The Destinies Of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman E-Book

J.P. Donleavy

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Semi-orphaned, semi-legitimate heir to crumbling Andromeda Park in the lush beauty of the Irish country-side, Darcy Dancer is raised by aging servants, tutored in basic skills by lovelorn Mr. Arlan, in hell-raising by incorrigible Foxy Slattery, and in love by his astutely aristocratic housekeeper, Miss von B. He grows up a complete gentleman only to be rudely cast out of his ancestral home, forced to seek his fortune among berserk fox hunters, destitute noblemen, lusty bohemian ladies, and shameless gamblers- to discover that his destiny, like his birth, rides on the 100-to-1 shot, and the sheer luck of a fast horse galloping against all odds to roistering victory! His future is disastrous, his present indecent, his past divine. He is Darcy Dancer.

Leseprobe

The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman

J. P. Donleavy

A DELL BOOK

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

Contents

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1

Blue strips of sky between bleak clouds this chill day before Christmas as winter entrenched across the remote midlands of Ireland. With darkness descending at tea time in the north east bedroom of a grey cut stone manor, an ample horsey woman who had the day before been riding to the hounds, groaned giving birth. The news was whispered from servant to servant down through the house and more loudly into the kitchens and louder still out across the lantern lit stable yards.

The husband of this woman, a man as well known for his gambling as he was for his generosity among cronies, had married for money and was, as he was mostly, away in England for the racing. And upon that birthday he had waged one hundred pounds on a rank outsider at one hundred to one, which had come waltzing in by eight lengths, a winner. And upon hearing the news of a boy sent a cable.

And with this among other names a child was christened in the small chapel at the top of the stairs, Reginald Darcy Thormond Dancer Kildare.

Reached by a mile long winding drive through vast entanglements of ancient rhododendrons, Andromeda Park stood a weather worn cold edifice three storeys tall over a basement on a hill surveying lonely standing oak, beech and chestnut trees in a forty Irish acre field inclining down to a small river. Here three children, two sisters and their baby brother played along the grassy banks of these trout waters and ran as cowboys and indians up into the higher hills of forest hiding other distant fields and meadows. And when recaptured for meals by nurses and nannies, were led, sometimes by the ears, up wide granite steps through an oak bullet-proof door fitted with a small iron barred grill out which the cross eyed butler Crooks asked visitors their business so it could be discerned as to whether they were friend or foe. The latter always being those with a bill who wanted to be paid.

His nurse called this alabaster skinned, blue eyed and black haired boy Darcy Dancer and swaddled, dressed, fed and minded him in his nursery till he was six years old when a groom taught him to ride. And sometimes at the open stained glass chapel casement, with his older sisters each holding a hand, he watched the cattle stampeding as the hunt assembled on their front lawn. Later as darkness fell he saw them through a blue tinted pane of a north east parlour window come straggling back, scarlet coats, black coats and breeches, mud spattered, horses steaming, a few lamed some maimed and all, as Uncle Willie said, relieved to be alive.

He counted from the shortest winter’s day right into early spring the lengthening minutes of light. Till on midsummer nights a cold glow lurked in the northern sky way past bedtime when in the illumined sunset darkness he listened to the donkeys braying. To be always finally lulled to sleep by the chiming bells of the clock tower from which his mother’s father had removed the hands when too many of the locals trespassed to a neighbouring hill to be told the time of day by a man who owned a spy glass. And just beyond this hill he often dreamt there were green and white bearded little fairies with angels’ wings who lived and played joyously there in the lonely grassy beyonds and would one day come and bring him into their hidden warm wonderful kingdom where nice little boys could sit with them mending shoes.

His games were to ride the hay top of ricks as they were drawn to the barns at harvest time. And his chores were picking summer berries for winter jam in the hedgerows. He grew taller amid smells of drying saddles and the whinny of horses and the pounding of their hooves in springtimes out across the surrounding pastures. All moments of this tiny world golden within petals of a buttercup. Till one early morning dawn, falling out of bed, breaking a collarbone and rolling in agony where a rocking chair rocked, I was carried sobbing and trembling in my nannie’s arms to her bedroom further down the hall to mend and convalesce. And learn to know that just as poison lurked in the beauteous soft tissue of yellow meadow flowers, so too did pain and sorrow lie before all one’s footsteps.

And only

Some knowing

Loving hand

Could

Guide you

By

2

His sisters gone away to school in Dublin, Darcy Dancer was taught reading writing and arithmetic by Mr Arland, a tall, thin, grey suited gentleman who often said between his deep sniffs of snuff, that that was what he was, a gentleman. Who although disowned by his aristocratic father as a child borne by a serving girl, was educated at proper schools in England and later at Trinity College Dublin where he was a sizar and scholar. And often on his lips were his favourite words he used to a disputatious Darcy Dancer.

“Please do not Kildare, be miserably negatory.”

Mr Arland came fetched each day and they sat at ten o’clock for three hours in the tiny schoolroom tucked in under the servants’ staircase. And always Mr Arland as he took his cane from the front hall and shoved it up under his arm also took his last pinch of snuff which he sucked from the tip of the back of his hand up each nostril as he stood on the front steps waiting to be ferried by pony and trap back to the village where he stayed in a grim damp room over the pub.

Following lessons, and free to run, explore and hide, Darcy Dancer often climbed up upon the massive bough of a tree where he lay stretched out holding his head in his fists, elbows on the rough bark listening to the creaking cartwheels and trudging horses heading for the underground tunnel which led from the stable yards behind and under the back of the house and way out to the light of day again in the fields. And his horse trading visiting Uncle Willie when shouting to find him there would always smilingly say.

“Ah child, it will soon be for the likes of yourself that you’ll be inside looking out over your madeira upon the vistas that do be displaying from this house, and that the beauty and peace of your daydreaming cannot be disturbed by the rough movements and noises of carts and men.”

And it was one year later on the third day of spring in the late sunny afternoon, his mother, carried in strange foot shuffling silence by the linked arms of farm hands, was lifted up the steps and through the front door. Her long dark brown riding habit bloodied and tresses of her hair hanging while she was laid upon the horsehair chaise longue, her one green and one blue eye staring at the ceiling of the north east parlour, dead. The smell of baking scones for tea in the air and on the floor of the whim room next to the chapel I had been playing with my trains, lifting the locomotive with a derrick back on the track. I heard a loud scream and choking sobs and went to the balustrade and saw down into the front hall the men standing hunched and silent, caps in their hands, the mud broken away in lumps from their boots and scattered on the black and white tiles. They held me away till I ran in between and around them into the room. And when I looked and looked at her. Her slender ankles and white satins closed by a gold pin around her throat. The blue veins at her temples and the way she always swept through the house, casting friendly orders to the adoring servants over her shoulder, her voice so clear so certain and kind, a pleased smile always ready on her lips. And all had said that although before her marriage she was plump and plain, following the birth of her last child, she became slender rarefied and beautiful.

The coffin made by the village butcher arrived by the farm road and was brought in through the ivy shrouded basement entrance. And a day later his father had come on the train from Dublin where during the yearling sales he’d been staying at his club. A large gloomy establishment through which once after seeing my first rugby match, I was led. Thawing my chill in front of an orange glowing turf fire and watching members like my father, stand at the great polished gleaming drawing room windows safely surveying over cigars and port the flat green velvet playing fields of Trinity College many of them had attended across the street. And I slept there in an attic room hearing the trams screeching and roaring along the road and in the morning could see the moist glossy rhododendrons and evergreen leaves that grew up from the college grounds the other side of the spear topped iron fence. And mid day sat in a smoky carriage pulled by a throbbing puffing steam engine which sputtered and wheezed across a Liffey bridge and gathered speed by the blackened slate roof tops and tiny back gardens. Till out between the furze and heather covered bog lands it raced, whistle wailing along by the banks of the Canal to finally after two hours chug into the little familiar grey and black painted station with its carefully tended always blossoming flower beds.

And all those other days I knew my father was home, when he could be heard shouting for Crooks that his boiled egg was too soft or hard or the fire to be mended and kept blazing or his newspaper found or that he would not speak to some caller who demanded to see him. And once, his monocle flashing at the bottom of the stairs, he said to me as he saw me at one of my daydreaming spots at the great window on the large landing watching out to the grove of beeches where each evening, black hundreds of wing flapping barking rooks gathered.

“There you are, you bastard.”

Now to see on the thin narrow reddened face his lips drawn tightly as he took his long leather motoring coat from his shoulders, nodded at the members of the household who lurked genuflecting and then blessing themselves as their master entered his study. A whole day passed with his door closed on this shuttered panelled room where he sat in front of the fire drinking whiskey and listening to solemn symphonies on the gramophone. Crooks stationing a stable boy inside the door of the salon across the hall to steal forward as the music began to fade and to wind up the gramophone again and again. And the visitors in the faded blue walled parlour looking down and paying their last respects to the alabaster face cushioned by the soft black waves of hair and those vanished strange gems, the gently closed eyes of my mother.

That fifth day of spring like the first day after the end of the world had come. A storm the night before sending slates flying off the roofs and they lay scattered and broken around the house, some stuck like arrows deep in the front lawn where ancient oaks were blown over, their roots sticking up and their boughs breaking the fence. I came awake as the shutters and window frames shook and a giant stone falling from a chimney sent a great bang trembling throughout the house. The pounding gusts of the gale poured billows of turf smoke into rooms and out into the halls where it gathered high up beneath the skylights. And now heavy rain swept in wave after wave out of racing dark clouds from the west. Crooks bracing with his shoulder and needing help to slam closed the front door. The entrance hall covered in puddles from the dripping coats and umbrellas. With mourners standing backsides to the roaring fire with their dark clothing steaming and some of their chilled blue hands holding brimming glasses of brandy.

Outside lost birds knocked backwards in the sky. Floods of water shining silver below in the fresh green field where the banks of the river overflowed. Motor cars had blocked the entrance drive and wheels were churning and skidding deep into the lawn. His mother’s coffin taken from the darkly furnished north east front parlour where the smooth gleaming elm box had reposed two days on an oak wake table under the hunting portraits of my mother’s pink coated father and black habited mother. And now borne down the front steps by grooms through a way made between the vehicles and placed upon a black velvet covered cart. The voice of the head groom repeating over and over again.

“Gently lads gently.”

All walked and the dark line of people strung out from the apron of stones fronting the house. To follow the horse drawn coffin a short way down the drive and left on to a farm road which entered the park and wound under a giant oak and down a steep hill to the dell surrounded by a grove of walnut trees. In the small walled cemetery where were buried her mother and father and two of her brothers, the musty mausoleum held coffins of Darcys and Thormonds back through generations and my sister Sybilla. The men had dug my mother’s grave by the ruins of the ancient chapel whose thousand year old arched entrance and stone foundations still stood heaped up and roofed over by ivy vines. A place where I had so many times come in summers to sit cooled and shaded by the great yew tree to watch the wasps go and come from their hole in the ground.

Shielding the pages of their bibles from the rain, a priest and a parson in attendance. The first a strange friend of my mother’s, whose elegant clerical garments were tailored in Paris, and the latter an even stranger friend, an amateur astronomer and botanist who spoke with the high pitched voice of a woman and who with his long blond curling hair was rumoured to be living in his parsonage with a man. Both usually called for tea and always brought presents, mother of pearl shells, copper boxes, and sometimes statuettes of Wedgwood and Meissen. All placed on tables and admired as the butters melted between the halved scones, and voices ranged upon vases, paintings and opera. My mother as she held the silver pot to pour, reeling off dates manners schools and motifs. And hear the refrain from her gently chewing ecclesiastic friends.

“Yes yes superb I do most certainly agree exactly.”

Standing around the mound of mud and sods were the Master of Fox Hounds, twenty three members of the hunt and four neighbouring farmers and their wives. The gombeen man of the village, whose bald black browed wife wore a blond wig, was sheepishly rubbing his hands. And from the town, six Irish miles away, came six of the biggest shopkeepers. One nearby Earl and two Barons stood under their black umbrellas with their black bowler hats in hand. A Marquis, a widowed Countess, one well known bookie and further, their backs agains tthe cemetery wall, nine members of the household, my two red eyed sisters and twenty working men with their big fingers grasping their caps, as all these heads dripped with rain.

And my blue eyed Uncle Willie his broad shoulders folded forward, standing next to me behind my father, was sobbing like a child. His big hand reaching up again and again to brush at the tears and rain rolling down his cheeks. And I could hear him say. As the same words were choking up against my silent lips.

I love you

Nettie

I loved you

3

Two days following the funeral Darcy Dancer’s father sold ten big bullocks at the street market in the village and without an ounce of petrol for the motor cars he left again by horse and trap clip clopping three miles on the hilly winding road to the station. His two big thick heavy leather cases waiting that morning in the hall and I traced my fingers on the tooled large black initials of R.C.S.K. While Ruby my nurse, who had moved in semi retirement to the top floor, was packed and weeping clutching me, was gone with my sisters minutes later.

The next day a cable came from Dublin. The pale green envelope emblazoned with a black harp. Crooks solemnly brought it on a tray. Standing above me in the whim room intoning.

EN ROUTE VIA LIVERPOOL STOP IN EMERGENCY ONLY CONTACT RITZ LONDON.

And Crooks retreating with his crossed eyes and now just one of his front upper teeth left to hardly brighten his rare smiles. As he daily, along with six other pairs of hands, continued to run the slowly collapsing household.

And still with each week day at his appointed hour Mr Arland stepped from the trap, lifted his chin and always turned to look down the sloping parkland to the river and then reach into his pocket, take out his big gold watch and regard the time. The stitching threads hanging loose from his little battered briefcase across the top of which he held his cane. His nervous sometimes twisting mouth which always seemed to draw a deep breath before he climbed the steps. Just as I would then speed from the whim room and along the stone paved corridor and down the servants’ staircase at the end. To await Mr Arland’s arrival as I sat steeped in laborious study. When came his tapping of the blackboard pointer and I would then sit book open over the grim wastelands of Latin as his kindly reasonable voice spoke from his thin white face.

“Kildare, you are being automatically stupid.”

And then as we embarked upon English grammar and punctuation, Mr Arland kept by his left hand a volume of poetry into which he would refer his eyes, patiently waiting for me not to be automatically stupid.

“Kildare, when do we use a period.”

“When a comma is not required.”

“I shall repeat. For the umpteenth time. For the benefit of your inattentive ears. When a sentence is complete and independent and not connected in construction with the following sentence, it is marked with a period. As, fear God, period. Honour the King, period. Have charity towards all men, period.”

“But I do not honour the King.”

“Kildare you’re being tiresome, you know. Do you have charity towards all men, period.”

“No, period.”

“Well that is a pity, period.”

“No one has charity towards me, period.”

“Ah you are getting the point, period.”

On wild rainy days he came hunched and huddled up under a naval great coat from which his head emerged to wipe his nose gently against his sleeve. And if the day continued dark and cook brought us up bowls of hot vegetable soup, he would telll his little stories, looking down now and again at his bitten fingernails, his thumb rubbing along his spoon and then pulling his soiled shirt cuffs back under his frayed jacket sleeves.

“Yes my absent minded tutor. He was always nervously rushing hither and thither never fully realising where he was. Until one day, stepping off a ladder backwards from a book shelf high in the college reading room he was killed. For the world of scholarship it was most sad. He broke his brains. They hopelessly tried to revive the poor man on the reading room steps. But he was as absolutely dead as an old bone.”

And those afternoons following lessons, Darcy Dancer would wander to the stables. To see the big hunting mares bred by his mother in off the grass in their loose boxes chewing hay and waiting to foal. Foxy Slattery the head groom’s son, milked the cows and fed the chickens and would be lurking there silently behind the bales of straw glancing up sideways as he made a sucking sound with his lips secretly pulling smoke out of a cigarette. His one or both eyes blackened and his face bruised if not by the kick of a cow then by his father’s fist the previous night.

“What is wrong with your face.”

“Ah I have a knock on it now and again.”

And as the herd came mooing in from the fields, udders swollen and led by three goats, Foxy ran back and forth behind them waving his hat, shaking his fist, kicking with his boot and throwing sticks stones or anything at wayward beasts. When a chicken was to meet its doom he would charge after it, his two hands outstretched, his mouth spitting vile oaths and curses as he galloped crashing and banging through barns and sheds tripping over rakes and ploughs, lashing out with swipes of his sharpened axe at the fleeing hen. And once when he fell full length immersed into the water trough, he surfaced, swinging his axe and roared out two words I had not heard before.

“Fucking cunt.”

Crooks on one of his frequent insomniac tours of the sleeping house, shuffling in an old pair of my father’s slippers embroidered in gold with a stag’s head, caught Foxy stealing whiskey from the wine cellar. In the struggle, as the bottle broke on the red tile corridor, Foxy kicked Crooks in the shins and shouted that Crooks himself had been stealing the wine and whiskey for years. Next day Foxy’s head all wrapped in white bandage and his both eyes closed to two blue little slits. Catherine the cook said his father had socked him like a football all over the Slattery cottage. And when Foxy’s bandages were finally gone he celebrated on a bottle of poteen, picking the lock of the cabinet in the tack room where it was specially kept to cure beasts of blackleg. Then half delirious atop an unlit bicycle heading down the drive on his way through the black night to the village pub, he sailed on the first turning straight into a tree. Crooks hearing the news of cracked ribs, fractured skull and various contusions and abrasions as well as a broken arm, announced solemnly to every member of the household.

“That should keep that regrettable rapscallion quiet for a while.”

But before these bandages were off, Foxy, his arm still in a plaster cast, was trying to ride an evil minded stallion which had already attacked and nearly killed two grooms. And every able footed inhabitant of Andromeda Park ran for their lives when Foxy mounted bareback came charging out of the stable lashing the wicked brute on its quarters. Suitably named Thunder and Lightning, the beast bucked, its hooves flashing sparks across the yard with Foxy hanging on like a leech two handed to its mane. Till with an almighty undulation of its equine spine, Thunder and Lightning threw Foxy eleven feet high over the wall into the orchard. Where Sexton, a six foot four inch tall man who wore a black patch over his blind eye, was pruning trees. And who in his great shambling way, produced Foxy back out again crumpled unconscious in a wheelbarrow with a daisy chain wreathed around his skull.

“Here’s the hero served up with laurels. Now tell me what will I do with this stupid sack of imbecility. Lateat scintillula forsan. If any of you uninitiated understand me Latin.”

Later when I came into the shed where Foxy, his plaster cast arm brushing away the swinging tail of the cow he milked, had his head again newly wound with gauze.

“What this time is wrong with your head.”

“Ah I have a knock on it now and again.”

With summer, new grasses growing thinly over his mother’s grave, where an obelisk, tall as a man, now stood, letters gleaming in gold leaf, chiselled deeply in the grey stone.

IN EVERLASTING MEMORY OFANTOINETTE DELIA DARCY DARCY THORMONDBELOVED WIFE OFCAESAR REGINALD SEAN KILDARE.

When Darcy Dancer went there, he found placed on the granite plinth a fresh bunch of flowers just as were placed freshly round the house on hunting days. When always there was great commotion and feverish activity with the sound of boots down the halls and servants at the windows watching my mother in black and my father in pink be mounted by grooms at the foot of the steps. And Sexton said that her ladyship’s favourite mare when it grazed the surrounding field came each morning and afternoon to neigh over the cemetery wall. And I felt a strange loneliness growing. Just as the bright green moss did on the tops of the old deer park walls. And now when some of the stones had fallen and lay there in the growing grass, I’d wonder who would ever come and build them back up again.

For two months now, only the men to talk to in the barns and stables. After Foxy Slattery finally ended up in the hospital. With two broken legs. Got in the course of stealing exotic fruits from a neighbouring Lord’s greenhouse one midnight. A crack shot and former colonel of a crack regiment, his Lordship cornered him in the top of a tree in the walled orchard. When Foxy refused to descend, his Lordship blasted him down with the near misses of his shotgun. And now the only excitement stirring was when a foal or calf was born. With men tugging sometimes six or seven of them on a taut rope out a barn door. To all fall thump on their backsides as a calf with one last almighty heave was finally pulled out of a groaning heifer.

“There he is lads a fine big strong bull with not a bother on him.”

It rained till autumn. One unending caravan of clouds after another heading east, carrying mists and vaporous winds across darkened days. When suddenly the sun shone blazing. And Darcy Dancer’s father returned for three weeks of harvest. Selling the barley and the wheat as soon as they stood near ready and ripe to be cut and an auction was held for the two hundred cocks of hay. And before he left, ten more big bullocks, fifty sheep and five sows went off to market. And trays of silver egg cutters my mother had collected over the years along with selected pieces of Wedgwood and Meissen were packed by Crooks to accompany my father’s luggage.

Two upstairs maids Norah and Sheila and Kitty from the kitchens were given notice. And when Norah and Sheila were miraculously next morning reinstated, Kitty, in tears and howling out the act of contrition, was nearly dragged all the way to the front gate. And times she had minded me, her blue eyes wide like footballs and her red kinky hair electrified around her head, as she said God would get even and had cast a curse on the house because my father a Catholic was raising me as a pagan Protestant. But wherever she was, she would, she promised, pray for the redemption of my immortal soul.

Sexton, in his Sunday best, his black bicycle cleaned and shined to go off to mass, went gently pumping his pedals with his long legs. And shouting as he rode by the front of the house and down the drive.

“Incorrigible, incorrigible cur, that’s all he is or will ever be and you couldn’t whisper pax vobiscum within a mile of him without being branded a liar for life.”

Foxy had following the mending of his broken legs used one of his crutches to break his father’s arm, who, he claimed next morning, punched his mother all night over the house. Catherine the cook said what better hand to administer justice than a husband’s and it was about time someone had caught the wench who’d go behind a cock of hay with any stable lad, she with her skirts up and they with their trousers down. With Crooks mumbling as he gloomed through the pantry, nervously scratching at the tiny spots of dried soup and gravy that dotted his livery.

“No good will ever come out of that bunch.”

Mr Arland on recent instructions from my father now came only Monday Wednesday and Fridays, assigning me work to do alone on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he went instead to the great castle where the heaviest nobleman in the world lived and which could be seen on clear days from the high land of Spy Glass Hill, its turrets and towers nestled distantly between the forested downs. Sexton exaggeratedly said it was where he worked for slave wages till my mother visiting remarked on his most splendid roses and chrysanthemums. And he wasted no time before he got himself fired by levelling a few sophisticated insults to the foreman which had to be made less and less so until that thick headed eejit understood. And soon after he was with cap in hand taking favoured instructions from the lady of Andromeda Park.

“Ah young master Darcy there was no more beautiful woman than your mother. She was a saint, God rest her, a beauty. God speed her soul to heaven. She was a madonna. By God she was a madonna. With the purity of the Blessed Virgin, sine dubio and the kindest of the master creator’s creations sine ira et studio, as surely as you follow my Latin.”

Days when Mr Arland was absent I found much pleasure climbing in the lofts and searching the attics. And on fine days, followed by my mother’s wolfhounds Kern and Olav, I would ride my white pony as far as I could get the stubborn animal to go across the fields. Trying once to make my way fording the streams and around the lakes to the great castle, but with its tower out of sight I would lose my direction and get lost. Returning muddy and scratched and leading my tired sweating pony into his box and fetching oats. I’d wait till Foxy would come in with the cows for their evening milking. Watching him reach in under their bags to hammer out jets of milk with his jerking fists, his woollen hat pulled down over the scars on his brow.

“And where has Master Darcy been today.”

“I tried to find the way to the castle.”

“Ah you’d have to know the way around the woods and lakes for that. Sure I’m taking that old Thunder and Lightning for a gallop again and I’ll show you the way.”

“Don’t you think it’s time you stopped getting knocks on your head and your legs broken.”

“Ah don’t worry I’ll be giving out the knocks soon enough. And the ones I’ve been getting will be like taps of a feather compared to the ones I’ll be handing out.”

“Sexton says you’re a cur not fit to have conversation with the likes of me.”

“That dirty filthy one eyed liar. What’s he doing but riding his cycle around pulling his prick into every hedge because not a woman in the countryside would let him near her.”

“What do you mean by that.”

“Now don’t go around asking them questions and saying the answers that they came from me.”

“But I do not know what you mean.”

“Sure you’re old enough don’t you pull yours.”

“I do not know what you are saying.”

“The thing between your legs you piss out of. Haven’t you seen the bulls at the cows and the stallions at the mares.”

“I am always shooed away.”

“Well I’ll show you sometime, some night when the time’s ripe. It’s like so, the milk I’m squirting out the teat I’ve got in me hand. You can come with me over beyond where there’s the woman.”

“What woman.”

“The wife of the one eyed one armed man. She’d soon teach you.”

“I’m not allowed out at night.”

“I’ll get you out.”

“Crooks locks the doors.”

“Never mind that stupid eejit Crooks. I’ll have you out and not a soul will know. And here for a start I’ll show you mine. It’s only a middling size now but in two seconds it’ll be as long as an axe handle and spitting in a minute like a squirt of milk out of that cow.”

“Nurse Ruby said that’s wrong till you’re old enough and married.”

“Never mind that cross eyed hunchback who’d never find a husband in donkey’s years.”

“Don’t say such a thing about my nurse.”

“What harm, she’s gone now and you’re old enough. Sure what would that old crone know. Who’d put a hand to her when there was the likes of Norah and Sheila with nobs on them that would open a treasure chest.”

“You shouldn’t speak of our servants in that manner if what you are saying is not nice.”

“Sure nice or not there are goings on in the big house I could tell you plenty about. Four of the girls this last year are gone from there now with their bellies bulging to the nuns in Dublin.”

“And what do you mean by that.”

“That they’ll be having their bastard babies before long.”

Darcy Dancer went crossing the cobbled stable yard that night. Pony’s bridle draped over an arm. The word bastard blazing on the mind. A distant whistle of the train and a beast groaning out somewhere on the evening pastures. To know now for certain that men did something to ladies. And that Nurse Ruby went red in the face as I sat on a chair by the copper bath. She slapped my thigh when she looked down and saw what Foxy was showing me, sticking straight up at her from my lap. And to know now that a cross eyed hunched back was ugly to the rest of the world.

And a

Beauty

Only

To me

4

As the autumn days shortened, cobwebs were getting thicker and darker on the ceilings of the house. The crack where the bees made honey in the wall of my mother’s bedroom grew wider. And each time I came there to see where she lived and touch the things she owned I found a turf fire glowing in the grate. With Crooks still entering her door with trays and once passing in the hall I heard his voice which suddenly made me stop and shiver.

“Madam I do believe there is a little sun this morning, shall I part the drapes further for you. And I do hope Catherine is making the coffee more to madam’s preference, ah allow me, madam to freshen your water decanter. I understand madam it’s twenty eight instead of thirty to dinner. The smoked salmon will be at the station at three. Certainly madam, the Sèvres. And the blue candles, of course.”

I tiptoed to the next room down the hall to enter my mother’s ablution room to listen. And could see through the half open door Crooks reflected in the dressing table mirror as he stood at the foot of my mother’s lace canopied bed. His right hand clasping his left, his chin held high and his head inclined to the side. He stepped forward touching the counterpane, his voice still full of urgent ministration, and a fear crept up my spine. That all in this house had died. And dwelled in an eternal world like heaven or hell.

At nights it took Darcy Dancer hours to sleep. Feet chilled under the damp blankets. Alone, with his sisters and nurse gone away. And now every day to go down the hall and with no one near, to go into my mother’s room. See myself in the painting picnicking under our greatest oak tree, my sisters and I seated around our mother. The colours matching the fresh flowers put each day on her writing desk and the tables by her bedside. And in the ablution room her toothbrushes laid out on the pink marble wash stand. The glass shelves of her soaps and bath salts waiting ready for her hand. Her scent bottles wiped and polished gleaming and once even her tub filled with hot steaming water. When I heard Crooks’s voice again.

“Norah how many times must I tell you to air madam’s towels.”

Pastures growing soft again with rain and grazing cattle shortening the grass, leaving only the clumps of stiff stemmed sharp ended rushes. To walk early mornings wandering with Olav and Kern by foxes’ coverts and watch the big dogs bark and dig furiously only to suddenly whirl and chase a zig zagging bounding hare, the great hounds stretching across the turf pounding furiously in pursuit. And wandering back up the hill towards the house I’d detour down into the servants’ entrance. To find Sexton cutting stems and filling vases in the basement flower room.

“Why does Crooks draw my mother’s bath.”

“Ah Crooks doesn’t know he’s half gone daft. The man’s sine dubio as mad as a hatter. But your mother, Master Darcy is with us nevertheless, living and breathing like life and any man who doubts that will have to reckon with a fist in the gob from me.”

A lead drain around the domed skylight of the front hall began to leak and in the worst rain storms would make floods on the black and white tiles. Until basins and finally buckets were all over the floor. And with water seeping in, mushrooms were flowering up from skirting boards and carpets in the cloakroom. Where when Mr Arland was hanging his coat I asked him what he meant by his Latin remark about Sexton, insanus omnis furere credit ceteros.

“Kildare does it not ever dawn on your lazy head to refer yourself to your dictionary if, as is clearly the case, you cannot translate even the most simple of phrases.”

“My mind goes blank at the thought of Latin.”

“Pity.”

And Mr Arland smiled as I presented my sheet of paper.

EVERY MADMAN THINKS EVERYONE ELSE MAD

“Good for you Kildare.”

I found Sexton in the kitchen gardens coming out of his potting shed where inside the Latin names of flowers were pinned up on sheets of paper. And inscriptions were written under a little altar on which stood a statue of a blue robed woman. Holding it up to his tall face, I showed him the Latin. He peered at it. And I said now you know what it means.

“Ah now I’m not going to bother meself about translating another man’s Latin.”

“I translated it. And do you want to hear what it says.”

“Sure if you’ve nothing better to do, I’m not against encouraging scholarship. Life is short art is long, and the beauty of the siprepedium lasts forever, if you understand me.”

“It means every madman thinks everyone else mad.”

“Is that fact.”

“Yes and it’s what Mr Arland says about you.”

“He what. The insolence of him. Shoot me down would he. Make a mockery of a poor old horticulturist, would he. Madman is it. And he is the sane one is he. I’ll soon teach that cheeky pup to address his intellectual betters with more respect.”

“I thought you might have something in Latin to say back to him.”

“In Latin is it. It’ll be in English delivered on the end of an Irish boot that that Sassanach bastard will hear from me.”

“But you said Crooks was as mad as a hatter.”

“And so he is, completely demented.”

“And now you are angry that someone has said something about you.”

“I am by God I am.”

And then as I stood there, Sexton’s one eye grew moist and brimming and suddenly, from under his eye patch, tears streaming down his face. As the giant man bent and broke into convulsive sobs.

“O God almighty I’m not mad, don’t say that, never say I’m mad. I’m not that. I only love the flowers and nature and the beauties of the world with my whole heart, my whole soul. And I conscientiously do my religious duty. And any man who would say I was mad has no charity. O God and his only begotten son, save me.”

Darcy Dancer reached forward to touch Sexton’s arm to comfort him and he drew away. His hands pushing up over his face and his whole body wracked with more sobs as his shoulder leaned in against the wooden panels of the shed wall knocking a stack of clay flowerpots from the shelf which broke hitting the ground. His voice came muffled out between his moans.

“Leave me be. Leave me be.”

Day after day Catherine the cook scraped together chicken scraps and boiling turnips and dished out cauldrons of potatoes covered in slabs of melted butter for the men to eat who had too far to travel back to their cottages for lunch. And Darcy Dancer still sniffed the smell of freshly baked bread coming up the stairwells. But slowly the bacon sides and hams hanging and curing from the basement ceilings vanished. Sexton now left the apples, pears, damsons and plums falling from the orchard trees for the birds to peck till they were rotting brown on the ground. The clock chimes stopped sounding in the stable tower. And the one bell outside the kitchen that all watched and listened for. Hoping to hear it ring, jangling back and forth on its curled spring. Its brass turning green. And its unused wire through the house, grown stiff with rust. Where it went turning corners on little wheels under floorboards and joists to the pearl inlaid ebony nob in my mother’s silent room.

Crooks who read his bible aloud each evening in his quarters, shuttered the ballroom and closed up half the top floor, locking off chambers where he said the chill would snuff out a candle. He would sit, on the cold evenings, thick woollen dressing gown pulled over his livery and a heavy pair of white boot stockings pulled up over his trouser cuffs. And once when I came to his room to ask him for the hot bottle that was usually there warming my bed, there was a strong smell of whiskey and I pointed to a door bolted with a large padlock which he said was the hanging room and haunted by a previous butler who had hung himself from the ceiling.

“It is cursed, and should never be entered. Furthermore Master Reginald, it is not done for you to come to my chambers, it is proper you should summon me to yours.”

“I rang the kitchens. And no one came.”

“Still, it’s not done. And stay away from Foxy, he sets a bad example with every broken bone in his body.”

The electric light which always faithfully glowed pale yellow in the filaments of the light bulbs was wavering weaker and weaker each evening, and now went out. The generator set on the hillside in the woods received visit after visit from the amateur engineers among the men and was given kicks, nods, pats and clanks and spins and turns but stayed still. And a man from Dublin would not come till all of Andromeda Park’s unpaid bills were paid.

Candles now gave their flickering glow as the winds groaned along the stone paved corridors. And the shadows moved and loomed and maids, those with locks and those with keys to their doors, tried to make them work. With Crooks still at large midnights or dawns trying all the doors. And when my mother’s father’s portrait crashed down on the main staircase, Crooks stood there with a lantern and said the ghosts who had risen this night from the grave are guilty of this. And one more maid frightened into her senses was gone fleeing the next day.

The walnut grand piano began to warp and rust. The huge gilt mirror on the chimney piece of the back drawing room fell forward where it lay crashed, broken and untouched on the floor. While slowly his mother’s fortune and estate declined with the further sale by his father of their shrinking lands. From six thousand acres down to three. And now several more and larger and nearer fields were auctioned. Neighbours’ boundaries coming closer and closer and arguments over trespassing sheep and cattle more and more frequent. With Crooks announcing himself at the schoolroom door as Mr Arland and I would look up from our books.

“Mr Arland please forgive my interruption. Master Reginald, while his father is away, should have announced to him callers whom I am sure you do not wish to entertain the thought of seeing, but we must at least pay them the courtesy of enquiring that this is in fact the case.”

“Thank you Crooks, I don’t wish to see them.”

“Very good Master Reginald.”

Autumns, winters and a distant war, and his father’s absentee and indifferent farming spread weeds and left dead sheep and unmended fences and pot holed roads. With irate farmers now threatening violence and bloodshed on the front steps. And upon his infrequent brief returns, he would immediately following lunch, reconnoitre the remaining crops or livestock. To be heard cursing as he did when the men let the hay ricks collapse or a thoroughbred horse get loose which a buyer was coming to see. And it had to be chased as it ran wild for miles. And always following three days of these continued catastrophes he would be gone again, not to be heard of for weeks and weeks. As more wagon loads of hay, sheep and bullocks disappeared, lost or stolen. But just as the grumbles would deepen, a money order would arrive for the agent, a swarthy beetle browed gentleman, to pay the back wages of the servants and men who lined up outside the old rent room.

And the evening following one such departure, and the recent hiring of a new lady housekeeper, I lay awake thinking that meaner men than my gambling father were getting closer and closer. Shouting out and shaking their fists at Crooks. And to feel I wanted to run. Gallop up over the hills. Take my pony and my mother’s dogs and find a round tower made of big stones where I could climb up into and be safe. From this new woman who went poking around the house snapping orders and commands at the servants and throwing Crooks into frequent door slamming rages. And a creak of boards made me listen and then I heard a little knock and a voice.

Are you there.

And I thought some thoughtful ghost had come who heard me thinking. And the black nob with the golden circles, turning. A wind rushing up against the window and rattling the casement. And I sat frightened in my bed as the door slowly pushed open with a shadowy head under a cap peeking round it.

“It’s me Foxy, are you awake.”

“What are you doing here.”

“Sure didn’t I tell you I’d come and get you. Keep your voice down and I have it all fixed.”

“Go away.”

“What way is that to talk when I near kilt meself getting in to get you out.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Suit yourself but there’ll never be another time. As ripe as right now I’m telling you. I’m going meself whether you come or not. With whiskey and all. And don’t breathe a word of that. It’s me own whiskey and not out of the house. Are you coming.”

The wind high and a full bright moon above the grey speeding shadows of clouds. Foxy looking back over his shoulder. For any signs of the now two major domos of the household. With Miss von B’s room at the upper end of the corridor. Who had that day in her flowered silk dress and white cloth gloves sent Foxy to the town to get men to come and mend the leaks in the roof. With Foxy standing in the front hall, his cap in hand and pulling his forelock as he said yes ma’am, that’s right ma’am. And then she called for Crooks to have the crashed mirror on the back drawing room floor cleared away. And her voice was heard raised and shouting.

“I am in command of ziss household and you should do what I say.”

And the mirror remained. With the seven years’ bad luck Crooks said anyone would get cleaning it up and he put his nose in the air and walked out. And as I came down the main stairs with Crooks slamming another door somewhere down the end of the hall, I could hear Miss von B still in the salon as she called it,

“Swine. Dirty filthy swine. You are all swine in ziss house.”

I stood in some alarm and disbelief on the stair. Miss von B came out in the hall and saw me there. Composing herself, she stretched her neck, looking over both her shoulders from which she brushed imaginary debris. Then putting her white gloved hands to her throat she stood staring at me across the black and white tiles. I thought it appropriate one should adapt Mr Arland’s cool measured words and deliver them accordingly,

“Ah Miss B.”

“It is von B thank you.”

“Ah, Miss von B do I perceive that you are aggrieved. Is there something I can do.”

“What can you do with swine. It is squalid. These people are nuts. They are completely nuts.”

“Nuts.”

“Yah, nuts.”

“I’m sorry but I do not know what you mean.”

“Cuckoo. Batty. Loony bin. Fruity cake crazy. I am speaking perfect English. Do you understand.”

“Yes.”

“Vell den. I am thinking I am in a madhouse. It is falling down. The dirt. It is pushed under the rugs. The greasy fingers. They go so on the doors, on the lamp shades, on the objets d’art. The mud. It come off the boots. It go all over the floors. The hair off the dogs. The rain through the ceiling. Your father, he wants spic and span. It will be smudge and stain he will get.”

“I am sorry. But we in Ireland do not think it unfit for there to be some dust and cobweb about.”

“Dust and coweb. Ha ha. That is a good one. You are dirty people.”

“How dare you.”

“Dare. Of course. Look at my gloves. They should stay white when I touch so, and look. My finger, it is dirt. A chicken it run back and forth downstairs, in the corridor. It came in the broken window. Then there is one dead in there behind the curtain. With the feathers all over the floor.”

“Why don’t you go if you are unhappy.”

“Go. I have just come. Sixty miles. I tell your father how I am treated too.”

Miss von B passed by me up the stairs. I thought perhaps on her way to her room to pack. But later she was in the blue walled north east parlour taking afternoon tea and perusing the colour plates of my mother’s large vellum bound volumes on pottery and china. Her only ally being Sexton who daily brought her a bouquet of flowers and said, by god she’s a woman of culture come in her innocence to this temple of defective intellects. And von B appreciating this attendance upon her, stood patiently but dumbfounded at Sexton’s steam of Greek and Latin. And one wonders now. If she lay asleep up the hall contemplating how to escape back to civilization again. Or if she sits up trembling at the creaks Foxy and I make, shoes in our hands, and stealing past her door. To proceed down by the west stair landing. The shadows of the grove of big beech trees out there. Through which we can run. To haunt the countryside this night.

“Follow me now, and never breathe a word of where I’m taking you.”

“Where are you taking me.”

“Out by the tunnel.”

“How can you get to the tunnel.”

“Ah now haven’t I told you I’d get you out. It is how the priests got in and out of the house long ago. Quiet now, that ould eejit Crooks will be coming drunk out of his bedroom and falling on his head. Now watch where you’re going over these bottles I put here on the stairs.”

“You could hurt someone.”

“It’s only to know if Crooks was following me. He’d only get a little tumble and knock on the skull. Sure there are carpets over the timber. And wood never did any harm cracking your head. It’s stone and cement you might feel if you wasn’t used to it.”

Touching the wall, following the way behind Foxy. His stale smell of dogs and stables. Go tiptoeing down past the great window, the moon silver against the leaves and bark of the beech trees. The unhappy moan of a cow out somewhere missing its calf. Through the swing door from the main hall where the grandfather clock chimes half past the hour and down the stair to the basement. At the corridor’s far end the night’s white white light through the arched panes of the transom. And only feet away the bedroom door of Catherine the cook. Whose gnarled hands still toiled over her cauldrons from dawn till all the household were asleep. And she lies loudly snoring.

“Listen to the noise of that loud bitch. In here behind me now. Don’t make a sound.”

The cold clammy air of the pig curing room with its shelves and slabs of slate. The heavy clank of a stone as Foxy digging in with all his fingers, prised it up from the floor. Climbing down into the darkness. The earthy damp musty chill air. And Foxy crouched grunting as he pulled on a ring to drag the stone slab thumping closed over their heads.

“No one can hear us now. And never breathe a word. This goes out now to the big tunnel back of the house. And not another soul knows.”

“The smell is not nice.”

“It takes some pipes. And they do be leaking betimes.”

“And you must stop making your unpleasant comments on members of the household.”

“What harm is that to pass a few ould remarks when I’m taking you out to the best lesson you’ll get in your life. Sure and that old Catherine owns a forty acre farm and has it stocked with sheep and pigs and is stacking up pound notes in the bank. And how do you know she’s not stealing.”

“Our cook is honest.”

“It’s none of me business but let me tell you they’re robbing the place blind.”

“Do you steal.”

“Ah only ould bits and pieces now and again. But I’m honest in general. I only lie not to get a beating. But when I’m telling the truth they think I’m lying because I’m such a liar. So it’s all the same. They love giving a beating. But I don’t feel a thing.”

Through the blackness, crouched hobbling forth, and hands touching in the cold mud along the dank low corridor. Water drips on the back of the neck from the roof of the runnel. A scurrying and scrabbling.

“What’s that Foxy.”

“Ah them’s only a few ould rats.”

“I don’t like rats.”

“Sure they’ll do you no harm if you give them a swipe of your hand in the gob. It’s only the very big ones that can kill cats, that’ll jump for your throat and chew open your vein and take the blood out of you.”

“I want to go back.”

“Ah sure there’s only a dozen or so of them in the tunnel. Sure they’ve only managed twice to take a bite out of me and each time I gave them a wallop with me boot that made manure of their guts. It’s not more than a few yards now and we’ll be in the tunnel to the stable yard. Mind these slippery steps.”

The great shadowy arch of the farm tunnel as Foxy pulls Darcy Dancer out behind him. And pushes back the stone and lifts another stone. Turf mould spread over the cobbles. The air sweet smelling with hay where clumps of it had fallen from the carts hauling it in from the fields. Down more stone steps and now along another underground passage wide enough for two men to walk abreast and tall enough that you had to reach to touch the vaulted ceiling.

“Mind now the big rats be worst here, kick out if you feel something putting teeth into you.”

“I don’t like this.”

“It’s not far now.”

In a black mustiness they emerged. Foxy lighting a match. A strange fear. In the chill stillness of death. A room of cobwebbed coffins stacked on stone shelves. Their rusted handles and copper nails stained green. On the oak and elm, brass plates engraved with names. Of Darcys and Thormonds. Bertha, Elizabeth, Esekiel and his own name, Reginald. On the top corbels were smaller coffins near the big ones. And the tiniest one of all. To whom death came at ten months of age. With the same Christian name as his eldest sister. Beatrice Blossom Thormond.

“All your mother’s lot back till kingdom come. They’ll put you in here too when your time comes.”

“They will not.”

“Ah they will. There be jewels on them in the coffins. That’s why they are put here secret the way they are behind them big bars and locked with the size of them locks.”

“How do you know there are jewels.”

“I’ve heard tell.”

“Did you try to look.”

“I’m not going to go touching in them skulls and bones. But there are others I hear talk of who’d like to get in here.”

“Who are they.”

“Ah I’m not saying now. But they be grave robbers from beyond the other side of the lakes.”

The headstones of the cemetery looming. A breeze rustling the ivy leaves. They stepped out under the massive tangle of vines roofing over the ruins of the ancient chapel. Foxy’s breathing heavy as he tugged lifted and nudged with knees and shoulder the heavy grey slab back into place. And reaching under a moss covered rock, he pulled forth a bottle of whiskey. Squatting, he planted his elbows across his thighs and tipped the pale spirit up to his lips.

“Only you’re too young I’d give you some whiskey. Now like I said never tell anyone this secret way. Nobody else knows it but meself, the gaffer and maybe that fool Crooks. I have a good mind sometime to scare the wits out of that big ould eejit Sexton when he comes here simpering to the graveyard and I jump out at him like the Holy Ghost and send him blessing himself for miles running across the countryside.”

“You must not do that to poor Sexton. He is not well in his mind.”

“Sure haven’t I just said he’s an eejit. Bursting into the new housekeeper five times a day with a bunch of flowers. Don’t I know he’s not well in his mind. Isn’t he there up on the altar every Sunday with his grey hair slapped back wavy on his skull and it looking black as coal.”

“And why shouldn’t Sexton’s hair be black.”

“Because it’s as grey as your pony is white. Doesn’t he go to the ould can of motor oil in the stable and take a drop. And then brush down a bit of the soot from the stove that keeps the mares warm when they’re foaling. He mixes the filthy ould soot with the dirty ould motor oil till he gets a thick paste. Then he rubs it well in into his skull and plasters the hair back with the iron comb they do be using in the stable on the horses.”