Hungry Hill (23 page)

Fanny-Rosa ran Lletharrog, and Fanny-Rosa could deal with the servants. If one of them was idle or rude, well, Fanny-Rosa must dismiss him. If old Martha did not understand Johnnie and had words with Fanny-Rosa, well, let old Martha be pensioned off, but for heaven’s sake let there be no scene about it which he would have to face.

“You are as bad as my father,” said Fanny-Rosa, “escaping from your responsibilities. What a good thing for you that I am not a timid, frightened little woman, dependent upon you for everything.”

“You are dependent upon me for the only things that matter,” said John, putting his arm round her waist.

“Ah, you great useless one,” laughed his wife, “would you forget I am the mother of three children, and maybe a fourth before we know where we are? And all you do is to sit about all day and look at me, and yawn, and smile, and wander down to the kennels to pat your greyhounds, and even they are becoming as lazy and contented as yourself.”

It was true that John had no longer the same interest in coursing. The season would come along before he realised how the months had slipped by, and his dogs, having become slack and spoilt during the summer months, with too rich a diet and too little exercise, would need several weeks’ hard training before entering into competition. This required considerable energy and concentration from their master, which he found himself unable to give.

“It’s no use, Fanny-Rosa,” he said one day, after returning from a meeting where his dogs had failed to win more than a few points from the critical judges, “my coursing days are over. The excitement I had from it once has gone, I don’t know why. It seemed to me, watching this day, that the dogs were running loose, here and there over the course, for no very great purpose, and all to destroy a hare, which maybe had a family somewhere. No, I think in future I’ll take my rod and go down to the river, and even if I should catch a very small fish, why, I could put him back again, and he’d be none the wiser.”

And John would throw himself into his chair, in an untidy living-room of Lletharrog, no longer recognisable as the neat, trim parlour of Barbara’s days, and pulling tiny Henry on his knee, and with Fanny looking over one shoulder, and Johnnie over the other, ha would proceed to show them the precious case of flies, the gaudy feathers proving an irresistible attraction to the children. There would be a dog on the opposite chair, and a cat on the hearth-rug, nuzzling a brood of young kittens, while toys, needlework, and books lay strewn about the floor, and Fanny-Rosa, seized with a sudden passion for dressmaking, leant over the table with a large pair of scissors, preparing to cut wastefully into the folds of an evening gown to make herself a jacket which might hide something of her once more widening figure.

The coming of the babies made little difference to Fanny-Rosa’s looks. She was, so her husband thought, as lovely as the day he married her; she was still wayward, careless and capricious, the true daughter of Simon Flower. Her servants never knew where they were with her. One day she would be generous, indulgent, giving them roast for dinner and suggesting a holiday for the lot of them, and the day after a scolding whirlwind would burst into the kitchen, with a packet of sugar in her hand which she swore had been stolen from her untidy store-cupboard, and a flow of language would escape from their flaming mistress that the servants would declare afterwards could only have been learnt from the lads in her father’s stables. John, hearing the tirade of wrath from the living-room, would laugh quietly to himself and go out into the garden. Fanny-Rosa would have her scene, and enjoy herself hugely, storm upstairs to the children’s bedroom afterwards and probably beat the frightened girl from the village who had replaced old Martha, and then, like a burst of sunshine after rain, come singing after her husband, with small Henry tucked under her arm and Johnnie capering at her heels.

“Visiting Lletharrog,” Eliza would say, on returning to sedate Brodrick House, Saunby, after a stay of a week with her brother and his family, “is like visiting a bear-house. There is nowhere to sit, because the chairs are full of dogs or kittens or babies’ napkins. The cooking is atrocious. I can swear my bed was damp when I arrived, but I did not like to say anything, as Fanny-Rosa had embroidered me a nightgown fit for a queen, which was laid out upon the sheets. The first morning she put the whole household to making jam. I am sure none of it will set, for the shocking waste of sugar-the children all upon the table eating it up as fast as it was put into the pan.”

“And yet dear John seems very well content?” asked Barbara, her forehead wrinkling in anxiety.

“Oh, he’s as happy as the day is long, in all the confusion. He does nothing whatever but sit in his chair and laugh. He has grown side-whiskers, to save himself the trouble of shaving, he told me.”

“And the children?”

“The children are all very pretty and quite uncontrollable, and as for darling Johnnie, he may be wild and quick-tempered, but he is the most affectionate of them all, and quite attached himself to me, calling me his “most dear aunt Eliza,” and would I marry him when he became a man!”

Poor Eliza, who would soon be forty, was proud of any proposal these days, even if it came from her six-year-old nephew.

Once a year John and Fanny-Rosa and the children would be invited to Clonmere for a period of three months, and as Copper John spent most of his day at the mines, and his evening in the library, the invasion of the young family caused little disturbance to his routine. Fanny-Rosa, with her usual artfulness, made herself particularly charming, and young Johnnie, grasping instinctively that bad behaviour might very well result in discomfort to himself, was quiet and subdued in his grandfather’s presence, and only let his spirits soar when the sound of horses’ hoofs had died away along the drive.

Then there would be a shout, and a whoop of delight, and a flourishing of bows and arrows, and woe betide young Fanny playing with her dolls outside on the grass, or Henry struggling with his top, or baby Edward sucking his comforter when their eldest brother was about, for the doll would be in the rhododendrons in three minutes, and the top flung into the creek, and the baby with his petticoats tossed above his head, and Johnnie himself doing a war-dance with a cock’s feather stuck in his dark curls, aiming an arrow at his protesting aunt Barbara, who defended herself behind a parasol. “Johnnie darling, you must be careful, you will do some damage,” and Johnnie darling, caring not at all, launched his arrow with a war-cry into the parasol, and then took to the woods to torment old Baird, pulling his peaches off the walls, digging up the lettuce plants, and puncturing the old man in the behind with an arrow when his back was turned.

“Why should Johnnie be so wild?” asked Barbara of her brother, removing the nest of young mice from her work-box. “We never played such pranks as children. He is so intelligent and affectionate in other ways, but he appears to lack a sense of proportion.”

“He has the faults of all of us, and none of the virtues,” said John. “I cannot beat him, because I see him do all the things that I have always longed to do myself, and never dared.”

“I cannot believe you ever wished to pour a basin of slops over poor old Mrs. Casey, when she was peeling the potatoes, or tie a cracker round a cow’s udders, as Johnnie did yesterday, so Mahoney told me,” protested Barbara. “The last was a most dangerous thing to do.”

“It certainly shows a rather warped sense of the ridiculous,” said Johnnie’s father, “but I would dearly love to do such a thing myself.”

“I don’t believe it. You just say that to defend Johnnie.”

“The boy will be ruined, you know, unless someone takes him in hand,” said Doctor Armstrong seriously, who was Johnnie’s godfather. “If he were mine I should beat him regularly, once a week, until he learnt manners. What is the use of his having intelligence unless he knows how to use it? Besides, he is not all that clever. Young Henry there will have a far better brain, you wait and see, and no nonsense about him.”

“I don’t believe beating Johnnie would do any good,” said his father. “I’ve seen more high-spirited dogs ruined by a whipping than were ever made by one.

Upbringing has little to do with forming character, that is my opinion. Johnnie was born wild, and he will stay wild, and nothing you or I or Fanny-Rosa can do will ever change him.”

And John, at thirty-six, with one or two grey hairs already in his dark head, thrust his hands into his pockets and strolled off across the grass in search of his first-born, thinking with a smile and a pain in his heart of his son’s begetting, and how he was created out of love, and passion, and doubt, and tenderness, under the white moonlight on Hungry Hill.

“The truth of the matter is,” said Doctor Armstrong to Barbara, “that the boy is not enough of a Brodrick, and rather too much of a Flower. When I think of what goes on at Castle Andriff, I find myself shaking my head over the future of Clonmere.”

For to good, sober Willie Armstrong, born and bred in Buckinghamshire, and with fifteen years in the service of his king, life over here was something he found difficult to understand, especially as led by Simon Flower of Andriff. A man of fifty-eight who spent most of his time in the cellar or playing cards with his groom, while his roof crumbled above his head and his tenants mocked him to his face, was, so Doctor Armstrong considered, a figure more to be pitied than despised, but when he allowed his young daughter Matilda to elope with a cobbler from the village, a fellow already married, and invited her to live with her lover in the lodge of Castle Andriff and have one baby after another, then, Doctor Armstrong considered, a man such as Simon Flower was a menace to the country that had bred him. He could not understand how the old fellow could hold up his head in society, but then society was very different here from what it was the other side of the water.

The scandal of Matilda and her cobbler caused little concern, and even Mrs. Flower, who might have been expected to die of shame, merely heaved a sigh and declared that “poor Tilly” had never been quite the same after she fell off a horse at the age of fourteen, and really poor Sullivan was quite a good sort of fellow, and so obliging the way he came to do odd jobs about the castle for nothing.

“The person who takes it hardest is Bob,” said Fanny-Rosa, putting away one of Edward’s small gowns to send to her sister, “and it really must be rather trying to come home on leave, with one of your friends, and have your brother-in-law touch his hat to you at the gate, and Tilly scream “How are you. Bob?”’ from the window of the lodge. It is inconvenient that both Tilly and I are expecting at the same time. This gown of Edward’s would have come in for our baby, but, poor girl, I cannot very well grudge it to her.”

Yes, it was a strange country, thought Doctor Armstrong, and he wondered sometimes why he continued to live in it, for his original reason for retiring from the army and taking up the practice in Doon-haven was there no longer. All that remained was a picture on the wall of the dining-room at Clonmere to remind him of a dream that could never be. He attached himself to the family for the sake of her who had gone, and it seemed to him that there was a quality each one shared in common with her, a smile, a gesture, a turn of speech, a softness of the voice, from Copper John with his dry humour, seldom shown these days, down to the infant Edward, with his warm brown eyes and slow baby chuckle. Clonmere might become like Castle And-riff, and indeed when Fanny-Rosa and her children were in residence there seemed every likelihood of its doing so, with the dogs, and the toys, and the sewing that littered the rooms, and John might become another Simon Flower, now he was putting on weight and taking no exercise, but the charm they brought upon the place was greater than the disturbance they created, the castle itself seemed the warmer and the brighter for their presence.

“The fact is,” thought the doctor, “John, and Fanny-Rosa, and that tumbling godson of mine belong to the country, belong to Clonmere; they are part of the air and the soil, and they thrive here, like the pigs and the geese and the cattle. The Brodricks are Doonhaven, and Doonhaven is this country.”

Two days afterwards he stood by the bedside of the oldest representative of the family, Ned Brodrick, the agent, seized by a stroke while riding round the estate, like his father before him, and as the old fellow breathed his last he winked solemnly at the doctor, fumbling with his hand under the bed-clothes, and produced a bag of coins he had hidden there for years, part of the rent roll of Clonmere, which he should have handed long since to the brother who employed him.

The whole family attended his funeral, Copper John and his daughters standing with bowed heads beside the agent’s grave, and it seemed to the people of Doonhaven, who wailed aloud as was their custom, the most natural thing in the world that the coffin should be borne upon the shoulders of Ned’s four illegitimate sons.

It was in September 1837 that Thomas Dowding, the Clerk to the Doonhaven Mining Company, returning from the mine in the late afternoon with the sum of able300 upon him, to be banked in the Post Office in Doonhaven until the following day, when the money would be taken to Slane, had his unfortunate encounter in the market-square with Sam Donovan, Sam Donovan’s sister Mary Kelly, and James Kelly, his sister’s husband. Mary Kelly, a foolish, excitable woman, was selling vegetables at her stall hard by the Post Office, as was her weekly custom, and, according to accounts given later by people standing by, a cabbage rolled from the stall at the feet of Dowding’s horse, causing the animal to rear on his hind legs and throw the rider.

The Clerk, irritated by the circumstance of his fall, rose to his feet from the dust, and accused Mary Kelly of deliberately rolling the cabbage in the hope of an accident. Whereupon Sam Donovan and James Kelly, who emerged at that moment from the public-house opposite, proceeded to set upon the Clerk, and one of them, whether it was Kelly or Donovan no one seemed to know, seized his purse and scattered the contents on the ground.