The Blood Upon the Rose (6 page)

As a child, she had come to the house for Christmas and for the Dublin season, which lasted for six weeks afterwards. It had belonged to her Gort grandparents then, and she remembered it as a time of parties, treasure hunts, skating in the park, great candle-lit meals, laughter, and music. Always music, and fine, rustling, many-layered dresses, for there were balls in the square nearly every night. The carriages would come rattling into the square, full of gay young debutantes, the windows would be thrown open, and no one would sleep until one or two in the morning. Her grandparents would always throw their own ball, and that would be the grandest of all. Catherine and her brothers would stay up all night, rushing in and out of the ballroom, their eyes wide at the extravagance of gorgeous dresses and uniforms.

She remembered her parents opening the ball, the handsomest couple there. Always her father and grandfather would dance with her, and she would go crimson with the pleasure of it. One night, when she was eleven, the Viceroy's ADC had danced with her, and everyone had clapped because she had done it so well. Afterwards, he had sat her on his knee and fed her bonbons, and she had asked him to wait for her until she was old enough to marry him.

The next year, her grandparents had died, her father had inherited the house, and her mother began to go mad.

Catherine had not understood why, at first. She had been only twelve years old, and thought her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. Not only beautiful, but powerful, important too, because of her beauty. Artists painted her, poets worshipped her; even the Viceroy bowed his head and kissed her hand. But in that year, 1913, something had happened, and her mother had never gone to Merrion Square again.

It showed itself first as eccentricity and weeping. Her mother had taken to going for long lonely walks across their estate in west Galway, coming home wet and bedraggled and then shutting herself up alone in her room for days on end. The poets and painters were banished, and replaced by doctors. Catherine's brothers went away to boarding school and her father to the army. Only Catherine was left with her governess in the big house by the wide, empty sea, 200 miles from Dublin, to witness the long slow collapse of the mother she had so admired.

Her father said it was a disease, and certainly, Maeve O'Connell-Gort was ill. Her once fine bones became gaunt, skeletal under a paper-fine skin; her eyes wide, dark, haunted. But she would not accept that she was ill. ‘The body itself is only an expression of the mind, my dear,’ she had whispered to Catherine, one dark winter evening in west Galway, while an Atlantic gale howled around the rafters of their house, Killrath. ‘I was beautiful once because I was loved, and you are beautiful because you are a child of that love. Now your father has abandoned me, and there is nothing left. It is not my body, it is my heart that is broken.’

And so Catherine learned of her father's English mistress, Sarah Maidment, who had usurped her mother's place in the Dublin house in Merrion Square. For seven years Catherine had visited the house only once, under duress. Sarah Maidment had put herself out, bringing Catherine dresses from England and arranging visits to the theatre in the hope of winning her over as she had done with her brothers. But Catherine had thanked her, curtsied, and then scarcely spoken again for the whole visit. She had put her foot through the skirts of the dresses so she could not wear them, and then left them behind.

Sarah Maidment was a rather short, round woman with the beginnings of a double chin, which made it easy to despise as well as hate her. She had turned most of the house into a hospital for wounded soldiers, which was very admirable, no doubt; but Catherine had refused to help. Her interest in medicine grew out of a desire to help her mother, not these strangers. So she ignored them, saying the war was against Ireland's interests, anyway, so the soldiers should not have gone.

It had not been a happy visit.

And now her two brothers and her mother were dead, and Mrs Maidment was in a nursing home in Bournemouth. So Sir Jonathan had asked Catherine to be mistress of the house. It was part of a deal they had made between them. There was little love in it.

They had made the deal ten months ago, in the big dining room where she had once waltzed with her father and the ADC. When Catherine saw it after the war, it was stripped bare. All the paintings had gone, the wallpaper was stained and scribbled on, there was a single dim lightbulb in the chandelier. The last of the wounded had been carried out, but there were still two hospital beds in a corner.

Sir Jonathan had been in his army uniform. His riding boots echoed on the bare floorboards. Catherine had worn a bright, defiant red dress with high button boots. She sat on one of the beds and swung them, looking at him.

He said: ‘You know Sarah - Mrs Maidment - is dying. She has cancer of the lungs. She has a few more months, that’s all.’

At least she'll be thinner, Catherine thought, viciously. But she said: ‘I'm sorry.’

‘Are you?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Well. I . . . I've thought of marrying her, you know. We've discussed it.’ He looked at her for a reaction but there was none visible. ‘She has two children, grown-up boys. By her husband, of course, they are no relation of yours. They are all quite poor.’

Catherine looked away from him, out of the window. Her mother had been dead for less than a year. She still loved her father but she despised him, too, for what he had done.

‘Mrs Maidment's sons are no responsibility of mine but they are decent fellows. Both did their bit in the war; one lost an arm. Neither has a job yet -
are you listening to me?’

She had got up and walked to the window. It was so painful to hear. Without turning round she said: ‘Yes, Father.’

‘If I married Sarah, they could inherit this house, and my part of the estate. It would be a reward for virtue. But they are not my family, and you . . . are.’

She turned to face him. ‘I see. You think I don't deserve to inherit?’

She was tall, and the lift of her chin made her, though she did not know it, both desirable and terrifying to most young men. To her father, the look reminded him of his wife, as she had been when he loved her. Before she had become ill, and mad, and impossible to live with. Before he had left her for the comfort of Sarah Maidment. Catherine looked to him like Maeve's ghost, come back to haunt him.

‘You never expected to become a great heiress, and you never would have done if your brothers had not given their lives for their country. You would not have been poor, but …’

‘Land-owning is for men?’

‘Yes.’ They looked at each other coldly. He thought how like Catherine's eyes were to her mother's - dark, passionate,compelling. But there was a determination in them too, a strength that Maeve had never had. There was something in them that he saw in the mirror each morning. It unsettled him.

After a long pause he said: ‘The fact remains that you are flesh of my flesh. Our family has owned Killrath for three centuries, and this house for half that time. That stability is the whole basis of this country.’

‘Still?’

‘Still.’ He waved a hand dismissively. ‘I know you have other ideas, but I hope and pray they will change. Listen, my dear. I want to make a bargain with you.’

It had been a great surprise. For the last year of her mother's life, Catherine and her father had scarcely spoken. She blamed him so much for her mother's death; she did not think he could care for her at all. When the interview had begun, she had been prepared to be disinherited entirely.

‘I will not marry Sarah, and I will settle the whole estate on you, on three conditions.’

‘I see. And what are they?’

‘One: that you help me restore this house, and reside in it for at least half the year. That should not be too hard.’

She looked around the desolate room. ‘No. Just wearisome. But worthwhile, I suppose.’

‘I'm glad you think so. Second: that you run the Killrath estate in trust for your own children. It will not be yours to sell off in bits and pieces for some mad revolutionary cause. I will not have that. You have the whole thing, or none.’

‘It seems you want me to have none of it. Is that legal?’

‘I can make it so.’

‘And the third condition ?’

‘That you marry a man of my choice.’

‘What?
Father, that's absurd!’

‘It is not. It is the system that has prevailed for hundreds of generations, and it is a good one, particularly where large estates are concerned. You will need a man to help you, and he should be someone born to the task. I am not a fool, you know - I won't choose a monster.’

‘No? Father, you're a monster yourself!’ She walked across the room, and her mocking laughter echoed from the bare walls. It sounded hysterical; but then, it was a mad situation. ‘You can't just use me to breed, like one of your mares! I'm a woman, you know, a person in my own right! It's a new century, those ideas are gone. I can even vote - do you know that?’

‘Not until you're thirty. By then, you may have changed your ideas. If so, I can change my will.’

‘And my career? My studies at UCD?’ At the time of the conversation she had only just got her place. It was the one thing she had fought for, all those years alone at Killrath. Her career was like a beacon in a storm to her. Something that would give her light to understand the physical side of her mother's illness; and the independence to ensure that such a mental collapse would never happen to her.

‘I don't object to that. Though you might be better advised to study economics than medicine. In a way, I . . . I suppose it is an achievement for a young woman to think of such study at all.’

She stared at him. With a shock, she realized there was a hopeful, slightly appealing look in his eye. He really meant these things
kindly.
‘Father, you are . . . antediluvian! You realize you cannot force me to marry anyone?’

‘No. Perhaps I put it badly. Of course you can have a say in the choice.’

‘A say in the …’

‘But I must give my permission. If you marry without it, you will be disinherited.’

‘What about Mother's estates?’

‘She died insane. Therefore they are all mine.’

‘And if I do not marry, and have no children?’

‘That would be a pity. Catherine, you are nineteen now. You cannot marry without my permission until you are twenty-one. I think it is reasonable to say that you must be married by then.’

‘Reasonable!’

‘It is a natural thing; it will happen anyway. As for children, that is in the hands of God.’

‘Oh yes? It may have to be, with the husband you choose!’

‘That is hardly a ladylike response, Catherine.’ He paused. ‘Do I take it you refuse my conditions, then?’

There had been a long silence. She had considered him, a grey-haired, slightly stooped figure in his khaki uniform. A pillar of an establishment that was completely out of touch. He was standing in the centre of the room, almost exactly where he had called her out to dance with him, all those years ago. She had worshipped him then. It was hard to make the connection.

She had a choice. To defy him, cut off all connections with her childhood, go out into the world to make her way on her own merit. Part of her believed that was the right thing to do. She believed she would do it, when she was older. As a girl she had dreamed of selling her share of the estate, to build a hospital and work in it as a doctor. But to struggle to qualify as a doctor without money - that was a cold, lonely decision, forced on her like this. For all her idealism she knew little of the world. Only that without wealth, she would have the power to change nothing.

Difficult though her father was, he was her only family now, as she was his. His was an awkwardness she understood, and believed she could work with. The conditions were really a bluff to hide the weakness of his own position. In a few months Sarah Maidment would be dead, and the connection he had with her sons would begin to wither. Besides, whatever he said, he could not force her to marry anyone.

And she did want, very much, to restore this house to something of its former position. To reclaim it, in memory of the mother who had danced here, so long ago.

So she had agreed.

And now, ten months later, the dining room was again furnished with a long shining table and carpets. They had taken down the old wallpaper, with its war poems and graffiti, and replaced it with something less grand but serviceable. Several pictures had been brought down out of the loft and re-hung. There was a dresser, a silver service, and a black-leaded fireplace. They employed a butler, a cook, three maids, and a manservant.

It was very empty and quiet in the house. The three maids, the butler and the manservant had a room each on the fourth floor, and the cook slept in a room beside the kitchen. The hall, the grand dining room, and a drawing room took up the rest of the ground floor; on the second floor there was a library, a large sitting room, her father's office, dressing room, bedroom and bathroom; and on the floor above, two spare bedrooms and a suite of rooms for Catherine.

To Detective Inspector Kee, as he arrived on the morning of 20
^th
December, it seemed extravagant.

The butler showed him into the dining room, where Catherine was finishing a solitary breakfast. Her father had already left for the Castle.

Catherine rose to welcome him. She was wearing a bright-blue woollen dress with a white lace collar, a few inches below the knee, as the fashion was now. If he had met her in the street he would not have thought her unusual, but her self-assurance in this large room, and her clear resemblance to the woman in the twelve-foot-high oil painting on the wall, slightly unnerved him. He was also puzzled by the odd, incongruous fact that the university lists had revealed her, unlike her father, to be a Catholic. Perhaps that, too, had something to do with the handsome woman in the portrait.

Catherine saw a solid, burly individual in a drab raincoat and heavy boots, with a square determined face and short moustache. A typical stolid policeman, she thought, all method and no imagination. She regarded the interview as an amusement, a formality. She smiled politely, like a good society hostess.