Tipperary (25 page)

The farmhouses in England's West Country seemed appealing and secure. Across undulating land, we glimpsed distant church spires, on a day of great sunshine and a clear blue sky. After a train luncheon of less than moderately good food (it stuck to the roof of the mouth), we alighted at the town of Yeovil.

His childhood home, Mr. Burke told me, lay between Yeovil and Bath, near the village of Doulting. A hackney car took us there, and we found an excellent inn where we guaranteed rooms for the night. I longed to ask him whether he had told his daughter of our excursion, but I decided to wait until dinner and a glass of Madeira.

The Brook House lay in a small valley, where the summer seemed more intense than anywhere else. A long building, it had a stone doorway to the street, and a lengthy blank facade with two windows—sparse appointments in such a building.

“The house's greater life faces the garden,” Mr. Burke told me.

We opened the latch on a green wooden door under the arches of branches, and there, some ninety feet long, stretched a beautiful terrace of paving-stones. As we entered, the garden came in view to our right— sloping lawns filled with yellow and white blossoming trees, and deep, wide beds of flowers in their glorious summer colors.

“I have not been here since I was twenty,” Mr. Burke said, but when we knocked at the door, he immediately recognized the old lady who answered. She knew him too, and professed herself delighted—but with my experience of calling upon people in their homes, I thought her wary. We did not enter; she led us to a bower with garden seats and an air of peace and pleasantness, and she rang a bell that hung from a branch. A gentleman appeared, a truculent man; “Harris!” cried Mr. Burke.

“Oh? Hullo,” said the worthy, and never uttered another word. He brought us lemonade and sat with Miss Gambon, for that was her name. And she, as I soon found, had been the person who raised Mr. Burke!

After much talk of neighbors and memories, of childhood escapades and great feats of the weather, Mr. Burke, in his charming way, declared, “Now, Mater, we are here on a mission. Tell me, do you know anything of a Great House in Ireland? Of which you gave me a drawing when I was very young?”—and he pulled it from the leather attaché case he had carried with him. I had set myself to watch rather than speak, and I know that Miss Gambon recoiled and looked at him with some malice. She concealed it cleverly—but she knew that I saw it. Then she answered:

“I don't know. Somewhere in the past, I feel, we did have an Irish relation.”

Mr. Burke pressed on: “I have never visited my mother's grave.” Had I not had such a good impression of him, I might have believed that he was taunting her.

“Oh, but do you not recall? She was buried at sea, on her return from Spain.”

“What?” he said. “Was I born at sea?”

She had the air of someone grasping at a straw of hope—and she had been bewildered by this thunderbolt into her life from such a clear blue sky.

“Oh, yes, at sea, yes.”

“But is not my birth registered here at Bristol?”

“That is where the law required,” she said. “It had to do with the place in which the infant would reside. And—” Here she stuttered a little. “Also. The ship—it had sailed out of Bristol port.” (I was mindful of Mother's remark that “a lie needs two legs.”)

Mr. Burke believed her, but I did not. I studied her—and she saw that I studied her. Although she wore excellent fabrics, she had nothing of Mr. Burke's looks; indeed, she seemed coarse to have reared such an elegant man, and I came to the conclusion that nothing in this story might be what it seemed. I also concluded that we should not get at much truth in this garden at this moment.

In a short time, she terminated the encounter, saying, “You must forgive me. I tire easily these days; I never leave the house anymore.”

Mr. Burke and I took our leave of her. In the lane outside the house, he said that he wanted to show me his “haunts,” and we walked up to a hill from which we could look out over a wide swath of the countryside.

“The locals told me that on a clear day I should glimpse the sea from here,” he said, “but on a clear day, we always seem to have a haze that obscures our chance. I find that to resemble Life itself.”

And as he laughed, I wondered whether he had begun to ask himself questions about the obfuscations that might have been his lot.

That night, in the inn they call the Pilgrim, the landlord required that each of us sign the Visitors' Book and gave us a workman's supper of beef, potatoes, and ale. Mr. Burke and I discussed the day's proceedings. He saw nothing untoward in the speech or attitude of Miss Gambon, expressing only surprise that he had not been told he had been born at sea.

“By Jove!” he said, over and over, and then, in a typically forgiving remark, “Perhaps she thought it would have been too much for a small chap to bear. Especially with his mama being buried at sea—although I confess that I should have been very intrigued at such a notion.”

I learned that what I had seen of the house represented no more than a third of the establishment, that behind the very large trees at the end of the terrace the main building spread longer and wider.

“How came your aunt by such a fine place?” I asked.

This innocent man replied that it had been in her husband's family “for centuries”—that, as he understood matters, the Gambons had been yeoman farmers, meaning that they had not been tenants; they had supported themselves throughout history, with their own livestock and their own produce.

By now, Mr. Burke gave the appearance of fatigue, and I knew that the day must have been exhausting for him. I did not try him further in family matters or the question of his beautiful daughter's affections. Instead I sent him to bed early, with a warning that the hackney was to come at nine o'clock, so that we might get back to Yeovil in time for the London train.

Next morning I rose at six o'clock, prepared myself for the day, and set out on a walk to the places we had visited the day before. They were but a mile distant and it had dawned a beautiful morning. As I strode down the lane to Mr. Burke's childhood home, I saw that a good hansom cab had drawn up outside—an unusual sight, I surmised, in that countryside. Concealing myself behind a tree, I watched, and soon I saw Miss Gambon appear, dressed for town. She carried a small case, such as people use for documents; this was a person bound on business. Harris, the surly manservant, helped her to ascend, and then he climbed to the box beside the driver, and the cab went up the lane and took the road for Bristol. I thought it unusual that a lady so old should take a journey so elaborate so early in the day.

In this pretty corner of England's West Country, Charles O'Brien was thrust into confusion. He had believed that his beloved's father had been taken from Tipperary Castle as an infant. According to the story Mr. O'Brien heard Oscar Wilde tell in Paris, the mother had previously vanished mysteriously, in the company of a strange woman who showed up unannounced.

The grief-stricken father, Terence Burke the First, so to speak, had searched high and low for her but never found her; she had vanished. Oscar Wilde had met her when she was at the height of her dazzling career.

Now Charles was confronted with an entirely different tale—of a child born at sea, and of a secretive old woman who obviously told lies (“I never leave the house anymore”).

Victorian literature and theater abound in such intrigue over inheritance. Even now, disputes over land ownership and testatory challenges break out in Irish courts all the time: “Where there's a will,” they say, “there's a lawsuit.”

Essentially, Mr. O'Brien found himself in the center of such a plot. Even though he never says so, how could he not have speculated many times as to why Terence Burke—and especially Terence Burke's spirited daughter—never bothered to pursue such a potentially huge inheritance in Ireland? Whether they admit to it, many of the English have long had a romantic love affair with Ireland. To them it was always a land of castles and charm, of horses and great drinking feats, of misty hills and dreams.

It's possible that the Burkes, father and daughter, suspended the romance because they feared the circumstances, and then simply did not let on to Charles O'Brien. To claim an Irish estate at a time of such turbulence over land might have struck the gentle Mr. Burke as, to say the least, risky. Nor would his daughter, who cared for him deeply, have wanted her father to feel stress of any kind—especially if it had been generated by somebody she had already dismissed as an insanitary and unreliable ass.

My journey back to London in Mr. Burke's company had the pleasantness of friends accustomed to traveling with each other. When we had seated ourselves in the train, he thanked me for this excursion into his past.

“I have been greatly moved by it,” he said. “My daughter shall know how this has added to my life.”

Upon this he fell silent, and we both contemplated the passing countryside.

The orderly hedgerows and green leafy richness, though not as wild and inspiring as those in my beloved native land, soothed my eye and encouraged my reflection. How could I reconcile the two opposing stories of Mr. Terence Burke's origins? Where and how had he been born? In a safe confinement bed within that beautiful house in Tipperary or tossed in a schooner's bunks upon the notorious Bay of Biscay? Who was his mother, and what had become of her? Had she gone on to achieve fame through her beauty and acting brilliance or does she lie “full fathom five” in a watery grave off the rocky coasts of Europe? Was my judgment of the old woman accurate? I found her furtive and uneasy. How would all of this affect the possible advancement of my affections with my heart's desire? I dreaded that she might blame me for having stirred up an intrigue within her steady life.

Thus did my thoughts grow morbid. As to the general oddity of the thing, I felt not at all dismayed. Such tales seem ordinary to me; I had long heard stories of family mystery within my parents' home, and on my travels it seemed the very fodder upon which people feasted—a mainstay of table conversation.

For example, I recollected that in the town of Roscommon, they celebrate a notorious woman, by name Lady Betty. According to the legend, when she was a young wife, her husband died, leaving her with an infant son. They eked out a dreadful existence until the boy reached the age of fourteen, when he emigrated, promising to send his mother money from the New World. She never heard from him again, and she continued in disappointment and havoc, dwelling in an abandoned hovel with rags for her bed.

One winter night, as the story goes, a handsome and wealthy young stranger called and asked for a roof under which to stay out of the rain and cold. While he slept, Lady Betty killed him for his money. In his pockets, she discovered papers that informed her she had murdered her own son—who had come back rich and successful to salvage his mother.

Lady Betty screamed her sorrow up and down the streets of the town, and she was sentenced to hang. But the hangman took ill; and, as several hangings had been arranged for that day, Lady Betty volunteered to become the executioner in exchange for her own reprieve. So effective did she prove that she gained a salary from the King and apartments in the jail.

Across such lowering topics did my thoughts flow as we steamed through the pretty English countryside on that sunny day. The prospect of meeting Mr. Burke's beautiful daughter, the permanent resident of all my thoughts for almost four years now, did not cheer me as it should have done. I knew of a certainty that she must greatly disapprove of her father being taken through such a tiring experience without her foreknowledge.

When we reached Mr. Burke's home in Westminster, nobody was there; the maid, Mary from Cork, had her afternoon of liberty, and we sat, pleased to rid ourselves of our weariness. Mr. Burke provided a bottle of Madeira and we set to it, and thereby did I forgo my pledge to myself that I would not imbibe strong drink in this important adventure. But one glass always requires a supporter, notoriously so with delicious Madeira.

Cried Mr. Burke, “A bird never flew on one wing.”