Dorothy Eden (42 page)

However, it happened that I made several visits to Ireland, and became deeply interested in its history, beginning to see it as the poets did, this dark sad quiet country with its ruins of old castles, its ballads, and its voluble people, especially the now ageing patriots with their obsessive love for their country. To them, ironically, Ireland’s freedom has been its death—or the death of the old vital quarrelsome poetic tragic land. It has no enemy any longer, it no longer demands martyrs, so life has become flat, dull and commercial.

But I caught something of the patriots’ dream, and that was the beginning of my book. The next step was even more significant. I came upon Katharine O’Shea’s memoirs which I hadn’t known existed.

Katharine has told her story guardedly, with a great deal left out. It has been suggested by other historians that this book was written with her son, Gerard O’Shea, holding her back from too many admissions. So one has to read between the lines.

From the moment of reading that book the missing and vital information became brilliantly clear to me, and I knew that the story must be written again, this time in full.

Perhaps I have misinterpreted, perhaps in some incidents I am wrong, but I have the strongest feeling that I have scarcely erred, that poor unhappy Katharine has been at my shoulder all the time.

And I am sure the brown-bearded gentleman who followed me into the library one day was Mr. Parnell himself. And when I went to Somerset House to find Aunt Ben’s will, and saw on the old parchment the signature of Anna Maria Wood and the unformed hands of the servant witnesses, I had the strangest feeling of looking into a dusty grave.

Yet there is very little visible evidence left in England of Parnell’s or Katharine’s existence. Eltham is now a busy suburb of London, the house in Brighton where Parnell died has been pulled down and a block of flats built in its place, Thomas’s Hotel in Berkeley Square has long since gone. So has the Westminster Palace Hotel and the Ladies’ Gallery in the Houses of Parliament. Only the soot-grimed Victorian railway stations where the two so often met remain practically unchanged. Even the National Portrait Gallery has put the portrait of Parnell (which should hang in the room where Queen Victoria is surrounded by her ministers) in the basement.

In the end, perhaps Katharine’s greatest grief was that Parnell was taken to Ireland for burial. She never went to see his grave in Glasnevin cemetery, the place that is famous for its graves of Irish patriots. The last bones to be interred there were those of Sir Roger Casement, recently removed from a prison yard.

Katharine wrote that she heard Parnell’s grave was untended, with grass growing over it, and that she would have looked after it lovingly if it had been in England. Thirty years after Parnell’s death, when she herself lay dying, looked after by her faithful daughter Norah, she called constantly for her lover. “It was Parnell, Parnell, Parnell, all the time,” Norah wrote in a letter to one of Parnell’s last loyal supporters.

Katharine is buried at Littlehampton, and Norah lies beside her.

I think one of the most eerie experiences of the researcher is reading about one’s subject in old newspapers, facts written down as the news happened, and unaffected by the hindsight of history. Old storms in the Houses of Parliament, old outrages perpetrated in small towns or villages in County Cork, County Limerick, County Kildare, eloquence and tears and violence of long ago.
The Times,
the English Bible of those days, had a long column headed “Ireland” every day. No other of Britain’s widespread colonies had a tenth of the space given to small unruly Ireland. When the commission sat on the enquiry into the Pigott forged letters and the Land League whole pages were devoted day after day to reporting evidence. The O’Shea divorce case occupied several columns for two days. Then the comments, the criticisms and arguments went on for weeks. Charles Stewart Parnell must have been a godsend to English journalists.

But it all came to an end. And one of the saddest ends that could possibly be written. I put off writing it for days, then wrote it in one long session and could not alter a word afterwards.

Perhaps I have been too kind to the lovers. This, I do not know. I wrote only as intuition told me. And anyway, why not be kind? Their debt to society, if they owed one, has been paid long ago.

Dorothy Eden (1912–1982) was the internationally acclaimed author of more than forty bestselling gothic, romantic suspense, and historical novels. Born in New Zealand, where she attended school and worked as a legal secretary, she moved to London in 1954 and continued to write prolifically. Eden’s novels are known for their suspenseful, spellbinding plots, finely drawn characters, authentic historical detail, and often a hint of spookiness. Her novel of pioneer life in Australia,
The Vines of Yarrabee
, spent four months on the
New York Times
bestseller list. Her gothic historical novels
Ravenscroft
,
Darkwater
, and
Winterwood
are considered by critics and readers alike to be classics of the genre.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1966 by Dorothy Eden

Cover design by Connie Gabbert

978-1-4804-2973-4

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