Ashes In the Wind Read online

  John goes home, falls asleep in the bath and again over supper up at the Fort.

  ‘Off to bed with you,’ says Cis.

  John walks slowly back to his cottage and looks in on The Elector. It’s a long drive to Kildare, he thinks, and then remembers Grania’s bright eyes. He changes into his dinner jacket, drives slowly over to Kildare, buys a ticket and goes into the Leinster Arms. On his way to the ballroom John has to pass through the long, busy bar, and is immediately embraced by the jockey who fell in front of him at the big double.

  ‘We had you beat barring the fall,’ he says. ‘Any road, let me buy you a drink.’

  There are many happy gamblers to help him celebrate his win. Paddy Brennan is holding court at one end of the bar; he beckons John over and insists on another bottle of champagne.

  ‘Big win for the stable,’ he says, his face red with the warmth of the room and the drink, his voice hoarse and only a little slurred. Paddy smiles at the circle around him, all happy to relive the story of the race any number of times as long as the drink keeps flowing.

  John leaves the bar to look for Grania in the ballroom of the hotel. This is past its glory days, decorated, but not recently, in gold and red; heavy velvet curtains are drawn across its tall windows. A ten-piece dance band is playing quicksteps, waltzes and foxtrots from a gallery set above the dance floor. The royal arms – not for much longer, thinks John – are the only ornament on the wall. The room is filled with a noisy, cheerful crowd, many of whom have spilled over directly from the racecourse. Half the guests are in dinner jackets, half in tweeds or corduroys.

  He eventually finds Grania in a large party around a table on the far side of the dance floor. She is wearing a dark green dress that shows off her white shoulders, her black hair gathered by a tortoiseshell comb, her lips red. She stands up, takes his hand and says to her table, ‘This is John, stallion man at Burke’s Fort and winner of the third race. He’s made me a rich woman, and I owe him a dance.’

  They push their way onto the crowded floor, where luckily there isn’t enough room to test John’s quickstep. The band is playing ‘My Blue Heaven’. Grania is almost as tall as John; he holds her close, her hand on his shoulder. Their cheeks touch and stay together. Her fingers gently stroke the back of his neck. The dance is over all too soon for John.

  ‘I must go back to my table,’ says Grania. ‘Eamonn thinks he’s my beau. I’ll be over to see you with Tess next week.’

  Is Eamonn her beau? wonders John as she walks back to her table. As he leaves the dance floor he is pulled into the bar by an insistent Paddy Brennan.

  ‘Just one for the road,’ he says, speaking slowly and deliberately. He is swaying a little. John sips a glass of Guinness.

  ‘We’ve drunk them dry of champagne,’ says Paddy.

  The last waltz is played; John can’t see Grania on the crowded dance floor. The music finishes, there is a roll of drums and the Master of Ceremonies announces, ‘The National Anthem – The Soldiers’ Song’. There is one quickly silenced boo as the band strikes up the unfamiliar tune. Although the bar is quiet, it is clear not everyone knows the words; some are singing in Gaelic, some in English. John misses the beginning, hears,

  ...Sworn to be free,

  No more our ancient sireland

  Shall shelter the despot or the slave.

  As he drives carefully home he remembers Grania’s fingers stroking the back of his neck.

  Three days later she rides over in the morning on her cob, leading her mare.

  ‘She’s been ready for twenty-four hours, but I couldn’t leave the farm yesterday.’

  ‘We’ve no teaser stallion. We’ll have to leave it to The Elector to excite Tess. I’ll get Sean to come and hold her. You can have a cup of tea in the cottage if you like.’

  ‘I don’t like. She’s not Sean’s mare. I’ll hold her,’ and, seeing the look on John’s face, adds, ‘I am a farmer’s daughter.’

  They take Tess into the covering stall, and John gets her ready, bandaging her tail, tying it forward, covering her quarters with the heavy leather blanket. As he swabs the mare clean, Grania, impressed, says, ‘She’s used to being turned out in the field with the stallion and told to get on with it.’

  John puts on the bitted head-collar and leads The Elector out of his box into the yard.

  ‘Come on now, be a good boy, don’t let us down,’ he whispers.

  And The Elector is a good boy, whinnying softly, circling and sniffing Tess for a few minutes. Tess is skittish at first, moving away from the stallion and pulling hard. John is surprised that Grania is able to keep hold of her. They take the mare into the covering stall, where Grania talks to Tess in a soothing voice and strokes her neck. After a first failed attempt, The Elector rises up and shudders violently into the mare.

  ‘That’s a good cover. You did well to steady her. We’ll put her in the visitors’ box and cover her again tomorrow to make sure. I’ll fork some hay down for her.’

  They put the two horses away, and John climbs up the outside ladder to the hayloft. He pushes a double armful of hay down into the manger below, and turns to find Grania standing beside him. His heart leaps; he puts his arms around her and kisses her ears, her nose, her cheeks, her mouth. ‘Like this,’ she says, parting his lips with hers and pulling him down to the soft pile of hay. Her skin smells of lavender; John presses his mouth against her neck. ‘This might be more comfortable,’ says Grania, and it is more comfortable, more comforting than anything John has ever known. She runs her hand down to loosen John’s belt, and holds him, then strokes him to a climax. He touches her in return and she says, ‘There, just there,’ and closes around his hand. They lie together, holding each other, until Grania says, ‘Mannion’ll come looking if I’m not back soon,’ and they climb back down the ladder.

  This time John knows to give her a leg up into the saddle.

  ‘Thank you, Sean, my dear one. And I misled you – I’ve never seen a covering before, it’s not thought suitable for young Catholic virgins. And they’re right.’ Grania smiles, leans down and kisses the top of John’s head and trots out of the yard.

  16

  TESS IS COVERED for the second time on the following day, not out of necessity but because John wanted to be sure of seeing Grania again. He goes up to the Fort to hand over the eighty pounds to Charles.

  ‘Where’s this come from? They’ll be late enough foals.’

  ‘Two decent mares from Mannion’s. They don’t mind a late foal, they’re not for racing. Hunters is what they’re after. Mannion’s daughter brought the first mare over the day before yesterday.’

  ‘Saw her at the races. She’s a handsome girl, I’d say. I hear she’s about to get engaged to a lawyer in Maryborough. Did you see her at the dance in Kildare?’

  News travels fast in the County, thinks John.

  ‘I did. She was well escorted, but I had a dance.’

  ‘One dance is probably enough with Johnnie Mannion’s daughter. He was at Boland’s Mill during the Easter Rising, and then became the IRA’s battalion commander round here. Bought his farm off the Nugents only three years since; two hundred acres for three thousand pounds. Nugent told me he paid cash.’

  ‘Where did he get the money?’

  ‘I doubt he got it from dealing in cattle. Boasted in the Dáil that he’d robbed twelve Post Offices in a fortnight. He’s an out-and-out Shinner, hates the Treaty. He’d have burned the Fort down long ago if it wasn’t for Cis. By the by, shouldn’t it be a hundred?’

  ‘Ninety for the two. And she took a ten-pound luck-penny.’

  ‘That sounds like a Mannion.’

  John walks back to the cottage, his head full of Grania in the green dress, Grania’s luck-penny kiss, Grania in the hayloft, Grania kissing the top of his head. And of the lawyer from Maryborough.

  The next day he comes into the stallion yard after putting The Elector out in his paddock, and sees a short, heavy-set man leading Tess out of her box.


  ‘What are you up to with the mare?’

  ‘Up to? I’m from Mannion’s. I’ve been sent to collect her. McCarthy’s the name.’ He doesn’t hold out his hand.

  ‘Have you indeed? I know nothing about it.’

  ‘Well, you know now. I’ll be riding her back; I walked over with the bridle, but I’d like to borrow a saddle.’

  John is about to tell him to go to blazes, and then remembers the saddle will need to be collected.

  ‘I’ll find one in the tack room.’

  They go into the main yard, not speaking; McCarthy saddles the mare and rides her away.

  Two days later he rides over to Mannion’s in the morning to collect the saddle. When Grania comes to the front door John takes her by the shoulders and kisses her on the mouth. After a moment she pushes him away.

  ‘He’ll kill us both if he sees us carrying on – he’s only up in the long field, he’ll be back in a minute.’

  ‘Carrying on? Is that what we’ve been doing? It meant more to me than that, the dance and the hayloft.’

  The look on Grania’s face softens. ‘And to me. Take the saddle and be off with you before he comes back. Meet me at the Trafalgar Folly at around ten next Thursday. He’ll be away to the market at Maryborough all morning. And I dare say he has other business there.’

  She goes back into the house, hands over the saddle and looks around before giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. They’re making a bogey-man out of Mannion, he thinks. We’re both adults, we can choose what we do and who we see. It’s the twentieth century, not the eighteenth.

  John has ridden past the Folly but never been inside.

  ‘The Folly was built by my great-grandfather to mark the battle of Trafalgar,’ Charles tells him. ‘He was one of Nelson’s band of brothers, captained the Bellerophon, seventy-four guns, at Trafalgar. Lucky with the prize-money, spent most of it enlarging the estate and building the Folly. There was a story that he used it to entertain a woman from the village. We used to go there for picnics when we were young. Cis won’t go near the place, thinks it’s a house of ill repute.’

  John visits the Folly the day after returning with the saddle. Hidden away in a wooded dell, it has the feeling of a grand doll’s house, two rooms, one above the other, each a perfect twelve-foot cube, with a single-storey cube on each side linked to the main house by a four-foot-high wall. There is an external double staircase curving left and right up to a door on the first floor. Above the door is carved ‘TRAFALGAR 1805’ and on the linking walls are the names of the ships at the battle – Victory, Mars, Temeraire, Bellerophon, Ajax, Revenge... John reads the sonorous names out loud, stops when he realizes his mare is the only audience.

  The upstairs room is dry and bare, well lit on each side by two windows. John organizes a bunch of birch twigs into a makeshift broom, sweeps the floor into the fireplace, and lays and lights a fire. The wood burns quickly and there is a sudden roar as generations of rooks’ nests in the chimney catch fire. Alarmed, John runs outside, but the nests soon burn out, and there isn’t enough soot to set the chimney alight.

  The room below is almost as bare except for a collection of old cushions, badly holed by moths, left there by past picnickers. In one corner there is an iron water pump and a Belfast sink. After a few wheezes the pump yields up first brown and then clear water. John waits until the fire dies out, collects up more wood and re-lays it, and goes home well pleased with his work.

  On Thursday morning he is up early, takes The Elector out to his paddock, checks the mares and foals, and saddles up his own mare. He straps a tight roll of three blankets behind the saddle and rides over to the Folly, where he is sitting outside the first-floor front door, legs dangling, when Grania arrives. She ties up her horse and runs up the stairs to meet him; they hold each other in a long embrace.

  ‘Look what I’ve done,’ he says, leading her into the room. He has made a bed out of the cushions and blankets, put some honeysuckle in a white enamelled tin mug on the mantelpiece, and the fire is lit.

  She laughs. ‘You’ve been the busy one. And it’s clear what you have in mind. They say that one of the Burkes used the Folly to meet his fancy woman from the village. Is that what I am?’ dropping his hand suddenly. ‘Your fancy woman from the village?’

  ‘No, it is not. You’re my girl, you’re my only girl. I...’ And Grania silences him with a kiss before he can say any more.

  Later, when they are lying on the blankets and the cushions, John asks her about her father.

  ‘He’s IRA all right, and a hard man, a leader. He’s killed men, I’m sure, but so have most soldiers, and he wanted to see Ireland free. He doesn’t think we’ve got there yet. He hates the Oath, hates the Six Counties separated from us, doesn’t believe in the Free State, he’s a de Valera man. When I was at university in Dublin, he was on the run – he’d turn up unannounced every now and then, take some money and some food, and then be off again. I’d hoped all that was over. And now it’s Irishmen killing Irishmen.’

  ‘You were at Trinity?’

  ‘You should know by now Trinity’s not for us Papists, on pain of excommunication. I was at University College, Irish Literature.’

  ‘I’ve not read much, a bit of Swift and Yeats.’

  ‘That’s Anglo-Irish literature. I mean poetry and prose written in Gaelic. It’s an undiscovered world – you should visit it. Have you any Gaelic?’

  ‘A little. My mother was fluent.’

  ‘Good for her. It’s a wonderful language for poetry; it translates pretty well.’

  She looks steadily into John’s eyes, and says in a soft voice,

  I thought, O my love! you were so –

  As the moon is, or sun on a fountain

  And I thought after that you were snow,

  The bright snow on top of the mountain;

  And I thought after that, you were more

  Like God’s lamp shining to find me,

  Or the bright star of knowledge before,

  And the star of knowledge behind me.

  That’s from ‘The Love Songs of Connacht’. Douglas Hyde translated it; he’s a Prod, God help him. It’s even better in the original.’

  ‘It’s lovely. As the moon is, or sun on a fountain. It’s how I feel about you.’ He kisses her.

  ‘Is it indeed?’ Grania looks happy, jumps up, straightens her clothes and heads for the door.

  ‘Next Thursday?’ says John.

  ‘Next Thursday.’

  For John these stolen mornings are a source of anticipation for most of the week, delight for two or three hours, and a sharp sense of loss as he rides away.

  He finds a Dun Emer Press edition of The Love Songs of Connacht in a second-hand bookshop in Maryborough and gives it to Grania when they next meet at the Folly.

  ‘It’s in English and Irish,’ he says as he gives it to her, and she reads out the poem she had first recited in both languages.

  ‘You don’t have to choose,’ she tells him.

  Later he tells Grania about the murder of his mother and William, his fruitless search, the fire, the visit to Tomas in Kilmainham.

  ‘It’s a terrible story. I’m sorry about it, sorry for us all,’ Grania says, and holds him tight. ‘And Mannion would have done that sort of thing in his day.’

  ‘I thought I was a Kerry man, even after the killing and the fire. Right up to the day I left I thought we belonged there. I’d spent most of my life in Kerry. I knew every inch of the Drimnamore River. Tomas and I used to poach it with worms, although he used to say you can’t poach your own river, so what’s the fun in that? I knew all the bogs, knew when the snipe and the woodcock would be in. I could sail around Garinish Island and Rossdohan blindfolded.’

  He blows his nose hard.

  ‘I knew everyone in Drimnamore. We employed twenty-seven men and women on the estate – what’s become of them? What’s happening to the oyster beds? They’ll need to be ordering the spats from France now. Kerry’s such a beautiful
county, rain or shine – wild, big, not calm and contented like Queen’s County.’

  Grania gives him a little dig in the ribs.

  ‘I know, Queen’s County is better in many ways. The Famine here was bad enough, but it was far worse in the South-West. You pass roofless cabins every couple of miles along the Kerry roads. But you don’t have the mountains, the estuaries, the big waves of the Atlantic. One day we’ll go there together.’

  Grania doesn’t reply, kisses him instead.

  ‘Grania,’ says John, stroking her cheek. ‘It’s a great name. I love the sound of it.’

  ‘She was the daughter of Cormac mac Art, high king in Tara. You’re my Diarmuid.’ She kisses John again, and goes on, ‘Grania was promised by her father to Fionn, the leader of the Fianna, even though Fionn was far too old for her. So there’s a great feast in Tara before the wedding, and Grania, pale and silent, suddenly sees the handsome Diarmuid among the guests. She takes the loving cup to him, whispers, “My heart is filled with longing for you,” and lays a geis on him, a spell of obligation. Diarmuid has no choice but to go with her, even though he owes loyalty to Fionn. So that night while the guests are asleep they steal away. They are pursued for a year and a day by Fionn and his two hounds, Brann and Sgeolan, but Fionn never lays eyes on the lovers. After many narrow escapes Fionn and Cormac allow them to live in peace. They have four handsome sons.’

  ‘That’s a happy enough ending.’

  ‘But it’s not the ending. Fionn and a small band of the Fianna visit Diarmuid, and they decide to go hunting around Ben Bulben. Rash of Diarmuid, as another geis had been laid on him years before, forbidding him to hunt the boar. Perhaps he forgot. Anyhow, during the hunt Diarmuid kills a huge boar, but not before it gives him a terrible gash in the thigh. The boar is his half-brother, by the way. Fionn finds Diarmuid dying. Although he has the power of healing, his old resentment is still strong, so he returns with the healing water too late and Diarmuid dies. Years later, Grania’s hatred of Fionn fades away and she marries him and goes to live in Kildare.’