3 Great Historical Novels (6 page)

BOOK: 3 Great Historical Novels
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Rhia resisted the temptation to argue. ‘It is fashionable,’ she said as if she were only off to the opera. ‘Women of every class work in London. I’ve read about it.’

He shook his head. ‘Who will marry you now?’ It was as if she had not spoken. He would never understand because he did not want to. The restraints of class and the roles of men and women were traditional and non-negotiable; like weaving. Linen should be hand-woven and that was that. It was
dangerous
ground. Rhia kept her tone light, with effort. ‘The coach will soon be here. Will you come up to the house?’

‘No, the place smells of your grandmother today. It is depressing me.’ Rhia was too surprised to respond. He looked so mournful, so sorry for himself that she almost smiled. For the first time she saw his obstinacy as a weakness rather than a strength. He was not prepared to yield even a little to see the world as something other than that which he ordained.

‘Then I’ll say goodbye.’ She leaned over and kissed his
forehead
. He took her hand and held it so tightly, so that she
wondered if he would let her go. When he finally did, he looked away, back to the sea, so that neither could see the other’s emotion. He was really letting her go, perhaps only because he had not the strength to prevent it. Rhia felt a mix of sorrow and elation. Was she really going to be in charge of her own life?

She turned away and started to walk back up towards the cottage.

‘Rhia!’ he called out weakly. She turned.

‘You are brave and kind for a devil in petticoats.’ His eyes almost twinkled, just for a moment.

‘I’m sorry about William.’

‘He wasn’t good enough for you.’

Rhia rushed back and threw her arms around her father and then ran up the hill.

Her trunk was already beside the front door. She and her mother had lugged it down the stairs on their own. They were both much stronger since the move from Dublin. Brigit was at one of the three spinning wheels by the hearth. Now that Rhia was leaving, two of the village women would come in to spin. Her mother looked up. ‘There’s a new loaf.’

Rhia thought Mamo might still be in the house, but she didn’t seem to be. She was probably with her sheep. ‘I’ve eaten at the Kelly’s,’ she said.

Brigit nodded. ‘We should have a jug, then.’

It was what they did in the evenings when there was a
spinning
circle, but this was a special day. Rhia got the stoneware jug from the larder and filled it with porter from the tap in the barrel, then put it on to the ledge by the hearth to warm.

Mamo’s downstairs parlour was much cosier than any of the rooms at St Stephen’s Green. The furnishings were simpler and the fabrics older and softer. There were books on tables
and faded rugs on the wooden floor and Rhia’s easel in the corner. The room smelt of the lanolin and lavender Mamo had used to put in her hair to make it soft.

Rhia went upstairs to change into her travelling clothes and took a last look around her childhood room. It was neat, which was unusual in itself, and it felt empty without her paintbox on the table and her books by the bed. There were no clothes strewn across the old blanket box. She could see the sea from the window, but she turned away before she could think too hard about it.

When she came downstairs, Mamo was at her old spinning wheel, but if Brigit noticed the wheel turning she said
nothing
. They sat together quietly. Brigit passed Rhia the jug and sighed. ‘I didn’t realise how I’ve missed the oily feel of wool through my fingers.’

Rhia, too, liked the feel of wool. ‘Will you try out some new weaves?’

Mamo chuckled. ‘You can treat worsted to make it pretty as silk,’ she said. ‘And it costs much less. Tell your mother that.’ Rhia shot her a look.

‘I’ve spoken to Thomas,’ said Brigit. ‘I’ll have him weave some samples.’

They talked until the coach wheels were to be heard
coming
up the hill, and then until there was no ignoring the jingle of the reins and the snorting and stomping of the horses outside.

There were no tears, they had each shed them privately. Their emotion was present only in its constraint; in the
tautness
of speech and the gripping of hands.

‘Don’t forget to write,’ whispered Mamo in her ear. ‘Remember, there is always something to feel grateful for.
Always
. Be in the world but not of it, Rhiannon.’

This made no sense to Rhia. How could one be
in
the world but not
of
it?

Brigit pressed a purse into Rhia’s hand and put a finger to her lips before she could protest.

She stepped up into the coach. In a moment it was rumbling down the drive towards the Dublin road.

 

30 November 1840

 

Mamo stór,

The
Irish Mail
has arrived in Holyhead without sinking. I was so bilious until this morning that I didn’t once consider the fate of the Spanish Armada. Manannán’s kingdom is in ceaseless motion and I cannot imagine how sailors ever manage to walk upright.

There is little to see of England on a November evening but fog and a barrow-seller or two, but there is thankfully a tavern on the quay, from where I write this. It feels a little bold, venturing into a tavern on my own, but as I have crossed the sea, what is there to fear in a port tavern? So far no one has either approached or reproached me.

The window is grimy with sea mist and soot, but I can just see a row of black hansoms beneath a gas lantern,
waiting
to drive passengers to the overnight rail service to Euston. It departs at midnight and it is barely ten o’clock. I am told the railway is nearby and, since I don’t want to encounter certain passengers from the crossing, I am taking comfort in a glass of porter and a slice of cold, rather greasy, pigeon pie.

At lunch today (besides the pie, the only meal I’ve eaten since I left) I shared a table with a party of London ladies who had been in Dublin for a Protestant wedding. I was seated beside Mrs Spufford, who informed me that travelling unchaperoned is a terrible thing for the reputation of a young woman, and that I must endeavour to learn certain proprieties if I expect to be welcomed into polite society. If
she
is an envoy of the la-di-da league (that’s what Thomas calls them) then English society isn’t so polite after all.

 

Manannán took revenge on my behalf. Mrs Spufford dipped her spoon into her minted pea soup just as the boat tilted, causing both ladies and bowls to slide sideways. The
contents
of the spoon landed in her décolletage and I laughed before I could help it. No one else did. Mrs Spufford looked at me as though I were something sticking to the sole of her slipper. Presumably, a well-bred young Englishwomen would have found no humour in a pea green décolletage. Mrs Spufford and I did not speak again and the other London ladies took the opportunity to practise their
repartee
, which still stings my vanity.


You are from the trade, Miss Mahoney? Why, my upstairs maid comes from a linen family.


Ireland really is becoming civilised, I had no idea I would be able to buy silk stockings in Dublin!’

They droned on with their pretty spite, and I let them. I simply could not be bothered wasting my wits on the creatures, besides I’m weak and weary from being rolled around like a brewer’s tun. I thought they’d forgotten me by the time the custard pudding was served, but their best insult was yet to come.


How fortunate you are, Miss Mahoney, that your
complexion
is so dark. It is tiresome being fashionable at times; always taking care to protect one’s delicate pigmentation.

I entertained myself by imagining their coils of lacquered hair as the stubs of Lucifer’s horns. I am beginning to
wonder
if being Irish and therefore Catholic might be a disadvantage in London. Of course,
you
know I’m no Catholic, but that is our secret. I was curious to know what English ladies liked to talk about. Now I know: breeding, and the allowances of people one aspires to know; idle
people
who pass their time redecorating their homes and
themselves. I cannot imagine the conventions and niceties I am ignorant of. I hope Antonia Quaker is no minion of polite society.

I can see the contents of the hold of the
Mail
being
transferred
to wagons; but there seem to be more sacks of grain than of mail. It looks as if I have just crossed the Irish Sea with all of the wheat, oats and barley of the nation. It is not just Irish linen that is channelled through London. Perhaps I should be grateful that British law has not actually
forbidden
women to read the papers. I wonder whether it is because if she read of the ruthlessness of his trade, a woman might turn against her industrialist husband.

I suppose I should curb my blessed interestedness and get into one of those ominous-looking black carriages. By morning I shall be in London. 

The sleeping compartment was the size of the water chamber at St Stephen’s Green. It was close to midnight and Rhia couldn’t be bothered with fastenings and button hooks. She doubted that she would sleep.

The carriages clattered and hissed all night, halting at one lantern-lit station after another. Crates and trunks and
bulging
brown canvas sacks stamped with the insignia of little Queen Victoria were loaded on, before the train lurched off again. The rhythmic activity and increasing nervousness kept Rhia awake. It seemed that in no time at all grey mist hung over fields soft and eerie in the dawn. The silhouettes of stone walls and sinewed trees reminded her of home. This, surely, was a good sign.

She must have dozed, because the light was suddenly strong and stark and the scene from the window unsettling. The soft landscapes of daybreak could have been a dream. Forests and fields had been replaced by slag heaps and flatlands,
interspersed
occasionally with a dairy farm or a mill. Then the straggling hovels of the city’s fringe-dwellers appeared; wattle and daub with a bleak yard that ran up against the railway. Sometimes a scraggly hen or two; a skinny goat; a mongrel pig. Could this be London?

The flimsy housing became denser, and more portraits of slum life lined the track. A woman in her nightgown and cloth
cap pegged out her laundry for all the world to see; a
barrel-chested
man washed his hair from a tin pail. Children sat on piles of stones and rubbish, waving as the train passed. They jumped and shouted with excitement when Rhia waved back. She felt a creeping cold. She had never imagined the capital would have poverty worse than Dublin.

The train was creeping so slowly that they must be nearing Euston. Rhia’s spirits lifted in anticipation of seeing Ryan. His liveliness was always infectious; his costly habits reassuring. Whenever her uncle came to Dublin he brought China silk, French lace and Portuguese wine. And he knew how to make her laugh, a restorative now absent in the Mahoney household. If it was possible to resurrect Mahoney Linen, then Ryan would know how.

She now wished that she had taken the time to remove her clothing last night; her ribs were sore from the chafing of her stays. She inspected her hair in the speckled oval of glass beneath the luggage rail. It was still more or less braided and only needed a pin or two. She washed her face in the tiny basin and changed her long, lace-up walking boots for the shorter, buttoned boots that were in her carpet bag. They had a pointed toe and pretty heel and they instantly made her feel better. She was ready.

Thomas’s parcel was beneath the boots, and she sat and eyed the carpet bag, suspecting that Thomas’s gift would only lure her into the homesickness she was taking such care to evade. She would have to open it sooner or later. Rhia
rummaged
in the bag and drew out the brown paper square tied with string. She put the parcel on her lap and took a deep breath, then immediately wished that she hadn’t; there was a funk in the air; something sulphurous or rotting. When the paper wrapping was peeled away, the folded underside of a
heavily woven piece of cloth was exposed. Rhia unfolded it, holding her breath. She knew what this was. Unfolded, the piece covered her knees; a two-foot square of a high grade chintz. The linen upholstery was impeccably woven and as vivid as a botanical garden against the green alpaca of her travelling costume. The pattern was achingly familiar. It was
her
design, from a long, long time ago; a time when she still believed in fairies and did not mind ghosts. She had spent weeks perfecting it before giving it to Thomas as a gift. He had woven it. She was overcome. The design was of curling boughs laden with golden fruit and birds of jewel colours. It was, she remembered, intended to be the Otherworld, where the magical birds of Rhiannon woke the dead and put the living to sleep.

Thomas had written a note on a square of the stiff paper used for carding yarn:

 

Anam Cara,

Do not forget who you are.

Thomas Kelly

 

He liked to be mysterious. How could she forget something that she didn’t know? Rhia replaced the chintz in her carpet bag. She felt fortunate to have such a friend, troublesome though he was. But she wouldn’t have married Thomas, in spite of what she’d said to her father, because when they were lying naked on the prickly forest floor she hadn’t wanted him to touch her. She had, regrettably, told him so, and Thomas hadn’t spoken to her for the whole, long summer. It wasn’t just because she was the daughter of a clothier and he was a weaver; they were, like Rhiannon and Pwyll, from different worlds in other ways besides. They both knew that she would never be
happy to have a simple life, and Thomas made no secret of the fact that he thought her spoilt.

She thought of William O’Donahue. Had she wanted
him
to touch her? She thought not. She had been taken by his manners and sophistication; with the allure of his profession. How fickle she was. With Thomas she was her true self; as bad-tempered or whimsical or inquisitive as she felt. William had clearly not cared for her blessed interestedness. She shivered to think that she might have married a man who would have wanted only a fixed smile in an expensive bonnet.

The locomotive steamed through the northern reaches of London, the slums had become red brick terraces; row upon row, mile after mile. Rhia felt her stomach somersault, and it wasn’t the pigeon pie. What was the house of a Quaker like? Would the furnishings be austere and uncomfortable? There would almost certainly be no modern conveniences such as pumped water or gaslight. She expected that Antonia Blake would disapprove of her fondness for fine cloth and her
aversion
to church services.

The dirty stains of industry on the sky reminded her of ruined linen and of how much her life had changed already. The oily smell of the fog only worsened as the heart of the city approached, and she wondered how anyone could feel
healthful
in such a place. She heard again Mamo’s whisper in her ear. She must find something to be grateful for, and quickly.

The train slowed and the sky disappeared completely. Above the densely crowded platform a large, proud sign read: L
ONDON
E
USTON.

BOOK: 3 Great Historical Novels
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