Dorothy Eden
Authors: Never Call It Loving
The Immortal Love Story of Kitty O’Shea and Charles Parnell
Dorothy Eden
To another Irishman
Dorothy Eden on
Never Call It Loving
W
HEN KATHARINE TWICE CHANGED
her mind about the dress she would wear for dinner that night, Lucy lost her patience and spoke with the familiarity of long service, her voice tart with disapproval.
“Really, Miss Katharine, anyone would think you were entertaining royalty.”
“I suppose in a way I am, Lucy. I believe that Mr. Parnell is called the uncrowned king of Ireland.”
“Well, if he hasn’t yet got his crown he won’t object to your old blue silk.”
“That’s the trouble,” Katharine fretted. “It is old. It’s quite two years out of fashion.”
“You haven’t minded before. You’ve said you don’t need new gowns, buried in the country. It’s not as if the Captain likes to see his wife getting shabby.”
Katharine gave a small shrug, dismissing that argument. Willie hadn’t noticed for a long time what she wore, and Lucy knew that well enough, if age hadn’t dimmed her faculties too much. But the old creature had always been stubbornly devoted to Willie, and wasn’t likely now to admit that there was anything in him to criticise.
“Anyway, from what I’ve heard,” Lucy went on, “you won’t care for Mr. Parnell. They say he’s a dour sort of a man.”
“Where have you heard that, Lucy?” Katharine asked in amusement. “Who have you been gossiping with?”
“I read the newspapers, Miss Katharine. Especially since the Captain went into politics. And a fine lot of braggarts that Irish party seems to be. Always trying to upset poor Mr. Gladstone. It’s a good thing they’ll have the Captain to teach them manners. Now then, which dress am I to pack?”
“The brown velvet, I think, and I’ll wear my topaz brooch. You’re quite right, Lucy. I don’t want to be dressed up for Mr. Parnell. He works so much with the poor that I don’t believe it would be in good taste to look richly dressed.”
“But you do pay for dressing, Miss Katharine,” Lucy said wistfully.
Katharine smiled, half in amusement, half sadly.
“What, and me over the thirty and with three children! Besides I had enough of that when Willie bought me clothes he couldn’t afford. And don’t pretend you don’t remember.”
Lucy chose to ignore that and asked: “Who is to be at this grand dinner party?”
“Only a few friends. Willie and I decided not to have too many on this first occasion. The O’Gorman Mahon, of course. It was his idea. Colonel Colthurst, Colonel Nolan, Justin McCarthy. And Mr. Parnell, if he comes.”
Lucy looked up, the half-folded gown in her arms.
“You mean you don’t even know for sure if he’s coming?”
Katharine fastened the topaz brooch in the lace at her throat, regarding it critically, then took it off and handed it to Lucy to pack.
“Mr. Parnell is an unknown quantity, Lucy, as you yourself seem to know. Perhaps he does need to be taught manners, because he hasn’t answered my invitation. But I’m sure that was merely an oversight. He’s a very busy man. He’ll be there. After all, Willie and I are giving this dinner for him.”
Why should she be so anxious to look well for a man she had never met, dressing up her over-thirty charms for him? Especially since she didn’t even know if he would come. He was becoming one of the most talked-of men in the Government, and already, although he was so young, was a brilliant Parliamentarian. Yet no one seemed to know what he was like as a man. He was elusive, anti-social, an enigma. Charles Stewart Parnell. Born in Ireland thirty-four years ago; growing up at the same time as she was, he at Avondale in County Wicklow, she at Rivenhall, in Essex.
She slipped into a dream, thinking that now Rivenhall seemed like a place where it had always been summer. The swing under the yew tree, the strutting bad-tempered peacock, the white dresses of herself and her sisters sprouting like mushrooms when they had a picnic on the lawn, Lucy in her immaculately starched cap and apron coming out in the summer dusk to call that it was bedtime, the sky yellow and the trees black and the air full of the scent of roses.
Although summer had stopped the year that Papa had died. The year that Captain O’Shea, the dashing young Irish Captain in the 18th Hussars, had come courting.
He had scarcely waited for her father to be buried before wanting her to marry him. He was good-looking, charming, witty, and the best horseman in his regiment. His mother and his sister Mary were his remaining family. Although the O’Sheas were Catholics, and Katharine’s father, Sir John Page Wood, had been an Anglican clergyman and Royal chaplain, none of Katharine’s sisters and brothers, or her mother who had also had royal connections—she had been a Lady of the Bedchamber—had thought Captain O’Shea’s religion an obstacle. Dear Katharine did not need to embrace the Catholic faith. She merely had to promise to bring up her children in it.
Dazed by her beloved father’s death, she was the youngest of thirteen children and her father’s favourite, Katharine had been so thankful for Willie’s kindness, comfort and generosity that she had failed to distinguish between gratitude and love. She had been very young, only eighteen. But she had soon enough begun to grow older when she had discovered Willie’s own immaturity, the recurring financial crises that seemed to be a permanent part of his life, the tendency he shared with a great many of his countrymen to drink too much and rely too much on his charm and wit, and, most trying of all, his quarrelsome nature. She had been completely mature by the time her third baby was born, and when it, too, had been taken by Willie and his mother, a frail old lady wrapped in exquisite Cashmere shawls and piety, to be baptised with great ceremony in the Brompton Oratory. This time she refused even to go inside the church, but stood outside, a lonely woman in her fashionable clothes, watching the pigeons wheeling and strutting, waiting for her children to be returned to her.
She had heard that Charles Parnell was a Protestant. He must be a remarkable man to have succeeded in becoming such a power in a Catholic country.
It was only recently, however, that Katharine had become aware of his existence. Although always interested in political affairs (her father had encouraged her to have a social conscience, and her uncle, Lord Hatherley, who had been made Lord Chancellor now that Mr. Gladstone’s Government was back in power, frequently invited Willie and her to dinner parties), she had not followed the Irish question with deep interest until Willie himself had decided to begin a serious career at last and had stood for election at County Clare.
She knew that the Irish party had been leaderless since Mr. Isaac Butt’s death, and that Charles Stewart Parnell had recently been elected in his place. Mr. Parnell had been Mr. Butt’s protégé, and the old man, who with his amiable affable manners had been as popular as an Irish politician could be with the English, had written of him some years ago, “We have got a splendid recruit, an historic name, young Parnell of Wicklow, and unless I am mistaken the Saxon will find him an ugly customer though he is a good-looking fellow.”
Since then young Mr. Parnell had created a new slogan which he called the three “F’s”, fixity of tenure, fair rents and free sale of the tenants’ interests, and had passionately supported Michael Davitt’s Land League, an organisation formed to protect tenants against unfair landlords. The English hated the Land League, the Queen who had no patience with her Irish subjects, called it “that monstrous land league”, and Willie complained that it was becoming positively dangerous to be a landlord in benighted Ireland. The Land Leaguers were getting out of hand, burning down a landlord’s house and asking him questions afterwards, driving off his livestock, setting fire to his haystacks. They did everything, Willie said bitterly, except put poison in the poor fellow’s tea.
Anna Parnell, Charles’ sister, had made herself notorious by forming a Ladies’ Land League, and by writing inflammable seditious articles, but she was an hysterical unbalanced creature. Her brother was another matter altogether.
At least that was what The O’Gorman Mahon had said when he had accompanied Willie to Eltham after Willie’s successful campaign in County Clare.
The two of them, flushed with success, filled the house with noise and laughter. Katharine had never seen an Irishman so much larger than life than The O’Gorman Mahon. Tall, white-haired with a handsome craggy scarred face and a torrent of picturesque language, he had been a famous duellist and soldier of fortune, friend of kings and emperors. In his old age he had turned to the comparatively milder amusement of Irish politics.
He and Willie boasted that they had kissed every girl in Clare and drunk with every man.
“And your poor husband, Mrs. O’Shea, detests Irish whisky. But he drank it like a man.”
“And admired every baby in every filthy cabin from Clare to Limerick,” Willie put in, wrinkling his nose distastefully. “What with the babies and the latest litter of the pig, I couldn’t tell which was which.”
The O’Gorman Mahon roared with his tempestuous laughter.
“Faith, and they thought Willie too finely dressed to be a true Irishman. But his kisses brought them round.”
“I’ll strive to bring a little sartorial decency to the Irish party if I do nothing else,” said Willie. “And I’ll make a bet that that has more effect in the House than all Parnell’s eloquence. Let the English know that some of us are civilised.”
“Ye’d be more than civilised, if you’d do something for Parnell. They tell me his begging expedition to America has nearly finished him.”
“How do you mean?” For the first time Katherine spoke.
“He suffers from a delicate constitution, but never mention it to him. He’s an aloof reserved creature and gets hostile if his health’s mentioned. He’s got no woman to take care of him, poor fellow. That might be something you could do, Mrs. O’Shea.”
“Me?”
“For the sake of the party, woman,” said Mr. Mahon, drinking deeply, and indicating that he would like his glass refilled. “He’s got a powerful following and we just might whip the English with him. Isn’t that so, Willie?”
Willie might want to shine in politics, but he had no desire to quarrel with his sophisticated English friends. Ever since his army days, where he had incurred debts amounting to fifteen thousand pounds which had nearly bankrupted his father, he had had a love of social life. He had always sought friends who were influential and rich, although in living up to them he had several times reduced his wife and children to penury.
Katharine had been unhappily aware for a long time that Willie cared more about the cut of his suit, and that she should be expensively gowned as befitted his wife (who was, after all, only an extension of himself), than that they had a permanent home and he some useful position in life. That was why she had been so pleased when he had decided to take up politics.
But already he was in a dilemma because he didn’t want to offend his sophisticated English friends by taking up the unpopular and boorish Mr. Parnell. Nevertheless, he didn’t want to offend The O’Gorman Mahon either, for with his colourful and overwhelming personality, all doors opened to him.
He compromised by saying that he and Kate would give a dinner party in London and ask Mr. Parnell, but he was quite sure the fellow would not come.