did not seem like a Catholic at all. He still was one and for a Catholic to come into Coolowen after centuries of the place being Protestant, was something that Eleanor and Martha could hardly bear to contemplate.
‘I never thought I would see the day…’ Eleanor would say without being more specific.
‘He’s not properly so,’ Martha would reason. ‘He is, after all, half a Protestant just as he is half a Sale.’
‘No,’ Eleanor would interrupt, ‘only a quarter Sale. Eileen is half a Sale.’
By deflecting their conversation to a discussion of such genealogical fractions, the sisters managed to relieve their minds of more uncomfortable thoughts and, a few years later, when Fergal Conroy was seventeen, he came to live at Coolowen.
6
Fergal
FERGAL WAS ONLY seventeen when he first saw Julia.
She was just nine at the time but that made no difference: he fell in love with her on the spot. It was within weeks of his having come to live in Ireland and his great-aunts had asked the Esdailes over to tea. Lydia was only just five and Edward a tough 11-year-old; but Julia, in spite of still being a child, had the poise and allure of a debutante.
‘She’s such an old-fashioned wee girl,’ Aunt Martha said, amused, when she overheard Julia asking Fergal why he was called Fergal.
‘I’m called Julia because I was born in July: on the fifteenth. If I’d been a boy, I would have been christened Swithin.’
When tea was finished, Aunt Eleanor, who always decided such things, told the children that they might get down from the table and go out and play.
‘Fergal will show you the goslings,’ she said, ‘and, if you’re very good, he might take you into the walled garden and let you pick some strawberries.’
They went out through the greenhouse.
‘This vine is hundreds, maybe thousands, of years old,’ said Julia.
‘Are you sure about that?’ said Fergal.
‘Of course,’ said Julia. ‘It’s the true vine. It says so in Liscarrig Church. “I am the True Vine” is painted around the arch above the Communion table. That’s why every year Miss Martha arranges baskets of the grapes there for the Harvest Festival.’
Their feet crunched on the gravel as they walked along the path through the trees towards the yard.
‘She’s still only a baby,’ Julia said when she saw Lydia picking out the white stones. ‘Leave her where she is. She’s always dragging out of me.’
Edward had already disappeared.
‘I’ll show you the goslings,’ said Fergal. ‘Come on Lydia, I want to see if you can count them.’
‘I don’t like ducks,’ said Julia. ‘They’re dirty.’
She stood where she was. She looked down at the ground and then, closing her mouth firmly so that her lips became almost white, she stared at Fergal. He chuckled to himself and smiled. Julia was used to defying her elders and betters, even on the smallest of issues, and she knew she was always successful: in the case of Edward and Lydia, she always just told them what to do.
As the years progressed Fergal became like an older brother to the three Esdailes. But with Julia there was always an additional edge. She soon discovered that she could make him do her bidding and, with the élan of someone a great deal older and more experienced, she sulked, flattered, teased, ignored, and made demands so that Fergal never quite knew where he stood. That was the way Julia liked it, and when all else failed, she would tell him she was going to marry him.
‘Pappy may not allow it, so you’ll have to secretly take me away in the night,’ she would say.
‘I’ll wait till you’re twenty-one,’ Fergal would tease.
‘No, before that,’ Julia would demand.
In appearance, Fergal was striking. He was very tall and he had his father’s thick black hair and blue eyes. But instead of the very pale skin that is normally found with those looks, he had a robust complexion; and, in place of the sad eyes of the native Irish, Fergal’s shone with laughter. In manner too he was a mixture. He had an easy, natural, friendliness and courtesy but, at the same time, an assurance that singled him out as a cut above the ordinary.
If Julia was smitten by Fergal, she was not the only one and, if his great-aunts had been anxious that he would have difficulty fitting in with their way of life, their fears in that respect were soon allayed. He did not seem to find life in a house with two middle-aged spinsters lonely or exactly dull. On the contrary, he enjoyed everything. He chatted to them as though they were friends of his own age; he ran errands for them, accepted their advice as to how things should be done on the farm, and even teased them on occasion by poking fun when Eleanor was laying down the law. He was anxious to please, anxious to learn, and within a couple of months his aunts were devoted to him
‘The only thing that makes me sad,’ Martha said, ‘is that Honor never knew what a pleasure he could be.’
One aspect of his new life in Ireland, however, left Fergal confounded. When he first came to Coolowen he went to the Catholic chapel on Sundays while his aunts went to the Protestant church. But after a while he did not bother to go every Sunday and on occasion he accompanied the sisters to Morning Prayer: he did not make a choice between the two options – he did not think he needed to – as the fact of the matter was that he had hardly any feeling for religion of any persuasion. Furthermore, his education under the Benedictines in England had done little to prepare him for the form of priest-fearing Catholicism that he encountered in Ireland. If he was confused as to which church he should attend and how much it mattered, he was so with some justification. It did not help that the convention in Ireland at the time was that Catholic churches, which were generally enormous, were referred to as chapels whereas Protestant churches, which as a rule were tiny, were called churches.
The spire of St Malachy’s in Liscarrig soared up above the little town as a landmark that could be seen on a clear day from as far away as the Hill of Mullach, twelve miles distant to the south. The spire and the enormous structure to which it was attached – a huge building in an elaborate architectural style that might loosely be described as French Gothic – was quite out of proportion to the scale of Liscarrig itself and, as a result, it seemed to look down upon all the other buildings in the town with an air of condescension. This condescension was particularly striking when St Malachy’s was confronted by another structure at the opposite end of Church Street. Tucked in behind an aged and crumbling stone wall was a building which seemed almost ashamed of its low-key understatement and lack of architectural style. A square tower which looked old and might have housed a bell was its only claim to distinction and even the tower was no higher than the aged beech trees planted nearby. This was St John’s. On Sunday mornings, the tiny trickle of Protestants, the Esdailes among them, who dribbled into St John’s for Morning Prayer were dignified by being members of the Church of Ireland even though they were representative of only a tiny minority among the population of Ireland as a whole. By way of contrast, the devout shoals of Catholics who thronged into St Malachy’s at the same time represented the majority population; but they, nevertheless had to be content with being merely Church of Rome.
Fergal’s indifference as to which church he attended was understandable in a stranger new to Ireland; but if he thought that his careless and carefree attitude could continue indefinitely in a country where religion mattered so very much, he was mistaken; and his aunts, if they had thought about it at all, were greatly mistaken too. But they had not thought about it and, accordingly, they were jolted all the more when, almost a year after Fergal’s coming to Coolowen, they received a visit, as exceptional as it was unexpected, from Father Costelloe, the parish priest of Athcloon.
‘This is a rare occasion, Father,’ Eleanor said to him when she came through to the hall. ‘The last time we saw you was when you were good enough to call when our dear sister passed away and that’s