cycle he was composing. The villagers thought his music remarkable. Neighbours often said how much they enjoyed hearing the sound of his piano filtering out onto the street. But no orchestra had yet played a single composition. Music companies returned his compositions with polite notes of refusal. But still he pressed on, motivated by a desire to bring beauty into this world or, maybe at a subconscious level, to feel some vindication in succeeding to prove his cousins wrong.
In Dublin now rebels were fighting behind barricades, with buildings shelled and slum dwellers looting amid the corpses of horses and soldiers. Boys trapped on barbed wire in no-man’s-land in France were screaming for comrades to end their agony with a bullet. Rats grew fat on corpses. Young Oliver Hawkins’s body might never be found. Mr Tim remembered how handsome Oliver had looked last summer. What must it be like to lose a son? He prayed that this war would end before his boys were old enough to be drawn in and that the Dublin madness would end without too many deaths. Scrutinising the lyrics he wrote this morning, they seemed a feeble pastiche of his favourite poets. At heart he knew this cycle would fare no better than the others, but still he worked on, knowing that these imperfect songs were the only poultice he could offer the world.
December 1917
Local Catholics had such long memories that Mrs Ffrench was careful not to betray any hint of proselytism about her activities. Older people still cursed the visiting Protestant clergymen who had tried to steal souls during the famine by offering soup to any starving wretch lured into attending their church services. Last year a Dublin Protestant was sacked after his Catholic employers discovered how he served tea each Sunday at the Free Breakfasts for the Poor Protestant Missionary Charity. Mrs Ffrench thought that it was easy for her fellow Baha’is in America to advocate Baha’i children’s parties as vehicles by which children of different social classes might learn to intermingle and be gently taught the truth, but in this remote part of Donegal any form of preaching was dangerous. Her husband might not think so, because Commodore Ffrench feared nothing. But, with the Bolshevik unrest in Russia, his leave was cancelled and, without him, their house felt empty and the winter hills desolate.
Still, with a war on it was unpatriotic to look glum. There was much that a woman could do. Last week Mrs Goold Verschoyle had hosted a Red Cross musical evening, attended by many young officers from the warships anchored in Killybegs Harbour. Mrs Ffrench had invited several to dine in Bruckless House, impressing them by her knowledge of Northern Russian ports. Not that Commodore Ffrench ever divulged naval secrets, but his last letter had been filled with a boyish excitement about his latest mission. The northern route into Russia was always important as a line for supplies to be ferried into the ice-free port of Murmansk and sent on by rail to St Petersburg. However it had been an unglamorous naval backwater until the recent revolution in Russia, when it now became vital to prevent Murmansk and Archangel falling into the hands of the dangerous Bolsheviks who had seized power. This was the moment of destiny which her husband had been waiting for. Over dinner the officers had agreed that if he could help to fight off the Bolsheviks and hold these ports he would return a hero.
When the Tsar abdicated in February nobody suspected that the Bolsheviks would seize power – indeed few people, including Mrs Ffrench, knew much about them. But the world was out of kilter in these days of incessant bloodshed, with nothing predictable. The Dublin rebels – booed off the streets last Easter, with James Connolly and the other leaders executed – had recently been welcomed home from internment camps like returning heroes instead of hooligans who had levelled their own city. Mrs Ffrench was glad to have a Baha’i spiritual master like Abdul-Baha to make sense of these changes. His instruction was to spread light and human fellowship through every class and creed she came in contact with.
This was her intention behind today’s party. Every child from Bruckless and Dunkineely was invited. The attendance – smaller than she hoped for – was a curious mix, with prosperous Protestant children who were used to enjoying her gardens mingling uneasily with a few local poor Catholics. The better-off Catholic tradesmen had kept their children away. They liked the notion of their offspring taking refreshment with the gentry on her lawn, but not if they had to mix with their own lower social classes.
At first there was little mixing, as Protestant children formed one clique and the Catholics another, too ill at ease to enjoy themselves. She suspected that some Catholics had never attended any type of party, let alone an afternoon one. For a terrible moment she even envisaged a fight breaking out, a miniature re-enactment of the riots in Moscow. The servants were thinking this too, from the way they whispered to each other, but then the arrival of Eva Goold Verschoyle put everyone at ease because children from all creeds were comfortable with her.
Although Mrs Ffrench told people that every child was always welcome at Bruckless House, few ever called. Yet she never visited the Goold Verschoyle household without seeing village urchins wandering freely about the tennis court or sitting with Eva in the old coach house, taking turns to use her paints and brushes, laughing with their hands streaked in watercolours. Eva quickly became the centre of the party now, not even conscious of how she drew the children into the games she suggested. Perhaps it was her size, with many children towering over her. Or maybe it was her aura. At fifteen, Eva was older than her years in some respects, yet far younger in others.
Soon Mrs Ffrench found herself peripheral to her own party, a bystander who would love to swing a four-year-old girl around like Eva did or have toddlers cluster about her skirt while she told stories. She kept trying to mingle and talk to each guest but a glass wall existed with the village children that she could not break down.
Still, she loved the sounds of laughter and was delighted at having risked holding the party outdoors during the few hours of winter sunlight. There was real Baha’i happiness by the end as children relaxed with each other. Village children waved as they walked away in clusters, with the Protestants being collected in ponies and traps. Finally only she and Eva were left, excitedly discussing the party on a sofa in the library while, outside, serving girls cleared away the mess on the lawn.
She offered to have her man drive Eva home, but Eva insisted that she loved the two-mile walk in twilight. Mrs Ffrench knew that she would be safe because something about the child’s innocence suggested that Eva could not be hurt so long as she never left Donegal. Eva sympathised at how lonely Christmas would be in Bruckless House with Mr Ffrench away and asked would the Hawkins family ever come back to visit.
‘I suspect not, dear. Bruckless holds too many memories. These days a lot of ghosts sit on empty chairs at dinner. It would be hard for them not to keep seeing Oliver in their minds swimming down at our pier.’
Mrs Ffrench stopped, surprised by her tears. Grief was a sly thief always waiting in ambush. She had thought she was over the worst of the anguish at losing her two brothers, but last month’s news that her sister’s husband had also been killed had brought back her dreams of blood. When she woke some nights now she was afraid to touch the sheets, having dreamt that they were saturated in blood. She hated the three-card-trickery of these insidious dreams. In them she could be back with her brothers in their nursery, watching them play with boxes of tin soldiers. Next moment they would be wading through barbed wire and foxholes where dying men screamed, still only boys holding their tin soldiers, oblivious to danger. Then they would become her own unborn sons walking towards the German guns, not hearing her screaming to warn them until they were shot and fell. She always woke with a start from such dreams, her hand instinctively reaching down between her legs where she bled every month whether her husband was home on leave or not. Five years of marriage, stained by unwelcome blood. The Commodore had devised a code so that she could send him news after each visit home. They had names chosen if it was a boy or a girl and a locked room set aside to be a nursery. At thirty-one she was still young enough. When his victory at Murmansk was achieved, he would come home for them to try again, as often and with as much passion as it took. To compensate for all the deaths, her first child would be a boy.
Mrs Ffrench became aware of tears also in Eva’s eyes.
‘Don’t mind