The Thorn Birds (80 page)

“Stop it, Justine,” said Meggie sternly. “No thinking like that, do you hear me? Dane would hate it, you know he would. Things happen, why we don’t know. The important thing now is that you’re all right, I haven’t lost both of you. You’re all I’ve got left now. Oh, Jussy, Jussy, it’s so far away! The world’s big, too big. Come home to Drogheda! I hate to think of you all alone.”

“No, I’ve got to work. Work is the only answer for me. If I don’t work, I’ll go mad. I don’t want people, I don’t want comfort. Oh, Mum!” She began to sob bitterly. “How are we going to live without him?”

How indeed? Was that living? God’s thou wert, unto God return. Dust to dust. Living’s for those of us who failed. Greedy God, gathering in the good ones, leaving the world to the rest of us, to rot.

“It isn’t for any of us to say how long we’ll live,” said Meggie. “Jussy, thank you so much for telling me yourself, for phoning.”

“I couldn’t bear to think of a stranger breaking the news, Mum. Not like that, from a stranger. What will you do? What can you do?”

With all her will Meggie tried to pour warmth and comfort across the miles to her devastated girl in London. Her son was dead, her daughter still lived. She must be made whole. If it was possible. In all her life Justine seemed only to have loved Dane. No one else, even herself.

“Dear Justine, don’t cry. Try not to grieve. He wouldn’t have wanted that, now would he? Come home, and forget. We’ll bring Dane home to Drogheda, too. At law he’s mine again, he doesn’t belong to the Church and they can’t stop me. I’ll phone Australia House right away, and the embassy in Athens if I can get through. He
must
come home! I’d hate to think of him lying somewhere far from Drogheda. Here is where he belongs, he’ll have to come home. Come with him, Justine.”

But Justine sat in a heap, shaking her head as if her mother could see. Come home? She could never come home again. If she had gone with Dane he wouldn’t be dead. Come home, and have to look at her mother’s face every day for the rest of her life? No, it didn’t bear thinking of.

“No, Mum,” she said, the tears rolling down her skin, hot like molten metal. Who on earth ever said people most moved don’t weep? They don’t know anything about it. “I shall stay here and work. I’ll come home with Dane, but then I’m going back. I can’t live on Drogheda.”

For three days they waited in a purposeless vacuum, Justine in London, Meggie and the family on Drogheda, stretching the official silence into tenuous hope. Oh, surely after so long it would turn out to be a mistake, surely if it was true they would have heard by now! Dane would come in Justine’s front door smiling, and say it was all a silly mistake. Greece was in revolt, all sorts of silly mistakes must have been made. Dane would come in the door and laugh the idea of his death to scorn, he’d stand there tall and strong and alive, and he’d laugh. Hope began to grow, and grew with every minute they waited. Treacherous, horrible hope. He wasn’t dead, no! Not
drowned
, not Dane who was a good enough swimmer to brave any kind of sea and live. So they waited, not acknowledging what had happened in the hope it would prove to be a mistake. Time later to notify people, let Rome know.

On the fourth morning Justine got the message. Like an old woman she picked up the receiver once more, and asked for Australia.

“Mum?”

“Justine?”

“Oh, Mum, they’ve buried him already; we can’t bring him home! What are we going to do? All they can say is that Crete is a big place, the name of the village isn’t known, by the time the cable arrived he’d already been spirited away somewhere and disposed of. He’s lying in an unmarked grave somewhere! I can’t get a visa for Greece, no one wants to help, it’s chaos. What are we going to do, Mum?”

“Meet me in Rome, Justine,” said Meggie.

Everyone save Anne Mueller was there around the phone, still in shock. The men seemed to have aged twenty years in three days, and Fee, shrunken birdlike, white and crabbed, drifted about the house saying over and over, “Why couldn’t it have been me? Why did they have to take him? I’m so old, so old! I wouldn’t have minded going, why did it have to be him? Why couldn’t it have been me? I’m so old!” Anne had collapsed, and Mrs. Smith, Minnie and Cat walked, slept tears.

Meggie stared at them silently as she put the phone down. This was Drogheda, all that was left. A little cluster of old men and old women, sterile and broken.

“Dane’s lost,” she said. “No one can find him; he’s been buried somewhere on Crete. It’s so far away! How could he rest so far from Drogheda? I’m going to Rome, to Ralph de Bricassart. If anyone can help us, he can.”

Cardinal de Bricassart’s secretary entered his room.

“Your Eminence, I’m sorry to disturb you, but a lady wishes to see you. I explained that there is a congress, that you are very busy and cannot see anyone, but she says she will sit in the vestibule until you have time for her.”

“Is she in trouble, Father?”

“Great trouble, Your Eminence, that much is easy to see. She said I was to tell you her name is Meggie O’Neill.” He gave it a lilting foreign pronunciation, so that it came out sounding like Meghee Onill.

Cardinal Ralph came to his feet, the color draining from his face to leave it as white as his hair.

“Your Eminence! Are you ill?”

“No, Father, I’m perfectly all right, thank you. Cancel my appointments until I notify you otherwise, and bring Mrs. O’Neill to me at once. We are not to be disturbed unless it is the Holy Father.”

The priest bowed, departed. O’Neill. Of coursel It was young Dane’s name, he should have remembered. Save that in the Cardinal’s palace everyone just said Dane. Ah, he had made a grave mistake, keeping her waiting. If Dane was His Eminence’s dearly loved nephew then Mrs. O’Neill was his dearly loved sister.

When Meggie came into the room Cardinal Ralph hardly knew her. It was thirteen years since he had last seen her; she was fifty-three and he was seventy-one. Both of them aged now, instead of only him. Her face hadn’t changed so much as settled, and into a mold unlike the one he had given her in his imagination. Substitute a trenchant incisiveness for sweetness, a touch of iron for softness; she resembled a vigorous, aging, willful martyr rather than the resigned, contemplative saint of his dreams. Her beauty was as striking as ever, her eyes still that clear silvery grey, but both had hardened, and the once vivid hair had faded to a drab beige, like Dane’s without the life. Most disconcerting of all, she wouldn’t look at him for long enough to satisfy his eager and loving curiosity.

Unable to greet this Meggie naturally, he stiffly indicated a chair. “Please sit down.”

“Thank you,” she said, equally stilted.

It was only when she was seated and he could gaze down upon her whole person that he noticed how visibly swollen her feet and ankles were.

“Meggie! Have you flown all the way through from Australia without breaking your journey? What’s the matter?”

“Yes, I did fly straight through,” she said. “For the past twenty-nine hours I’ve been sitting in planes between Gilly and Rome, with nothing to do except stare out the window at the clouds, and think.” Her voice was harsh, cold.

“What’s the matter?” he repeated impatiently, anxious and fearful.

She lifted her gaze from her feet and looked at him steadily.

There was something
awful
in her eyes; something so dark and chilling that the skin on the back of his neck crawled and automatically he put his hand up to stroke it.

“Dane is dead,” said Meggie.

His hand slipped, flopped like a rag doll’s into his scarlet lap as he sank into a chair. “Dead?” he asked slowly. “
Dane
dead?”

“Yes. He was drowned six days ago in Crete, rescuing some women from the sea.”

He leaned forward, put his hands over his face. “Dead?” she heard him say indistinctly. “
Dane
dead? My beautiful boy! He can’t be dead! Dane—he was the perfect priest—all that I couldn’t be. What I lacked he had.” His voice broke. “He always had it—that was what we all recognized—all of us who aren’t perfect priests.
Dead
? Oh, dear Lord!”

“Don’t bother about your dear Lord, Ralph,” said the stranger sitting opposite him. “You have more important things to do. I came to ask for your help—not to witness your grief. I’ve had all those hours in the air to go over the way I’d tell you this, all those hours just staring out the window at the clouds knowing Dane is dead. After that, your grief has no power to move me.”

Yet when he lifted his face from his hands her dead cold heart bounded, twisted, leaped. It was Dane’s face, with a suffering written upon it that Dane would never live to feel. Oh, thank God! Thank God he’s dead, can never now go through what this man has, what I have. Better he’s dead than to suffer something like this.

“How can I help, Meggie?” he asked quietly, suppressing his own emotions to don the soul-deep guise of her spiritual counselor.

“Greece is in chaos. They’ve buried Dane somewhere on Crete, and I can’t find out where, when, why. Except I suppose that my instructions directing that he be flown home were endlessly delayed by the civil war, and Crete is hot like Australia. When no one claimed him, I suppose they thought he had no one, and buried him.” She leaned forward in her chair tensely. “I want my boy back, Ralph, I want him found and brought home to sleep where he belongs, on Drogheda. I promised Jims I’d keep him on Drogheda and I will, if I have to crawl on my hands and knees through every graveyard on Crete. No fancy Roman priest’s tomb for him, Ralph, not as long as I’m alive to put up a legal battle. He’s to come home.”

“No one is going to deny you that, Meggie,” he said gently. “It’s consecrated Catholic ground, which is all the Church asks. I too have requested that I be buried on Drogheda.”

“I can’t get through all the red tape,” she went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I can’t speak Greek, and I have no power or influence. So I came to you, to use yours. Get me back my son, Ralph!”

“Don’t worry, Meggie, we’ll get him back, though it may not be very quickly. The Left are in charge now, and they’re very anti-Catholic. However, I’m not without friends in Greece, so it will be done. Let me start the wheels in motion immediately, and don’t worry. He is a priest of the Holy Catholic Church, we’ll get him back.”

His hand had gone to the bell cord, but Meggie’s coldly fierce gaze stilled it.

“You don’t understand, Ralph. I don’t want wheels set in motion. I want my son back—not next week or next month, but now! You speak Greek, you can get visas for yourself and me, you’ll get results. I want you to come to Greece with me
now
, and help me get my son back.”

There was much in his eyes: tenderness, compassion, shock, grief. But they had become the priest’s eyes too, sane, logical, reasonable. “Meggie, I love your son as if he were my own, but I can’t leave Rome at the moment. I’m not a free agent—you above all others should know that. No matter how much I may feel for you, how much I may feel on my own account, I can’t leave Rome in the midst of a vital congress. I am the Holy Father’s aide.”

She reared back, stunned and outraged, then shook her head, half-smiling as if at the antics of some inanimate object beyond her power to influence; then she trembled, licked her lips, seemed to come to a decision and sat up straight and stiff. “Do you really love my son as if he were your own, Ralph?” she asked. “What would you do for a son of yours? Could you sit back then and say to
his
mother, No, I’m very sorry, I can’t possibly take the time off?
Could
you say that to the mother of your son?”

Dane’s eyes, yet not Dane’s eyes. Looking at her; bewildered, full of pain, helpless.

“I have no son,” he said, “but among the many, many things I learned from yours was that no matter how hard it is, my first and only allegiance is to Almighty God.”

“Dane was your son too,” said Meggie.

He stared at her blankly. “What?”

“I said, Dane was your son too. When I left Matlock Island I was pregnant. Dane was yours, not Luke O’Neill’s.”

“It—isn’t—true!”

“I never intended you to know, even now,” she said. “Would I lie to you?”

“To get Dane back? Yes,” he said faintly.

She got up, came to stand over him in the red brocade chair, took his thin, parchmentlike hand in hers, bent and kissed the ring, the breath of her voice misting its ruby to milky dullness. “By all that you hold holy, Ralph, I swear that Dane was your son. He was not and could not have been Luke’s By his death I swear it.”

There was a wail, the sound of a soul passing between the portals of Hell. Ralph de Bricassart fell forward out of the chair and wept, huddled on the crimson carpet in a scarlet pool like new blood, his face hidden in his folded arms, his hands clutching at his hair.

“Yes, cry!” said Meggie. “Cry, now that you know! It’s right that one of his parents be able to shed tears for him. Cry, Ralph! For twenty-six years I had your son and you didn’t even know it, you couldn’t even see it. Couldn’t see that he was you all over again! When my mother took him from me at birth she knew, but you never did. Your hands, your feet, your face, your eyes, your body. Only the color of his hair was his own; all the rest was you. Do you understand now? When I sent him here to you, I said it in my letter. ‘What I stole, I give back.’ Remember? Only we both stole, Ralph. We stole what you had vowed to God, and we’ve both had to pay.”

She sat in her chair, implacable and unpitying, and watched the scarlet form in its agony on the floor. “I loved you, Ralph, but you were never mine. What I had of you, I was driven to steal. Dane was my part, all I could get from you. I vowed you’d never know, I vowed you’d never have the chance to take him away from me. And then he gave himself to you, of his own free will. The image of the perfect priest, he called you. What a laugh I had over that one! But not for anything would I have given you a weapon like knowing he was yours. Except for this.
Except for this
! For nothing less would I have told you. Though I don’t suppose it matters now. He doesn’t belong to either of us anymore. He belongs to God.”