The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (14 page)

Berenice’s defence attracted Enda’s suspicion, and then her jealousy until she too declared that Mr Rainfleury might have his way with her hair at any time, even offering to take the places of less willing sisters like myself. Guiltily, I permitted Enda’s sacrifice. And this had the predictable result of rousing Berenice’s ire, to the extent that she plaited dried strands of goose doings into Enda’s hair one night while her twin lay sleeping, a thing that ended very badly with pulled ears and eyes near scrabbed out all round.

Once the contracts were signed, Mr Rainfleury was given the run of us. Oblivious to the twins’ feud, or perhaps secretly feeding on its drama, Mr Rainfleury took delight in sitting on a stool behind them so he could weave their hair together into a single plait as thick and muscular as an anaconda. Then he would unravel it slowly. From behind them, of course, he could see neither the grotesque faces his ‘poppets’ pulled at one another nor the eloquent gestures of their fingers.

Darcy, being of age, insisted on signing the contract on our behalf. Each doll would have its own debut night, for which Mr Rainfleury would be obliged to subsidise new costumes all round, and stand a hot rum punch for the customers.

Mr Rainfleury put forward an advance sum, enough for Darcy to pay a year’s rent on a Dublin townhouse of five lofty storeys, from where the Swiney Godivas would take the town’s many theatres by storm. She came back from Dublin full of our new home, which, she told us, was furnished, stuccoed, wallpapered, fanlighted and hung with swarthy oil paintings. It stood in Pembroke Street on the corner of rose-bricked Fitzwilliam Square. ‘It’s entirely grand and cosy at the same time,’ she boasted, ‘and but a quick trot from the La Touches’ Dublin mansion!’

We were to remove there on Midsummer’s Eve, leaving the slow crows and the Eileen O’Reilly far, far behind.

The thought of that separation drove me to seek out the Eileen O’Reilly. I did not want to leave with her hating me, and counting me no better than Darcy.

I followed her home from school, a respectful three yards behind her.

She stiffened her back, never once looking behind.

When she reached the butcher’s shop, she turned to fix me with her eyes.

‘It’s too late,’ she said. ‘I know ye’re taking your great selves off to Dublin Town. That’s nothing to me and less than nothing. But I’ll not be the poor little country mouse ye left behind to be sorry for and think of jest occasionally from time to time.’

‘It would not be like that,’ I protested.

‘And why wouldn’t it be? Are ye not Darcy Swiney’s true sister?’

Her voice tore on the last word.

She walked into the shop and slammed the door behind her so hard that it lifted the bloodied clumps of sawdust on the path and closed my eyes with pain.

Annora refused to come to Dublin with us. She had tried her pallid utmost to dissuade us from the enterprise.

She had never been to Dublin, and insisted that it was a city rife with evil ways and that she would not be exposed to its sin and stinks. ‘Indeed, I’m asking myself why should you girls be wanting to leave Harristown at all when we’re snug as in God’s pocket here? My feet are wet with tears that you are even thinking of it, Darcy. Not that it would stop you.’

‘It would not,’ agreed Darcy.

But Annora, her eyes more sunken and her teeth more prominent than ever, showed a rare spirit in refusing to countenance a move for herself. ‘I’ll be stopping peaceable here at home. I’ll be grand with a bit of griddle bread of an evening and Mrs Godlin to visit, awaiting on when you have a mind to come away home.’

I saw Ida open her mouth to say, ‘I’ll stay too,’ and Berenice putting her hand over it to spare Ida a slap.

‘What about us?’ Darcy turned on Annora. ‘What if we never come back?’

Never come back
, I thought. Was it not what I had wanted all this time? Yet when I had dreamed of leaving Harristown, it was not to leave Annora and be put under the protection of an oyster-mouthed Mr Rainfleury and reproduced in bisque-faced miniature.

Darcy demanded, ‘How will it look, seven young girls unchaperoned in Dublin while their heartless mother amuses herself at her country residence? And what will you do with yourself without us to tend to?’

Annora plunged her hands into a tubful of laundry and shook her head. ‘I’ll not be sleeping at night over you every day you’re gone, God love you.’

Darcy crooned, ‘Isn’t it the proud woman you’d be, strutting down Dame Street in silk with your seven daughters behind you?’

This last argument did not weigh greatly with Annora. She muttered stubbornly, ‘It’s myself wishes that none of you would ever go away.’

I stood beside her mutely, taking in her smell of soap and sadness. As it had when I was tiny, my hand crept towards hers, finding it in the warm water of the tub.

The tongue in Darcy’s mouth flickered. ‘Don’t be so soft, Manticory! If there’s a worse mother in Ireland, I won’t know where to look or ask for her.’

Fashionable magazines began to arrive for Darcy. She studied them by the light of the seashell lamp, practising gracious phrases. She turned down the corners of fat catalogues. Her black books were stacked in a fine new trunk.

On the day of our departure, with the carriage waiting outside, Darcy staged one last attempt on Annora’s resolve. ‘So you’re still content for your poor innocent daughters to wade barefoot and alone through the swirling rivers of Dublin sins and stinks, is it?’ asked Darcy, adding cruelly, ‘With our guardian angels weeping for our souls outside every evil door we motherless innocents might enter? You’re perfectly sure about that now?’

While wincing at Darcy’s crude blackmail, I hoped it might yet sway Annora to come with us.

Annora’s uncomprehending silence annoyed Darcy into a great cruelty. She hissed, ‘Not to mention that our friend Sin has made at least six visitations to Harristown, and indeed overnighted on each occasion at this very cottage.’

This was the first time Darcy had ever mentioned our supposedly various paternal provenance, and the reason for the whispers in the street behind us all our Harristown years.

‘So,’ Darcy continued, ‘sure it
is
better you stay here in Harristown and let
us
escape your moral contagion. And do not trouble your old conscience as to the practical matters. Rainfleury’s hired us a cook-housekeeper.’ She waved a dog-eared letter. ‘Mrs Hartigan’s character here says she is known for exercising a wholesome influence on those in her sphere.
She
shall mother us to perfection, and so much the worse for you.’

Far from being goaded by Darcy’s insults or the prospect of a maternal rival, Annora was defeated by both. She hung her head and stammered for a few moments without ever framing an actual word. Then she went to the ironing basket behind the kitchen table and handed Darcy seven new white pillowcases, each embroidered with one of our names in the red thread she used for mending petticoats. At the finality of this gift, I began to cry.

Darcy stopped her goings-on immediately. She reached into her reticule, pulling out a lozenge of impacted banknotes. She thrust them into Annora’s apron pocket. I thought she looked a tint sorry as she did it. She seemed to hesitate. For a scant moment it seemed she might even embrace our mother.

The moment was lost when a thin goose sighed loudly under the window and Ida piped up, ‘Sin and stinks! Sin and stinks! Dirty girls in Dublin! We’ll be famished for a bar of soap so! Don’t be worrying, Mam, we’ll do like St Ita and keep a stag beetle on our bellies to keep the men from ravening us! Except’ – she began to sob – ‘I mightn’t be fit.’

Darcy was required to resume full gladiatorial ferocity, pinning Ida to the table. Before any of us could intervene, she was yanking Ida’s plaits violently, shouting a word for each hard tug, ‘Why is all the sense on the outside of your head, girl?’

The seashell lamp above the table swung to and fro, set aquiver by Darcy’s hot breath. Pertilly lumbered between Darcy and Ida, and took Ida into her arms.

We filed outside, me wiping my eyes and Ida snivelling into Pertilly’s armpit and clutching the hearthbrush made of the latest Phiala’s wings. I glimpsed the Eileen O’Reilly hiding behind the woodpile, with something shining on her face. If Darcy had not been behind me, I would have waved to her.

Instead, I rushed back into the kitchen and swarmed all over Annora with a feverish hug to every limb. ‘I really didn’t think we’d go without you.’

She stroked my hair with her soap-rough hand and whispered, ‘Be gone with you, girl. Darcy’s right. I’m no good to you in your coming grandness. And ’tis you – of all of us – who needs to get away from Harristown, do you not? You’ll not be happy here again, Manticory.’

What does she know?
I wondered.
Did Darcy tell the troll against me to her too?

Annora tipped my chin up to look at me, and wiped away my tears with her apron. ‘I have a great job of work for you, Manticory. Write to me, will you? Will you do that same? Mrs Godlin will come read to me. A letter every now and sometimes would be a fine thing, and better than butter, may God ease me. A letter in my hand, that will be something to have a hold of. And I’ll know you were thinking of me when you wrote it and that will be a gift in itself.’

The Eileen O’Reilly threw stones after our departing carriage. She cried, ‘The curse of the crows upon Darcy Swiney! My heavy hathred on ye too!’

Darcy poked her head out of the window to retort, ‘The back of my hand and the sole of my foot to you, runt! I am better and far better than you shall ever be.’

I heard the sob in the Eileen O’Reilly’s parting shout. She blamed Darcy, I understood, for taking me away without our ever healing the hurts between us.

I would not humiliate her by witnessing her distress. I kept my eyes on the slow crows, wet with rain and glittering on the grass like the spilled beads of a rosary. But at the last minute, as the carriage passed her by, I turned and raised the little finger of my left hand at her, and she did the same to me.

I took Darcy’s slap almost with pleasure, because the Eileen O’Reilly saw that I took it for her.

When the carriage pulled up at Pembroke Street, Darcy had to bully us out of it into the lilac-scented air. We huddled with all the dignity of frightened chickens on the roadside until she hustled us up the steps of Number 1 and through the front door into a grand hallway. I was ashamed to put my foot on its flagstones, so clean were they in the bright sunlight. I caught sight of our stricken faces in a bevelled mirror. Annora’s absence was visible there too. The smell of burning peat gave a breath of comfort – I sucked deeply on it. Darcy introduced us to Mrs Hartigan, ‘our cook-housekeeper’. A middle-aged woman curtseyed primly, bewildering us into returning the courtesy, which caused her high, pale brow to furrow and Darcy’s fists to tighten. Ida dropped her fiddle case and sent a vase of cut flowers crashing to the floor.

Our first instinct was to scuttle down into the forgiving gloom of the basement. In a tumbling mass, everyone except Darcy dived for the stairs, with Mrs Hartigan calling out, ‘No, my ladies, you shall never need . . .’

We found ourselves in a kitchen bigger than our whole Harristown cottage, with a black range that seemed like a factory. Enda lifted up a wooden potato masher – even that was polished and patterned and carved from an expensive-looking wood. Pertilly sniffed inside the salt box. Ida touched the lid of something that resembled a copper coffin. ‘Do they boil babies in Dublin?’ she asked. ‘The babies here must smell dreadful like fish, though.’

We hurtled out of the kitchen in different directions. Down there in those dim catacombs of the house we discovered a large bedroom with a single bed, a larder with a rat-rack attached to the whitewashed ceiling, and a rabbit hanging from a hook, a wine store and other mysterious doors with monumental locks.

‘It’s that gloomy down here,’ said Ida dubiously. ‘I think I’ll go home now.’

Berenice shouted, ‘I’m sleeping in the real bed. I saw it first!’

Enda sent the potato masher flying at her head.

By that time Mrs Hartigan was behind us. She laid a gentle hand on Berenice’s shoulder, her face soft with understanding. ‘This is
my
room, my dear. That is my bed, and that is my darning mushroom for mending your stockings, and my irons for smoothing your clothes. You young ladies are to be accommodated on the floors above the parlour. Mr Rainfleury has it all arranged just so.’

Silent and ashamed, we followed her back up to the hall where Darcy glowered and pinched each of us as we passed her. Mrs Hartigan showed us the ground-floor dining room, led us up the stairs to the parlour and an adjoining ‘withdrawing’ room with two thrillingly tall and full bookshelves. We trudged behind her up two more storeys arranged into seven separate bedrooms, each with a flounced counterpane on the bed and a flowered ewer on a mirrored stand. There was a music room with its own Julius Blüthner upright pianoforte on which rested a formidable rosewood metronome. Mrs Hartigan described as our ‘bathroom’ a shiny white shrine populated by unfamiliar objects. Darcy muttered, ‘I’ll explain later,’ when Mrs Hartigan showed us the commode chairs and the mahogany bidet boxes by every bed. From each window there were glimpses of the rose-brick canyons of Fitzwilliam Square or the mews behind it, and our own vegetable garden and a coach house at the end. From the top floor, the Dublin Mountains could be seen hovering in the pale distance, not far from the clouds.