits, quieten their voices, and take themselves to the attics if they wished to shout and laugh. And Johnnie, used to sprawling about the untidy living-room at Lletharrog, tumbling his mother’s cushions, kicking his muddied heels on the furniture, found banishment to the attics of his grandfather’s house a degradation and an insult.

Copper John was therefore an ogre, one of the giants in fairy-stories who lived in a fortress, and Johnnie the gallant young prisoner who ultimately would cut off his head and stand in triumph over his dead body. Family prayers were a time to bait the ogre. This would be accomplished by setting a trap for one of the servants. Sometimes he would fasten a piece of cord round a hassock and lay it underneath the carpet, and, taking himself to the other end of the dining-room and kneeling beside his chair, he would jerk the cord from time to time, shaking the luckless minion upon the hassock, to the great discomfiture of everyone present. Or he would bring in one of his tame mice, and set it free about the floor. Sooner or later the animal would find its way beneath the petticoats of one of the kitchen girls, and he would peep between his fingers and watch the wretched creature struggle with her feminine terror of mice and finally be overcome, uttering a shriek, and thereby incurring the severe displeasure of the ogre. The curious thing was that none of the servants betrayed him to his grandfather. In a sense they seemed to be in league with him, and later in the day Johnnie would go round to the kitchen and sit on the table, where Mrs. Casey would be making pastry, and he would call her his love, and his queen, and tickle the old woman under the chin, so that she would find it impossible to be angry with him, and give him some of the pastry into the bargain. “Master Johnnie is too forward,” would be the verdict below stairs, but even so none complained of him to the master. He had “a way with him,” so they declared, and so for that matter had all the children, even down to young Herbert with his twinkling brown eyes, and for poor Mrs. Brodrick to be left a widow after barely nine years of married life and bring up this lively brood alone, was a sadness the servants could not forget. In fact Mrs.