country.”
There was silence at the table, the mood a little altered. I was beginning to sense the complexity of Edward’s, and now my, situation. Edward is a landowner but he is Catholic too, and rural to the bones. Not nationalist, certainly not in the traditional sense; but if one’s nation is one’s land, and one’s attachment to it, and one’s desire every day to stand on it, to have one’s arms elbow-deep in it, to love it and work always to keep it, then yes, nationalist too, though there are few that would call him it, himself included. Where did he fit in, I wondered at that first dinner. He was as much an anomaly as was I.
Edward’s tie to Oranmore is unshakable—to the land, to his mother’s people, particularly to his maternal grandfather, with whom he is favorably compared. Not so Lord Ormond, who is generally disliked by the tenantry, a sentiment that appears to be reciprocated by him.
“It is true what Lord Dufferin says,” he announced to Edward at dinner. “An Irish estate is like a sponge, and the sooner got rid of, the better. If it comes to it,” he added, “if Ulster goes the way of Connacht and the others, if the government offers to buy the land and lease it to the tenantry, bite the hand off them. There is no other way out for us now.”
“It will never happen here,” said Edward. “The tenantry is entirely loyal. I will not sell.”
Was that really only twelve years ago? Edward lived to rue his words. The tenantry have no loyalty to Edward, no more than if he were an unscrupulous rack-renter who made no improvements to the land and fully expected them to finance his extravagant way of life. The one time he stood his ground and refused to lower the rents, events took on a very threatening turn.
Mrs. Macky sat to Edward’s left, unusually jowly for a slim woman. She was not much of a conversationalist. I heard her make some ill-informed remarks on the purity of Aberdonian English, as opposed to that of Inverness, but it was difficult to be angry with her, for her face, with her drowsy brown eyes, had the appearance of that of a Swiss St. Bernard. I heard later that she dosed every one of their children with Mother’s Quietness, turning them into imbeciles with swollen stomachs and shrunken brains, in order to stop their crying. There are acceptable levels of abuse, it would seem, and it takes only a commercial patent to exempt one. I never gave the children more than a mustard spoon of calomel or syrup of poppies, and only as a last resort to shift a stubborn cough or settle an upset stomach.
There was a portrait hanging on the dining room wall of King William III crossing the Boyne. In Edward’s grandfather’s time, he told me, it had hung in the hall, but when his father converted to Catholicism, he had it removed to a dusky corner. Edward remembered the picture, he said, emblazoned with the square and compasses of a Masonic device, his grandfather’s pride and joy. When Edward was born, his grandfather sent for water to be brought from the Boyne and had his first grandson baptized with it in the little Episcopalian church in the village, the one that had been moved stone by stone from the original site near Flowerfield. He often jokes that he is the only Catholic in Ireland to have been baptized in Boyne water, and in a church that had walked a country mile.
Delightfully, near the end of the dinner, during a particularly difficult speech by Mr. Walsh on the island breeding colonies of the gannet, the portrait fell off the wall and very nearly hit Mrs. Macky on the shoulder. I hid my amusement behind my napkin but I suspect Lady Bucknell caught me; I was sure she gave me a conspiratorial wink. There was a commotion, the lady attended to by Dr. Creith, the picture retrieved from the aspidistra where it had fallen, and when it was examined, the hanging wire was found to have corroded, in all likelihood, as a result of the fumes from the gas burners. The dinner disrupted,
There was silence at the table, the mood a little altered. I was beginning to sense the complexity of Edward’s, and now my, situation. Edward is a landowner but he is Catholic too, and rural to the bones. Not nationalist, certainly not in the traditional sense; but if one’s nation is one’s land, and one’s attachment to it, and one’s desire every day to stand on it, to have one’s arms elbow-deep in it, to love it and work always to keep it, then yes, nationalist too, though there are few that would call him it, himself included. Where did he fit in, I wondered at that first dinner. He was as much an anomaly as was I.
Edward’s tie to Oranmore is unshakable—to the land, to his mother’s people, particularly to his maternal grandfather, with whom he is favorably compared. Not so Lord Ormond, who is generally disliked by the tenantry, a sentiment that appears to be reciprocated by him.
“It is true what Lord Dufferin says,” he announced to Edward at dinner. “An Irish estate is like a sponge, and the sooner got rid of, the better. If it comes to it,” he added, “if Ulster goes the way of Connacht and the others, if the government offers to buy the land and lease it to the tenantry, bite the hand off them. There is no other way out for us now.”
“It will never happen here,” said Edward. “The tenantry is entirely loyal. I will not sell.”
Was that really only twelve years ago? Edward lived to rue his words. The tenantry have no loyalty to Edward, no more than if he were an unscrupulous rack-renter who made no improvements to the land and fully expected them to finance his extravagant way of life. The one time he stood his ground and refused to lower the rents, events took on a very threatening turn.
Mrs. Macky sat to Edward’s left, unusually jowly for a slim woman. She was not much of a conversationalist. I heard her make some ill-informed remarks on the purity of Aberdonian English, as opposed to that of Inverness, but it was difficult to be angry with her, for her face, with her drowsy brown eyes, had the appearance of that of a Swiss St. Bernard. I heard later that she dosed every one of their children with Mother’s Quietness, turning them into imbeciles with swollen stomachs and shrunken brains, in order to stop their crying. There are acceptable levels of abuse, it would seem, and it takes only a commercial patent to exempt one. I never gave the children more than a mustard spoon of calomel or syrup of poppies, and only as a last resort to shift a stubborn cough or settle an upset stomach.
There was a portrait hanging on the dining room wall of King William III crossing the Boyne. In Edward’s grandfather’s time, he told me, it had hung in the hall, but when his father converted to Catholicism, he had it removed to a dusky corner. Edward remembered the picture, he said, emblazoned with the square and compasses of a Masonic device, his grandfather’s pride and joy. When Edward was born, his grandfather sent for water to be brought from the Boyne and had his first grandson baptized with it in the little Episcopalian church in the village, the one that had been moved stone by stone from the original site near Flowerfield. He often jokes that he is the only Catholic in Ireland to have been baptized in Boyne water, and in a church that had walked a country mile.
Delightfully, near the end of the dinner, during a particularly difficult speech by Mr. Walsh on the island breeding colonies of the gannet, the portrait fell off the wall and very nearly hit Mrs. Macky on the shoulder. I hid my amusement behind my napkin but I suspect Lady Bucknell caught me; I was sure she gave me a conspiratorial wink. There was a commotion, the lady attended to by Dr. Creith, the picture retrieved from the aspidistra where it had fallen, and when it was examined, the hanging wire was found to have corroded, in all likelihood, as a result of the fumes from the gas burners. The dinner disrupted,
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