me, it has always looked, and still looks, like a house playing at being a castle. The hall displays a number of paintings known to have come from the Earl of Bristol’s gallery, dour depictions of sour-faced individuals, occasionally carrying a blunderbuss or leaning on a cannon but including, oddly enough, a portrait of the third earl’s bigamous wife with both her husbands. Three-quarter-length oil portraits of long-dead relations in scarlet uniforms, one killed at the Battle of Ferrol, another at the siege of Badajoz, yet another at Madeira, where Edward’s father had himself served. When Julia first saw the house, she declared it to be everything an Irish castle should be and immediately set off to look for a ghost; I thought her liable to swoon when she found the two spiral staircases. Personally, I find the whole place vaguely ridiculous: the neo-Gothic windows with their diamond panes; the eight staring
oculi
of the second story, like portholes in a man-of-war.
The place has one curiosity, though, in the small walled garden to the southwest, where old Peter grows rhubarb and red currant trees, gooseberries and marrows cheek by jowl with raspberries, artichokes and violets. A single apple tree has been trained to grow against the wall, its branches spread out in a perfect fan, its trunk flattened from the roots, as if it had been growing where a wall had accidentally taken root and been splitin two by its ascent. As if, around the other side, one might find its other half. I went to look. There was nothing there but laurel trees, lush from years of growing out of the waste of the house, and a patch of nettles, full of caterpillars.
Even Edward seemed taken aback at our reception that first evening. There were speeches of welcome from the local hoteliers, an illuminated address from the tenants, many toasts drunk to our happiness and long lives, much praise for his grandfather. On reflection, it may have been relief that the tenantry was expressing: to be finally rid of Edward’s father, Lord Ormond, as landlord and a hope that Edward, who they say resembles his grandfather in looks, would take after him in other ways.
Lord Ormond had assembled a cast of local dignitaries for our first dinner: Mr. Casement, Mr. Walsh, Mr. O’Hara, Mr. Shiels, Mr. Macky. I walked in with Lord Ormond, me in my wedding dress; Edward with Lady Bucknell. The cook had done us proud: artichoke soup and fillets of Bann salmon, plovers’ eggs from White Park Bay, followed by lamb and new potatoes, wild duck, stewed celery, watercress. I was barely nineteen, Edward was twenty-two: we were the youngest couple seated at the table by a margin of a good ten years. It was an odd feeling, to sit there in a strange house for the first time, not as a guest but as its new mistress.
Although Edward’s mother was long dead, her presence was everywhere I looked. Nothing can prepare one for the shock of the pattern of another woman’s choice of plate, in this case Staffordshire chinoiserie, cobalt blue with red enameling. I could barely find my food, so busy was the design. Nothing looked familiar. The table was served by eighteen balloon-backed mahogany chairs, upholstered in crimson. Lady Ormond had had a brief flirtation with aniline dyes when they first appeared: there was experimental evidence on the dining room walls of fuchsine and Tyrian purple. She was, by all accounts, a timid and temperate woman and hadevidently refrained from redecorating the entire room. She had retained the dusty old Turkey carpet and gargantuan curtain poles, each end of which finished in a kind of tortured hyacinth bulb and which allowed the oppressive crimson curtains to trail across the floor, no doubt to defy that old enemy, the draft. The overriding sensation was of dust and of weight. I resolved, as soon as I could, to embark on the redecoration of the rooms.
The meal was served
à la russe
and my neighbor Mr. O’Hara helped me to a slice of lamb. To his
oculi
of the second story, like portholes in a man-of-war.
The place has one curiosity, though, in the small walled garden to the southwest, where old Peter grows rhubarb and red currant trees, gooseberries and marrows cheek by jowl with raspberries, artichokes and violets. A single apple tree has been trained to grow against the wall, its branches spread out in a perfect fan, its trunk flattened from the roots, as if it had been growing where a wall had accidentally taken root and been splitin two by its ascent. As if, around the other side, one might find its other half. I went to look. There was nothing there but laurel trees, lush from years of growing out of the waste of the house, and a patch of nettles, full of caterpillars.
Even Edward seemed taken aback at our reception that first evening. There were speeches of welcome from the local hoteliers, an illuminated address from the tenants, many toasts drunk to our happiness and long lives, much praise for his grandfather. On reflection, it may have been relief that the tenantry was expressing: to be finally rid of Edward’s father, Lord Ormond, as landlord and a hope that Edward, who they say resembles his grandfather in looks, would take after him in other ways.
Lord Ormond had assembled a cast of local dignitaries for our first dinner: Mr. Casement, Mr. Walsh, Mr. O’Hara, Mr. Shiels, Mr. Macky. I walked in with Lord Ormond, me in my wedding dress; Edward with Lady Bucknell. The cook had done us proud: artichoke soup and fillets of Bann salmon, plovers’ eggs from White Park Bay, followed by lamb and new potatoes, wild duck, stewed celery, watercress. I was barely nineteen, Edward was twenty-two: we were the youngest couple seated at the table by a margin of a good ten years. It was an odd feeling, to sit there in a strange house for the first time, not as a guest but as its new mistress.
Although Edward’s mother was long dead, her presence was everywhere I looked. Nothing can prepare one for the shock of the pattern of another woman’s choice of plate, in this case Staffordshire chinoiserie, cobalt blue with red enameling. I could barely find my food, so busy was the design. Nothing looked familiar. The table was served by eighteen balloon-backed mahogany chairs, upholstered in crimson. Lady Ormond had had a brief flirtation with aniline dyes when they first appeared: there was experimental evidence on the dining room walls of fuchsine and Tyrian purple. She was, by all accounts, a timid and temperate woman and hadevidently refrained from redecorating the entire room. She had retained the dusty old Turkey carpet and gargantuan curtain poles, each end of which finished in a kind of tortured hyacinth bulb and which allowed the oppressive crimson curtains to trail across the floor, no doubt to defy that old enemy, the draft. The overriding sensation was of dust and of weight. I resolved, as soon as I could, to embark on the redecoration of the rooms.
The meal was served
à la russe
and my neighbor Mr. O’Hara helped me to a slice of lamb. To his
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