The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (16 page)

On our second Sunday Ida interrupted our singing with a cry. ‘He moved! Something twitched under that loincloth there!’

The worshippers around us drew in their breath and expelled it in a hiss of disapproval.

‘You should not have been staring at that part of him!’ said Darcy, who rarely lifted her eyes from it. ‘And you not yet twelve, you scrattock.’

Ida was hurried out by two tutting nuns. We followed, our heads cast down, trying not to hear the whispers of the women in the congregation. Even the priest stopped in his sermon to stare us out of the nave.

It was some weeks before we dared to show our faces at St Teresa’s again.

Instead, we enjoyed some pagan Sabbaths for ourselves. Our carriage took us to Black Rock south of Dublin Bay where we made squealing use of the bathing machines. We visited the museums in Leinster House. At the Hibernian Museum we inspected the entire Fossil Elk found in County Limerick half a century past.

Dublin’s map imprinted itself on our minds, though it was never possible, for a solitary minute, to conceive that the stern Liffey pulsing greyly through the heart of Dublin was the same dappled stream that flowed under Harristown Bridge. We tried to get used to the equestrian statue of William, and not to be intimidated by the porticoed grandeur of the post office or the mêlée that was Carlisle Bridge.

There was no respite from grandeur at home either. We struggled to accustom ourselves to the high ceilings of the rooms at Pembroke Street, and to the white tiles in the bathroom with the black grouting glowering between their shiny purities. The chortling of the water pipes brought on a fit in Ida, as did the wet tumbling of the water closet.

After reading accounts of Society suppers in the papers, Darcy tortured Mrs Hartigan with demands for mutton cutlets with macaroni, roast turkey, barnacle goose and seakale, boiled rumps of beef, snipe, apple puddings, orange jelly and pigeon pie. She ordered raisins and almonds, which were kept locked in a box in our withdrawing room to, which only Darcy had the key.

We tried not to look frightened whenever our doorbell chimed with a new delivery: we were now accomplished shoppers, Darcy the most acquisitive of all. In our first month at Pembroke Street she acquired fourteen pairs of pointed boots and a terrifying new crocodile-skin reticule with the traces of a grinning reptilian jaw and a hooded eye on each side.

‘I was exceptionally astute in a certain private business this week,’ she told us, demonstrating the fearsome object. ‘I deserved a little something extra. With all I put up with, all I do to make sure the rest of you are swimming in luxuries . . .’

‘What private business?’ asked Oona.

Ida commenced to gallop around the room beating her thigh like a jockey on a horse, until Darcy caught her and slapped her ear, sputtering, ‘Be sitting down for yourself, you bold-behaved torment!’

She turned to the rest of us. ‘Ida is really not up to herself today.’

A day rarely passed without my taking a book down to leafy Fitzwilliam Square to read. I was homesick for my hiding places in Harristown, the sweet clover where I used to lie full-length in front of a volume of poems. Perching decorously on a cold bench, I could never arrange my limbs with that same happy abandonment. I missed dipping my mouth in the stream for the taste of living liquid. In Dublin, our water was delivered to a great coffin of a tank and piped into the house. I missed the solid blackness of the Harristown night – in Fitzwilliam Square, even a moonless midnight was muddied by gaslight. I missed Annora’s low voice keening for the goose Phiala in the softness of the evening. The Eileen O’Reilly’s face floated into my mind often. I pictured her grimy finger on the page of the primer, and I wondered if she had continued with her studies. Perhaps, now that she could read, her father had taken her out of school to work in his shop, as he had sometimes threatened. I imagined her there, standing in the blood-soaked sawdust, frowning over an account. I never stopped missing the slow crows. Neither did Ida, I realised, when I saw her gazing sadly at a dusty blackbird as she practised on her fiddle by the window. Instead we had to make do with the wheeling, screaming Dublin gulls, their beaks dripping with pink and grey intestines they had ripped from some living creature. There was no sad music to those birds – only the sound of murder and the strident stinks of fish and salt.

I wrote of these things to Annora, on brown kitchen paper, by way of telling her that I missed her too.

It was a great day when the first entire dolls finally appeared. The time was set at just before tea on a rainy afternoon in December, with the house already got up in its Christmas finery and a pile of wrapped and ribboned gifts under the tree.

Mr Rainfleury had announced that he would make a ceremony of delivering each doll in person to her original. He also insisted that each sister should meet her own doll privately.

‘And you should each have a little minute or two alone with the creature, to get used to her,’ he explained. ‘Then you may present her to your sisters. Trust me, this will be the best manner of proceeding.’

Now that each of us had our own bedroom, Darcy saw no problem with indulging Mr Rainfleury on this point. ‘Let the old man have his way,’ she said dismissively.

‘Not an old man!’ protested Berenice and Enda in one voice, and then glared at each other.

When we heard the doorbell chime at five, we obediently repaired to our separate rooms, as arranged. As we paced silently up the stairs in time to the beating rain, there was a febrile atmosphere churning, as if a wild game of hide-and-seek was in progress, with breathless ghosts concealed in every wardrobe and under the armpit of each gable. The smell of luncheon’s boiled tongue and greens hung heavily in the air. I noted all my sisters’ smiling, eager faces. Dolls, my sisters seemed to think, were light-hearted creatures and there must be merriment in their first coming among us. It appeared that I was the only one to nurse any apprehensions about Mr Rainfleury’s creations.

I listened at my keyhole as our patron was admitted by Mrs Hartigan. She exclaimed loudly at the sizes of the packages he had brought. She knew about the ceremony, of course. The dolls were to be presented in order of our ages, oldest first. Soon I heard the housekeeper conducting Mr Rainfleury up the stairs towards Darcy’s room next to mine on the second floor.

That was never going to be an entirely pleasant encounter. Darcy’s displeasure grumbled through the walls in fragments of ‘Never!’ and ‘So much the worse for you . . .’ and ‘I’ll break your head for you if you—’ ‘Black book—’

Then it was the third floor – Berenice’s turn, and back down the steps for a lingering visit to Enda’s room across the corridor from my own. Listening at the wall, I heard a sound that resembled the purring of a cat. With everyone except Berenice, I thought anxiously, sweet Enda was too kind for her own good. I worried about how kind she was being to Mr Rainfleury, for I guessed he would lap up any amount of kindness, and then ask for some more in that tranquil steely way of his.

At last came Mr Rainfleury’s tap on my own door. As ever, it was too light, too tentative.

It should not have made me start or shiver or blanch, or screw up my face. But it did all those things, and more.

Chapter 14

My little likeness arrived in a pink cardboard box, fastened with a black ribbon, which Mr Rainfleury untied for me, kneeling at my feet. He cautioned me to stay in my chair as, ‘The excitement of meeting “Miss Manticory” may be too much for you, my dear.’

‘Doubtless,’ I scowled. ‘How my heart beats!’

‘Sarcasm does not become a young lady,’ he told me indulgently.

He pulled the doll gently from her box and set her on an occasional table in front of me. Her red hair almost covered her face, cascading over her shoulders past her waist and down towards her boots. The hair was burnished like Sicilian citrus where the light found it. A burnt purple brooded in the shadows of its curls.

‘It is my hair,’ I admitted. ‘I mean, very like.’

Mr Rainfleury reached through the canopy of curls and waggled her right hand at me in a coy wave. Then he rustled in the box and placed a miniature comb and hair-receiver in my unwilling lap.

‘You may touch!’ he urged. ‘Do!’

I parted the curls that curtained her face and peered into her eyes. Her hair thrummed silkily in the pinch of my fingers. I wondered how much of it was human, how much horse, but Darcy had forbidden me to raise that question any more. Mr Rainfleury would not retract his account of ‘artificial hair of spun silk and the essences of rare plants’.

Miss Manticory was undeniably like me, just shrunk to thirty inches tall, thereby refining every detail of my own appearance. I had no reason to be surprised by the doll’s accuracy. I had sat for her portrait in a series of photographs showing every angle of my face. I had submitted to the dyers, offering four separate samples before Mr Rainfleury judged that the doll hair conformed to my colour. ‘Miss Manticory’ carried a mesh purse like the one I favoured. Her complexion had been painted and refired until it was an exact match to my own.

Her dress, like the hideous stage one also just made for me, was in silk trimmed with lace and muslin. The bodice in solferino crimson was lined with cotton, again with a lace trim. She wore a diaphanous pinafore, three silk petticoats, circular-striped wool stockings and Balmoral boots. A bow sat at a jaunty angle in her hair, sewed right into her scalp. To complete her rig-out, around her neck hung a tiny silver locket on a velvet ribbon, just like mine.

The green glass eyes were also mine in shape and angle, though exaggerated in size in proportion to the face and placed centrally, like a child’s. Mr Rainfleury confided that the eyelashes were the only items of real hair. I imagined young girls, screaming, being held down, while their eyelashes were plucked from their lids with long tweezers.

‘Such a beautiful, rich red,’ he crooned, lifting one of Miss Manticory’s curls. ‘Royal red. Did you know that peasants were once forbidden to wear it? It was too good for them! Too fierce, perhaps. The colour is sacred to Mars, god of war. A colour so potent that our ancestors believed that it could ward off illness and witches—’

I was not listening, instead wondering what stories Mr Rainfleury had prepared for my sisters, to ease their acquaintance with their dolls, with what legends he’d flatter them, how he’d assure them of their primacy, soothe them with pretty anecdotes, whatever was needed to force them to accommodate these glass-eyed graven images without screaming. Although ‘Miss Manticory’ stood still as a stone in front of me, I myself felt as if I had been run at by a mad bull. My breath came faster. Mr Rainfleury noticed.

‘This is another effect of the power of red. It makes the pupils dilate too.’

‘It is not the red,’ I said slowly. ‘It is the theft.’

‘No, no, no, no, no,’ he protested, understanding me perfectly.

Mr Rainfleury had stolen more than my likeness. The idea of me was presently to be put for sale, in a pink cardboard box with a black bow. Darcy had sold us Swineys into a dirty kind of trade. She had whored us – Darcy, who tongue-scourged poor Annora for her fleshly sins. Annora had compromised only her own soul and reputation in the eyes of Harristown. Darcy had prostituted seven virgins. Anyone might put their money down and have a handle of us, with nothing to fetter their pretty-fingering or their imaginings. Anyone – even gentlemen collectors! – might tip up our skirts and examine our pantalets, or sleep with us in their beds.

When he saw the glitter in my eyes, Mr Rainfleury chose to believe that I still worried for the poor girls shorn to bedeck ‘Miss Manticory’s’ bisque pate. He’d heard enough of my fulminations on the hair trade on his various visits. He soothed, ‘There, there, my dear, it’s fine as fine. You
know
I would not dabble in the human hair trade. How often must I tell you? This is my patent silk and gum
imitation
hair. But, my dear, really it does not do to be so intemperate about the hair trade, a transaction that does not harm the . . . er . . . donors. Those girls in Paris are queuing up to sell their hair – they do it for the relief of the thing, I assure you. For it’s well known that in the weaker-minded a head of heavy hair can actually lead to madness or debauchery. It’s a great ease to those unfortunate girls to shed it.’

‘The Swiney Godivas are all finely suited as to wits,’ I retorted. ‘Yet you’ll seldom see heavier heads of hair.’

Even as I said it, however, I thought of Ida, who was not quite what she should be. But was that because of her hair? She was the last born, and after her it seemed that Annora’s fertility had finally been extinguished. Perhaps, by the time Ida was conceived, Annora had not had within her all that was needed to produce one more entire and intellectually wholesome infant. Then I remembered the grave in the clover field at Harristown – the death of
PS
was the most likely reason for the lack of any further sisters.

Mr Rainfleury rose, consulting his fob-watch. ‘I have other stork duties to perform. I must not keep your dear sisters waiting too long, particularly Ida, who’s as giddy as a water sheerie.’

So he too had been thinking of her, when he spoke of madness.

Then, perversely, I did not want him to leave. Not because I craved his company but because I did not wish to be left alone with ‘Miss Manticory’. I moved a step away from her, but that took me closer to Mr Rainfleury, dangerously within reach of his fluttering hand. So I bid him a tense good afternoon. Confused and ashamed, I even thanked him with a doll-like curtsey.