The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (36 page)

He set down his goblet and rubbed his hands in imitation. I looked away. He had succeeded in disgusting and frightening me.

I felt hatred towards all journalists in that moment, that they might prevent me from taking joy in what I had earned.

It came into my mind then, a new Swiney Godiva script about a sordid Grub Street hack who follows seven blameless sisters to Venice, seeks to bring them down with scandal. It is his especial pleasure to destroy their lives and their dreams. Aroused by the story he has invented in the darkness of his brain and the dirty fork of his groin, he pollutes Venice with his own lechery, persecuting a young hotel maid with his unwanted attentions. And therein lies his downfall.

After supper, I sat on the balcony to sketch out the tale in ballad form, distracted from time to time by the waves that swarmed like rabbits in a field below me and the songs of the gondoliers that reminded me of the slow crows in Harristown.

On my candlelit page, my villain met the picturesque, protracted death he deserved.

As I knew from former perambulations with Alexander, every dawn a great whale of a laundry boat came to the dog-legged
calle
that fed foot traffic from the Grand Canal to the street door of the Hotel Squisito in Cannaregio. The laundry boat arrived at six, loaded with clean sheets in bales as rotund as sheep. We’d often dawdled to watch the men – their vigour seemed almost health-giving. They disappeared down the
calle
bearing two or three sheep on their shoulders.

Shortly after, they returned, bearing even fatter sheep of used sheets, which they threw into the hollow bowels of the boat, sheep after sheep, until the boat was piled higher than a man standing on another’s shoulders. I remembered from the men’s chatter that the end of their rounds took them to Mestre, where the boat was unloaded. There laundresses soaped and rinsed and mangled. The afternoon sun emptied the damp out of the sheets and the women ironed into the night. By five in the morning, the bales of clean sheets were ready to return to Venice.

In my ballad, I wrote of the women’s strong arms and their lusty voices singing at their work. I wrote of one old laundress, called Annora, who crossed herself over every joyfully stained sheet. And I wrote of how the villainous journalist is asked by the hotel maid to meet him at dawn at the end of the
calle
where the men loaded the boat with heavy bales of soiled sheets. He arrives at the assignation, ready to pounce. But the canny Venetian girl lures him down to the mossy step. Slight as she is, there’s a hammer in her pocket and she knows how to cling to the rusted rope-ring on the wall when her pursuer loses his footing on the slick green moss and falls into the boat. Her white shawl quickly covers the unconscious villain, and she is lightfoot down the street before the men return with the bales of sheets that will cover and suffocate the man, as if a building or a tower had collapsed on top of him, as if Nature herself had intervened in meting out the rightful end of his story, making sure he was smothered by the soft pages of the linen.

It was the most vigorous writing I’d done since
The Cruel Sister
. The words flowed out of me like honey. There was dark humour, wit and poetry in my poetry again, at last.

A few hours later Darcy found me asleep by the Hansen mechanical writing hedgehog, with eighteen verses beside me.

‘What’s this?’ she demanded, casting her eye down the page.

‘No, nothing, just another ballad, something maybe for our show, should we ever . . .’

‘Oh really,’ drawled Darcy, turning to the second page. Her face tightened with surprise. She saw what had happened to my writing. But she quickly masked her surprise with disparagement. ‘The part for the dark-haired sister. How does it work? Where is it? Stop wasting paper. I’m sure it’s a sight of a price in Venice.’

‘And how are the lottery tickets?’ I asked. ‘Moderate in cost?’

In the middle of our second night Ida’s painted friar dropped out of his frame with an apocalyptic clap.

‘A small earthquake,’ we were told by a servant. ‘It happens in Venice.’

‘Not enough that the dreadful place floats – but it also shakes!’ growled Darcy.

Ida insisted the friar be covered with a nailed sheet thereafter, ‘to stop him coming to get me’.

Mr Rainfleury was gone the next day. Venice did not agree with him, he said. The pleading eyes of Berenice, and Enda’s searching looks, pleased him even less. We spent a month arranging our new, engorged doll’s house to our satisfaction, spending every last penny of our Venetian earnings on damasked linens, vases and ostentatious glass trinkets. Under the gushing chandelier, we dined on veal stewed with cherries, a bittersweet blackened chicory, liver the Venetian way. We were on nodding terms with the waiters at Florian, where we soaked our rolls in chocolate. Despite Darcy’s discouragement, I finished my script about the murderous bales of laundry, and smiled every time a boat laden with sheets passed us by.

I saw Alexander for whole quarter-hours at a time alone. He appeared at the
palazzo
regularly to sketch us for the bronze busts.

All too soon Mr Rainfleury called us home to Ireland.
The dolls need you back at work on their behalf. And there’s a stack of letters here from some mad chap with very poor handwriting
.

‘I’ll contrive a way to get to Dublin,’ Alexander promised me.

The last thing I packed away was my finished ballad, knowing that by writing a Venetian story, by doing what I did there, by doing it properly again, I had married the place in the only sense that marriage was possible for me.

In Dublin there awaited a frenetic programme of appearances in theatres, department stores and art exhibitions. Despite our tradeswomen’s labours, our insistent presence on the edge of Fitzwilliam Square gradually elevated us; we were now on nodding terms with our local lords and ladies. Eminences of the medical and legal profession also surrounded us in the square, and did not shun us. One of the glamorous Butcher girls, who had modelled for an Academy painting, waved to us in the street.

‘Don’t look so humble when she gives you good morning, Manticory! How is what she did so different from what we did with Signor Bon?’ demanded Darcy.

Do you really want me to tell you?
I wondered.
Would you really like to have the difference between art and vulgar commerce laid out for you? Do you truly want to know the difference between a Butcher and a Swiney? Between a gentle education and Tristan’s training academy? In short, between an aristocrat’s artistic daughter and a Harristown girl who sells her body parts?

Alexander wrote to say that he was detained in Venice by a lack of funds.
And it seems that in my efforts to be near you, I have foolishly painted Dublin Society to extinction. No one else needs a portrait
.

Darcy had refused to advance any more on the busts, and I had to acknowledge that there had been no progress of significance.

Oona sometimes spoke of having a ball, or a soirée, though we still lacked the outright confidence to pull it off. We played at being Quality, experimenting by giving alms to the beggars of Sackville Street, and buying sugar-candy and burnt almonds for the flower girls with their withered blooms, by being rude to the servants and condescending to tradesmen. And I, constantly reworking and refining my Venetian ballad, allowed myself to privately gloat about our secret palace in Venice, imagining the looks on people’s faces if they only knew.

Those delusions were quickly and violently extinguished.

Even if Darcy didn’t see the difference between Eleanor Butcher and a Swiney, the criminal classes of Dublin knew us surely for low-life dissemblers, and they did not wait long before launching an attack.

Chapter 32

Pertilly was assaulted on her way home from the central post office. She was nearly at our door when a masked man threw vinegar in her eyes and hit her on the side of the head with a knobbed cudgel. Then, as she swayed, he used her hair as a handle to drag her to the mews at the back of our house, where he kneeled on her back while he shaved her scalp with a curved dry razor, none too carefully. Pertilly told us afterwards that she lay there a while, her eyes pressed to the cobbles, her faltering hands cradling the back of her blood-smeared, denuded head. Then she crawled out to Pembroke Street and collapsed again at the sight of our grand front door, for she did not feel she had the right of entrance any more.

An elderly gentleman of the Royal Irish Constabulary found the bald Pertilly sobbing in the gutter. He dragged her into the house, her weight being too considerable to permit him a more heroic entrance. He laid her on the sofa in the dining room and took off his small cap and fanned her with it.

No one had missed her, but we came to her now, running down the stairs from our various bedrooms, our hair undressed and streaming behind us, providing all the more contrast for Pertilly’s naked poll. I smoothed her dress back down over the secret immensity of her knees, naked in a tumble of petticoats.

I let my sisters do the exclaiming and squealing while I called for Mrs Hartigan to bring hot water and clean rags and ran myself for the arnica and the smelling salts.

Poor Pertilly looks more like a nun than ever
, I thought, attending to her cuts.
She has gone away from us. She is alone
. I began to weep at Pertilly’s loneliness, and the thought of the violence she had just endured.
Would the man on Harristown Bridge have stolen my hair if he could?
I felt her fear, smelled it in the air. I tried to bury it by holding my arms around her and kissing her face as I wiped the blood from it.

The constable smiled indulgently at my sisters’ cries of murder, and calls for the military, telling us that our sister had suffered ‘a personal theft’.

‘Theft, you call it?’ Mr Rainfleury raised his voice too high. I had not known he was in the house. Then I realised that he had arrived on the scene with Berenice.

‘It was a great unkindness the scoundrel did her. But nature will replace what he has robbed,’ said the kindly constable, quite baffled at our hysteria. ‘Pray control your nerves. The poor girl is not dead, my dear sir and ladies. Nor is she seriously injured.’

He adjusted a button on his black livery, and smiled, happy to deliver reassuring news. ‘I suggest a drop of brandy for her, and maybe some laudanum.’

‘But her hair is dead!’ howled Ida. Oona and Enda joined her in all the luxurious abandon of fresh mourning.

‘Come, come!’ urged the policeman, giving Ida a worried look.

Mr Rainfleury added, ‘Sir, you have no comprehension. The girl has taken a body blow. Her dignity and status are assassinated.’

You mean
, I thought,
the Swiney Godiva Corporation has taken a body blow to one seventh of its profits. We’ll hardly be selling a great many bald ‘Miss Pertillys’
.

‘But you ladies’ – the policeman’s eye flickered around the room – ‘surely present an easy prey, so you do, with such a volume of hair to tempt one of them maddened hair-thieves. I must warn you that there are such men about. But . . . have I not seen you somewhere?’

Darcy suddenly collected her wits when the officer asked for our names to record the incident. ‘The Misses Harris,’ she told him. ‘Just visiting your fair city from County Cork. Clearly, some violent fit has come over a person of weak wits and our sister was the accidental victim. I agree with you, sir. Our sister’s in a fine way herself already, and will presently be up and dancing, I assure you. Let us not make a sorry incident into a tragedy. We’ll not be pressing for any extra attention from your good self who must be having a great many awful crimes to be solving outside this house. At this minute.’

She gave us warning looks, and briskly ushered the officer out.

‘If news gets out about Pertilly, the Swiney Godivas are dead,’ she told us flatly when she returned. ‘Now you see the secret object of that pretender, Phelan Swiney. Enda – I know you are still romancing about him. But my guess is he dangled fatherhood and money in front of us, just to get close to our hair. And now you see the result.’

‘Yes,’ said Berenice, ‘
now
we see the result, Enda.’

‘How can you say that Phelan Swiney did this?’ asked Enda. ‘How?’

Mr Rainfleury shook Darcy’s hand. ‘Admirable presence of mind in your statement to the constable! As for the so-called Phelan Swiney character, I had not thought him so dangerous . . .’ He strode out of the room muttering, ‘And the bookings solid for six months.’

‘But what about Pertilly?’ I cried. ‘She’s—’

I was talking to a slammed door.

After the doctor left, having tranquillised her with laudanum, we filed into Pertilly’s bedroom. She sat upright, her eyes lustrous but blank. Her right hand constantly quested towards her phantom hair, recoiling at its lack. We clustered around the bed in silence. Her plain skull was unexpectedly beautiful and delicate. It was shapely. Yet there was something obscene about its baby nature. Without her hair to guard her, it was indecent for twenty-two-year-old Pertilly to display her naked originary self.

‘Hide it!’ said Darcy in disgust. And Berenice rattled in the drawers for a night-cap, which she crammed over Pertilly’s dulled head. Pertilly smiled, swayed and fell back on the pillows with a sudden snore.