Painting The Darkness (59 page)

‘That’s where they found Lord Ardilaun’s bailiffs last year,’ Kennedy had said, pointing out across the lough as they caught their first sight of it from the muddy rutted track. ‘Trussed up in sacks and drowned like runts in a litter.’

‘It seems hard to believe such violent acts could be committed amidst all this natural beauty,’ Richard had lamely replied.

‘Don’t let the look of the land deceive you, sir. It’s a treacherous place, particularly for those of us doing our duty. You never know when Captain Moonlight may come calling.’

It was true enough, Richard did not doubt. Yet, if so, why had Kennedy – and the local constabulary – been so certain Mary Davenall’s murder had not been politically motivated? The journey to Carntrassna had passed the neglected Church of Ireland chapel where generations of Fitzwarrens, Mary amongst them, had been buried; and there, pausing to pay his respects at the graveside, Richard had challenged Kennedy on the point.

‘You’re sure the Fenians had no hand in this?’

‘Sure as I can be, sir. Lady Davenall was well liked and respected. Many of the older tenants still speak gratefully of her kindness to them during the famine years.’

‘Even so …’

‘And Fenians wouldn’t steal jewellery. No, sir, it’s my belief the old lady disturbed a burglar.’

Richard had stooped to inspect the inscription on the stone:
MARY ROSALIE FITZWARREN
, 1798–1882. It had seemed as pointedly stark to him then as it seemed perversely inaccurate now. ‘Why is only her maiden name used?’ he had asked.

‘That was her wish, sir. She was most insistent on the point. I suppose …’

‘Yes?’

‘I suppose she regarded herself as more of a Fitzwarren than a Davenall. That’s all I can think.’

Patently, it was so. Richard had never met the old lady, but her determination to exile herself from the Davenalls was mirrored in the overgrown forgotten setting she had chosen for her final resting-place. Even their name, in the end, she had discarded.

Richard returned to the window and gazed down the drive. There was Kennedy, in the dog-cart, starting early for an appointment in Castlebar. He would be likeable enough, Richard conceded, if he were not so anxious to please. As it was, this would be the first day when he would not be obliged to accompany the man on his endless rounds of the estate, when he would be free to begin the task he had come to Carntrassna to perform.

Small thanks to Kennedy, even so. It had been left, in fact, to the man’s wife to give Richard the clue he needed. She had talked more willingly than her husband of their predecessors, the Lennoxes, and Richard had asked her what memories she had of them.

‘None at all, sir. They were gone by the time we arrived in these parts.’

‘Did Lady Davenall speak well of them?’

‘She hardly mentioned them, sir.’

‘Do you know why they left?’

‘To emigrate, we were told.’

‘Not a step you’ve ever considered?’

‘No, sir. Of course, we don’t have a child to think of. The prospects here for—’

‘The Lennoxes had a child?’

‘A son, sir, yes. A bright boy, apparently. They must have been looking to his future when they decided to try their luck in Canada.’

Canada. And a son. More than twenty years ago. A short step from Richard’s room took him to the landing, where an oil painting of Mary Davenall hung high on an ill-lit wall. He had stared at it several times since his arrival and
now
did so again, puzzling over the secretive, reclusive, hidden personality of its subject. A handsome woman, he could not deny, somewhere in her mid-forties when the portrait was made, to judge by her appearance and the style of her dress, red-haired and fiery-eyed, confident and domineering, not at all the sort to hide herself from the world. Why had she done so? Why had she been killed?

‘How do you know the Lennoxes had a son?’ Richard had asked Mrs Kennedy. ‘Did Lady Davenall mention him?’

‘No, sir. Not that I can recollect. But, shortly after we’d moved into Murrismoyle, a gentleman from Galway came calling, under the impression that the Lennoxes still lived there. Evidently, he was tutor to their son. He seemed quite taken aback that they hadn’t told him of their plans.’

‘A gentleman, you say?’

‘A very learned gentleman, sir. That I know, because he still writes articles in the
Connaught Tribune
from time to time. Mr Kennedy often reads them to me. They’re very edifying pieces.’

The more Richard learned, the less he understood. As agent for the estate, Lennox would have been little better than a glorified servant. What business had he engaging a tutor for his son? What business had he being paid ten thousand pounds by Sir Gervase Davenall? Perhaps the one man who had known the Lennoxes and could still be found might give him the answer.

‘Can one of the men drive me to Claremorris, Mrs Kennedy? I wish to take the train to Galway.’

‘To Galway, sir?’

‘Yes. I may spend the night there before returning.’

Waiting on the front steps of the house for the gig to be hitched and brought round from the stables, Richard felt himself shivering, for all the mildness of the morning. Carntrassna, with its peeling stucco and clinging shanks of ivy, its weed-clogged gardens and gaunt shuttered remoteness, had eaten into his reserves of self-discipline. But that was not all. Something else was clawing at his
resolution
, something more potent by far than the air of resentful dereliction Mary Davenall had conferred on her family home.

‘I’ve never understood my wife and I never will,’ Sir Lemuel had once said. ‘I served with her brother in the Peninsula: a fine man. Killed at Vittoria. I knew him better than I ever knew Mary, for all that we lived together for more than twenty years.’

‘Might I ask, sir,’ Richard had said, ‘what took her back to Ireland?’

‘God knows, my boy. She gave me neither warning nor reason. And I’ve not cared to beg for an explanation. She packed her bags and left, one summer’s day in 1838, while I was in London. Since then, she’s never so much as written me a letter.’

The gig set off down the drive between the dank ill-kept lawns and the straggling hedges of fuchsia. The sun was shining on Richard’s back now, but still he felt cold, chilled beyond the reach of any warmth by the sudden realization that the truth was close at hand.

III

If Freddy Cleveland ever admitted to feeling the pangs of a genuine emotion, it was only in the privacy of his unspoken thoughts. No gentleman, he believed, should display anything but the most studied indifference to the dramas of life. He would, therefore, have been hard put to explain why, on calling at Hugo Davenall’s new residence in Duke Street only to learn that his friend was spending the afternoon at Lazenby’s Gymnasium in Hammersmith, he had not simply strolled towards Pall Mall and a few quiet hours at the billiards table.

Instead, he found himself ascending a rickety staircase beside one of the least salubrious of Hammersmith’s alehouses and enquiring, of a short, broken-nosed, bald-headed man in a tiny office festooned with programme
cards
for recent boxing bouts, whether his friend was truly to be found in such improbable surroundings.

‘You mean
Sir
’Ugo Davenall?’

So. Hugo was still making free with the title he had forfeited: it was worrying. ‘Yes. That’s right.’

‘There’s a shootin’ gallery aht the back o’ the gym. You’ll find ’im there, like as not.’

Freddy followed a narrow corridor, partitioned off from the gymnasium so that he could hear, but not see, the exertions of assorted weightlifters. It led him into a high-ceilinged brick-walled range, where the reports of rapid gunfire pounded at his eardrums. In one of the cubicles, he found Hugo, whose attention, after much shouting, he managed to attract.

‘What the devil are you doin’ here, Hugo?’

‘What does it look like?’

‘Shootin’, of course, but …’

‘I’m no marksman. Isn’t that what you said? Watch this.’

Hugo raised the old-fashioned gun he held in his hand and trained it on the target at the end of the range, about thirty feet away. As he pulled back the cock and took aim, Freddy glanced at the target and saw that it was the two-dimensional wooden likeness of a man, carved as if the man were standing side-on. There were circles marked in red on the head and chest, circles within which small jagged holes had already been torn in the wood. Hugo fired.

When the noise of the shot had faded and Freddy had unclenched his eyes, he saw that another hole had been added to the topmost circle. Hugo had scored a direct hit. ‘Not bad, eh?’ he said, smiling back at Freddy.

‘You’ve been practisin’ this?’

‘Of course. Practice makes perfect, after all.’

‘But … why?’

‘Why do you think?’

Freddy could hardly believe what he was forced to conclude: that Hugo was still indulging his fantasy of
challenging
Sir James Davenall to a duel. ‘Can we talk somewhere, old man? I don’t think well under fire.’

They adjourned to the alehouse downstairs, where the landlord was induced to open the snug for their use. Hugo looked better than he had all year, fitter, harder, unnaturally self-assured.

‘I’ve not seen you at the club lately,’ Freddy remarked, sipping at his whisky and soda.

‘Didn’t Bullington tell you? I’ve resigned.’

‘Resigned? Why?’

‘Because they’ve gone ahead with their invitation to Norton. And he’s accepted. Bullington told me so.’

‘Good God, old man, there was no need to—’

‘But that’s neither here nor there. He won’t have long to enjoy his membership.’

‘What d’you mean by that?’

‘As soon as he sets foot in London, I intend to challenge him.’

Anywhere else, at any other time, Freddy would have laughed in Hugo’s face. Duelling had long been regarded by their generation as the most absurd of anachronisms. But the intensity of his friend’s expression forbade such a reaction. Instead, he said, in sober responsible tones he scarcely recognized as his own: ‘It’s not on, Hugo. You must forget the very idea.’

But Hugo merely smiled blithely back, ‘I wasn’t going to leave you out of it, Freddy. In fact I’m glad you’re here. It gives me the opportunity to ask if you’ll do me the honour of acting as my second.’

‘You are jokin’, aren’t you?’

But Freddy was wasting his breath. It was obvious Hugo had never been more serious. ‘Will you do it? Grass before breakfast, old man. It was a common enough way to settle differences in our fathers’ day.’

‘But this isn’t our fathers’ day. You’ll make a laughin’-stock of yourself.’

‘I don’t think so. If Norton accepts the challenge,
I
’ll be ready for him. If not, I’ll have exposed him as a coward.’

‘He’ll never accept. Dammit, why should he?’

‘Because, if he were really James, he’d do the decent thing. Wouldn’t he?’

‘I don’t know. Twelve years ago, a chap might still sneak off to France and take a pot-shot at a rival without bein’ called a ninny by all and sundry. Jimmy might have done it then, yes. But not now.’

Hugo drained his glass and stared levelly across the table. ‘Will you act for me, Freddy?’

‘It’s a tomfool idea, Hugo. You must—’

‘Yes or no?’

It was strange, thought Freddy, to discover, so far advanced in his feckless existence, that there was a genuine fund of loyalty his friends could call upon at direst need. The amoral code he claimed to live by should have led him to desert Hugo in short order. But that, he now realized, he could not do. ‘Yes,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I’ll act for you.’ He, too, drained his glass. ‘Damn it all.’

IV

Denzil O’Shaughnessy, self-appointed spokesman of the thinking classes of Connaught, stepped sprightly from the platform of the Salthill tram as it turned into Eyre Square, Galway, plucked a sheaf of papers from the inside pocket of his coat and struck out towards the offices of the Connaught Tribune Printing and Publishing Company.

His progress across the square was impressive in its own right. A tall, heavily-bearded, broad-shouldered man wearing a dashing if dented top-hat, and a flapping overcoat in the fashion of a cloak, he flourished the papers in his hand like a swagger-stick, glanced about to right and left with his head tossed haughtily back and flipped coins to the beggars huddled beneath the Dunkellin monument as if throwing handfuls of seed to birds at his feet.

If any observer had judged O’Shaughnessy, by this display, to be some arrogant local magnate indulging in a piece of tastelessly conspicuous expenditure, they would have been sorely mistaken. He could, in fact, ill afford to give even loose change away. His clothes, though stylish and well made, were threadbare, his stout boots painfully thin-soled. For an educated man nearing sixty, he was scandalously ill-prepared for the privations of old age, and the air he exuded of leisured contentment owed nothing to the cramped lodging he had set out from not half an hour since.

Denzil O’Shaughnessy’s finances were, in truth, ransomed to his integrity. His forays into journalism had so often betrayed a contempt for the landed and Protestant gentry of Ireland that his more remunerative occupation – tutoring the same gentry’s children – had lately been in short supply. Not that he felt restrained by this from continuing to inveigh in print against the tide of violence sweeping his homeland or the reasons for it, for he was a man who always acted according to the promptings of his conscience: a rare phenomenon indeed.

Breezing into the
Tribune
offices, his face wreathed in the broadest of smiles, O’Shaughnessy was already preparing some artful rejoinder to the misgivings of his editor when he noticed a well-dressed grey-bearded man leaning against the counter, to whom the clerk, young Curran, said as he entered: ‘You’re in luck, sir. Here’s Mr O’Shaughnessy in the flesh.’

The stranger turned towards him. Middle-aged and rather weary-looking, O’Shaughnessy thought. Probably English. Too watery-eyed for any kind of commerce, too doleful to be a tourist. Not, whatever else, a happy man.

‘This gentleman was enquiring where he might find you, Denzil,’ Curran put in. ‘I was just after giving him directions.’