Tipperary (70 page)

When I went into the castle, I found a great pandemonium. People cried for joy and relief, and the talk had soared to a wild babble as those who had not overheard the moonlit exchanges sought the fullest version. Harney climbed a few steps of the Grand Staircase and asked for attention; then he told them what had happened.

Soon, everybody had dispersed. I told Harney whom I had seen climb into the lorry; he expressed dismay—and disgust. He asked what I had thought of “April's brilliant ruse,” but I laughed and did not make a committed answer. Then I claimed April's attention.

“Find your coat,” I said. “Come with me.”

We walked together out into the night; Harney looked at me with astounded interest as we went—he always sensed things.

In the general scheme of gardens and lands, I had made sure that the proud spur of ground which gave the best view had been preserved, and it was a tolerable distance to walk. I had sat there often in the old days, on Della; it was the point from which April and I had surveyed Tipperary Castle on her first visit, in October 1904.

Now we climbed the slope, and when we reached the vantage point, I turned to look back; she turned with me. We both saw the same sight: a magnificent building, all parapets and battlements, with its windows aglow, and smooth smoke climbing from its chimneys; and we both knew the same thing—that love of humanity had made it so.

For perhaps five full minutes, each of us drank it in; neither said a word; we stood some feet apart, untouching. I broke the silence—with the words that I had written down, and memorized, more than twenty-two years earlier, and that I had spoken to myself in my own head every day of my life since then.

“I believe, as I have always done since we first met, that you and I should marry.”

April said, “Of course we shall.”

We walked back to the house in silence, and still untouching—except, I think, in our spirits. As I went in the doorway, I turned back and I looked at the great and inspiring moon with more delight in my spirit than I have ever known.

And now, I believe that I may consider this History complete. It is no more—but also no less—than the chronicle of a faithful and sometimes foolish man. I am aware that I have not done outstanding service to the art of the historian, but I have tried to render a fair likeness of my country as I have seen it.

In my own defense, should any reader find me wanting, I may only reiterate the need for care when Ireland and her story are considered: “Be careful,” I have cautioned. And in my own praise—and you will know by now, whoever you are, that I am neither modest nor immodest—I simply say that I have done something many men do not. I wed the woman I loved.

Harney's account of that night runs to several pages. He tells the same story Charles did. And he adds much speculation as to the talk in the anti-treaty camp the next day about the failed mission.

From him we learn two facts. First, Stephen Meehan was shot dead a week or so later. He ran crazy with a gun, and his own men downed him. Second, and in many ways more interesting, Dermot Noonan quit the civil war that week.

Why? Harney speculates that “April's ruse” made him think again. Noonan knew that things would have to settle down; the civil war couldn't last forever. And if it became known that he'd tried to destroy— for no good reason—a treasure newly donated to the Irish people, his political future would carry at least a blemish, perhaps a blight. Especially given his personal history with the castle.

I was more concerned to see where Harney's account didn't match Charles's version. By now, I had a fair idea of the kind of difference I might find—and there were five in all.

First, the young gunman might not have been aiming at the door jamb with his second shot. Harney says that Charles had called out to him, “Why don't you shoot me, you brave fellow?” And he put his hands on his hips, and stepped forward to make himself a bigger target. As a consequence, the bullet missed—but we shall never know whether the miss was deliberate or the result of intimidation.

Next, the trio did not march out from the door in step with one another. Charles went out first; he stepped in front of Harney and April and marched straight at the gun barrel. The others followed, and Harney is honest enough to say that they did so only when they saw that Charles had closed off their possibility of being shot, and they'd observed that the men at the back hadn't primed and aimed.

Third, the flares did not drop from the tongs. Charles kicked them aside and stood menacingly over the two arsonists. That was why Meehan came prancing forward with his half-drawn gun.

Fourth, Charles grabbed Meehan by the arm and dragged him in front of April, where she delivered her speech—the words that clinched the evening.

And fifth—Harney also saw Noonan, and he started down the slope toward the truck to intercept him. Charles shouted to Harney to “go back” and Harney stopped—because he saw Charles “striding down like fury.”

Harney moved again, though, and he arrived in time to hear Charles say to Noonan, “Never—never, ever—interfere in my life again.” According to Harney, Noonan scrambled up onto the truck—“and he looked a bit whipped.”

Finally, this is how Harney saw the later event of the evening:

“I was talking to Paddy Furlong, the butler, and I saw April coming down the stairs with her coat on. Charles was standing inside the front door in his greatcoat; he looked like a noble statue. They left the house together. I went to the window and I watched them, and they walked to a favorite spot of Charles's—on the crest just above the beginning of the Long Terrace, where the castle land is at its highest. Whenever Charles wanted to think, or to survey something—that's where he went.

“When they got there, they turned around to look at the house. I never took my eyes off them—I was inside the window, and they couldn't really see that I was watching. They never spoke that I could see or hear, they never touched nor nothing; they weren't even standing close together.

“After a long while, they started walking back down to us, exactly the same as the way they went up. But there was something different about them—something was after changing.”

Thursday, the 14th of December 1922.

My dearest Kitty,

A note to tell you that I shall be away (in London) from tonight until Tuesday. I believe that you may guess what a good life now faces me—at last.

Yours affectionately,

April.

10

N
eedless to remark, the story of Charles O'Brien's life didn't end with April's short, excited letter to Katherine Moore. The wedding took place in a Westminster registry office—the governmental formalities separating Ireland from England hadn't yet extended to the recording of births, marriages, and deaths. No doubt April saw to it that all their papers were in order; that was what she was like.

He is described in the register as “Charles O'Brien, Gentleman, of Ardobreen, Golden, Cashel, County Tipperary, Ireland,” and she as “April Somerville, Widow, of Tipperary Castle, Tipperary, Ireland.”

When I first read Charles's final entry I was left feeling high and dry. What happened next? How long did they live? What became of them? Did they truly donate the castle and the estate to the new nation—or was that statement of April's no more than, as Harney called it, a “ruse” to stop the Irregulars from torching the place?

This “History” had hit me with three body blows. First there was the inexplicable emotional connection I felt to Charles, who seemed to be saying—and in my words—what I had been feeling about myself for most of my life. I'm not claiming that I felt that we were alike; he was big and dashing, I am small and withdrawn. But I nonetheless felt a warmth of connection to him. Inexplicable, I said to myself, but there we are; these things happen.

Then I discovered his connection to my mother through, initially, her photograph of Eamon de Valera at Boland's Mill and then her help to Charles during the week after the Rising.

Finally came the DNA reports—meaning that, although a great deal had been resolved in the story of his life, Charles O'Brien and his “History” had pitched me into turmoil. And even though I had set myself methodically upon a course of “research,” I was no nearer to solving my own mysteries.

Of which I had two: one minor but intriguing and one major and crucial. I still had ahead of me the task of clearing up the path of life taken by the first April Burke. And because of her, I had to find out who I was.

In a little West Tipperary church called Kilfeakle I found the original marriage record. It was bland and blurred: “Terence Burke, Gentleman, of Tipperary Estate to Margaret Collins of Gurtymore, Parteen, Limerick.” The date in 1850 is either (ink had run) 22 or 23 May. No Collins family, or trace of one, could I find in Parteen, but I did find Margaret Collins's birth certificate; she was born at Castleconnell (not far from Parteen) in 1828. (The newspaper reports of her death said 1831: had she—typical actress—lied about her age?)

My reasoning now ran as follows: calculate her age backward from her suicide. If she was already an actress in 1850, she must have begun her stage career earlier than the age of twenty-two. And I couldn't find the name Collins with any relevance in the places associated with her birth and marriage records.

Which probably meant that she had not come from a good family. So by the time she met Terence Burke she could have been a “working girl” for some years.

A miserable life—a whore's, back then. And it still is, I suppose (we don't have that many in this county, at least not that I know of). I assumed that she wanted to get off the streets, so she changed her name to April—more exotic—and became an actress (which didn't mean that she didn't still ply her street trade). And then I went looking for proof of my assumptions.

I found a newspaper notice of November 1848 telling of “Mr. FitzGibbon's Celebrated West End Troupe” bringing its “Celebrated Repertoire” to Cashel. In the middle of the bill sat the name “April Collins—as lovely as Portia as she is tragically Juliet.”

Hah! Oscar Wilde said that for “many months” after first seeing her, Terence Burke had pursued the beautiful actress. Now I had more or less nailed the meeting; Burke saw her, almost certainly, in Cashel, with Mr. FitzGibbon.

Other than the record of the subsequent marriage, I found no further information about her—until February 1855, when she crops up as “Mrs. April Burke” topping the bill in “A Theatrical Cornucopia” at the Arcadia Hall, Dublin. Her fortunes, it seemed, had improved. This newspaper report described her life during the run of the play:

Mrs. Burke travels with a maid and a laundress; they stay in rooms on Ushers Island, with a view to the river and the green fields beyond. If too fatigued after a performance, she will not trouble to dine abroad; she will have food brought to her rooms and cooked there. She has marked preferences for guinea-fowl; pheasant is the only game she will eat; her meal often begins with a smattering of caviare. Sometimes she is visited by her husband, Mr. Terence Burke, the esteemed Tipperary landowner.

This was a rich lifestyle, and it was obviously supported and encouraged by her adoring husband. Time was running out, however. Soon the actress must return and keep her side of the bargain—breed children to ensure the succession at Tipperary. The trail, as they say, went cold. All I had to go on from here onward was Oscar's story.

But, since I was checking everything, I thought I'd better ascertain what I could. By a (not very big) miracle, I found Terence Burke's death certificate. Actually, what I found was the informal version, scribbled in the doctor's records. He was a Dr. Hennessy, and I met his fourth-generation descendant, who lives and still practices in the same house— the “Dispensary”—in Kilross, not far from Tipperary Castle.

Country doctors in the old days threw away nothing. They kept sheds full of old records that they perhaps hoped to get around to sorting one day. In there I found the certification of Terence Burke's death, and I found something else—the inscription “M/Y present?” Hmm.

“What,” I asked today's Dr. Hennessy, “could that mean?”

After some thought and taking down of books, he said, “Possibly mercury.”

“Isn't mercury poisonous? Was this suicide?” I had already found so much of it.

Dr. Hennessy said, “More likely he was using it for venereal disease. It was an old cure.”

Now what did I have in my hand of cards? Here are some of the speculations I made about this woman—from whom, modern science had told me, I was descended.

When she met Terence Burke and married him, her life improved, and she no longer had any need to work the shady side of the street. But her past caught up with her, transmitted itself to him, and, unable to bear it, she fled. As a Victorian fallen woman, she would have seen the abandonment of her child and her life as atonement.

Or did a friend or family member know that she had walked a loose path? And was that person blackmailing her for money—and her only solution was to flee? I wouldn't have cared too much about any of this part of Charles O'Brien's life had it not been for the wretched DNA. There are times when science tells us too much.

When I drove away from Dr. Hennessy's, I went back to the church where April Burke the First had married. There was something I wanted to check on the register. Could I have got it right?

Suddenly, the story opened up, and I felt that I had found out everything I needed to know about April Burke the First. The path of research became a road to an answer—and a feeling of remarkable satisfaction, when I heard the pieces click into place.

In 1861, the “Prince's Theatre” in Bristol opened its doors, launched by a member of the famed MacCready acting family. The boy Terence Burke was four years old and living thirty miles away, with his mother in the Brook House. With them lived the lady whom Charles met with Terence Theobald Burke, the younger April's father.

The lady was not “Miss” Gambon—she was “Mrs.” Gambon, née Collins. Her name appears as a witness to the wedding at Kilfeakle church. Charles could easily have mistaken her name as pronounced “Miz Gambon” in the burr of the West Country. She had married a man called Gambon, who—according to Somerset records—died in 1860. If her sister went to live with her—and what would have been more natural if the boy was there?—an actress would at least have brought in an income. And now, of course, the actress was a respectable widow.

So here's the scenario. April Burke's husband dies. The actress goes back to work at the Prince's Theatre—which had a touring company. She works there for some years, builds an excellent reputation—and meets Oscar Wilde in Dublin.

Her son is growing up in Somerset, cared for by his aunt when the mother is touring. They never speak to the boy about his father. The guilt is enormous. And so is the fear that someone, somewhere, knows the nasty secret of the father's ailment, which they think may have killed him.

Now think of the date when the actress jumped to her death: 1878, the year in which the boy reached his majority. Did Miz Gambon blackmail her sister? Who was the inheritor of Tipperary? I felt the solution roll out in front of me. If the boy tried to get his inheritance, the aunt would have told all. But if he signed it over to his aunt—then she would take on the property or, more likely, sell it, now that land matters in Ireland were easing.

Here's the clincher. In September 1904, as we know from the court records, an application was made by a Bristol solicitor on behalf of persons unknown. In the details lay a little barb—“for the purposes of dismissal only.” The doubtful origins of Terence Burke's mother, April's grandmother, were alluded to just sufficiently to discourage a gentleman from opening that can of worms.

Next, in late September, 1904, a freak influenza swept through the West Country of England. It took scores of lives—including that of Miz Gambon. April and her father went down for the funeral—probably, as they do around here in rifting families, to make sure that when they put her in the ground, she stayed there. At which point April and her father felt free to open the inheritance claim.

So far, so good—mere speculation; but, to leap forward somewhat, here is part of something written by April to Charles in the spring of 1923:

My father, as you may have divined, was at heart a timid man. He had been raised a timid boy, and chose to have little society outside the home in which he grew up; and he played with one or two local boys. When he came to London, he intended to pursue a similar pathway, and his marriage to my mother gave him some protection in this intent.

However, when she died so tragically, he withdrew even further than he had intended. We saw nobody, we visited not at all; to meet anybody outside my school or our immediate neighbors became so unusual as to be remarkable.

Imagine, then, how strange I found it to be confronted in our own drawing-room at Alexander Street by a most unpleasant woman. That is how I found out where Papa had grown up. He had always said “the West Country” in response to my many childish inquiries. Now I found the name of the house and the name of the place.

More rewarding still, I found that my quiet, dear papa had a spine. This visitor kept browbeating him—I could hear them from my room, to which I had been sent—and he kept resisting. He refused to sign something that she wanted. That was when I first heard the name of “Tipperary Estate,” and I was ten years old.

This is the lady that you and Papa met in June 1904, and whose death a few months later released us to pursue my father's birthright.