—35—

I PUT the envelope on Father MacNamee’s desk.

“A small contribution from your man up in the castle.”

He looked up from the tea he was pouring and smiled.

“Beat him, did you now?”

“As everyone between Limerick and Killarney knows by now.”

He made no attempt to open the envelope, doubtless because he already knew what was in it.

“You met me colleague, Very Reverend Father Smith-Rider, have you now?

“I have.”

“Beautiful wife, isn’t she?”

“A woman like that clutters up a vicarage, doesn’t she?” I replied.

“She would that,” he said with a wink. “Still, few of us would object. And they may be closer to the old way than we are.”

Nuala Anne must have felt that there had been enough clerical chitchat. She dropped her bomb.

“You were present when Lady Augusta was finally buried up there thirty years ago, weren’t you, Father MacNamee?”

If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. “Sure, wasn’t I the parish priest? Didn’t I have to be there?”

“She had been in a convent, hadn’t she?”

“Where else would she be if she wasn’t buried up there in 1921?”

“Carmelite? The same one in which Kevin O’Higgins’s daughter is today?”

“What other one would it be?”

He was smiling genially through her litany of questions. Nonetheless, he seemed impressed.

I sure was.

“She saved the lives of those Kerry men, didn’t she? The Whelan boys whose execution O’Higgins later ordered?”

“Not to say executed exactly,” he said. “There was a standing order in the Free State Army to shoot such people on sight.”

“All except Tommy, and himself having a conversion experience?”

“And his grandson a junior minister in the government today, Foreign Office I believe. … Isn’t it all strange, Dermot Michael?”

“And kind of glorious, too,” I replied. “And very, very Irish.”

“Och, it is that. … Well, now, Nuala Anne, there isn’t much more for me to say, and yourself knowing the whole story.”

“The truth is in the details, Father, as me man always says.”

I’d never said anything like that in all my life. I did not, however, disagree with the sentiment.

“Well, let’s see where we can begin? I suppose it is with the old fella who was my predecessor here, Canon McGinn. He’d been here fifty years, first as the Catholic curate, then as the parish priest. That means he was here before the Great War. Became a great friend of Lord and Lady Downs. Played Irish football with him on the pitch. His predecessor, old Canon Muldoon, was also a great friend of theirs, a man way before his time, the old canon. Was friends with the Anglican Vicar, long before anyone approved of your ecumenical dialogue, if you take me meaning.”

“He said the Mass here in the church when Lord Downs was killed?”

“He did and nary a word of protest from our man in Limerick. He knew better than to take on the old canon. Well, me canon, Canon McGinn that is, always thought that Lord Downs had become a Catholic in the trenches. That’s probably true, you know.”

“Of course,” Nuala said impatiently, as if she didn’t need to be told such self-evident things.

“Anyway, me canon was dying when I came down here to be administrator. He told me all the stories about the McGarrys and what wonderful people they were and themselves being Protestant and that it was time we put aside all that Reformation nonsense and say we were one church. I was fresh out of Maynooth then, and I thought the canon was a heretic but a wonderful heretic.

“So finally as he lay in that room there dying, doesn’t he call me in and says he has a secret to tell me. ‘Lady Downs didn’t die in the fire and isn’t buried up there next to her husband. She’s still very much alive, he says. … Now, lad, don’t ask too many questions because the answers are none of your business. She had grand reasons for what she did. The old canon and I did it for her, and I’d do it all over again if I had to.’

“Well, I’m brimming over with questions, but it’s none of my business, like he said. ‘I visit her a couple of times a year in the Discalced Carmelite convent, where they call her Mother Augusta.…’ That’s what he said. She was the Superior there, young woman, did you know that?”

“I did not, Father. But it doesn’t surprise me.”

“ ‘I want you to go up and see her a couple of times a year, just like I did,’ the canon says to me. ‘She likes to know what’s happening in Garrytown, poor woman. And in my desk are the instructions for her burial when she dies. They know about it in the cloister, and they are committed to honoring her wishes.’ ”

“And you visited her regularly?”

“I did that. She was a wonderful woman, the happiest woman I’ve ever met. I think that’s important to remember, Nuala and Dermot. She found happiness in the cloister, not the same kind of happiness as when her man was alive but happiness just the same. … When she knew she was dying didn’t she send for me to make sure the arrangements were still on. They were of course. It was no problem at all, at all, to bury her up there late one night, though how you knew it was stormy I can’t figure out.”

Good guess, I thought. With my wife in one of these detective moods of hers it’s hard to tell how much she knows through her Homo antecessor (or whatever) genes and how much is quick guesswork—if there’s a difference between the two.

“She told you why she disappeared?” Nuala persisted.

“I didn’t ask. When you’re with a woman like that, you don’t ask. She gave occasional retreat conferences outside the cloister; her last one was for priests, if you can imagine. It was in the days immediately after the Council when we all had such great hopes … until the amadons in Rome ended them. She even went to Rome for a meeting of the order and had a lot of influence on it. Wasn’t she the most impressive woman I’ve ever met, saving yourself, Nuala Anne?”

It was a sincere compliment. Nuala nodded politely. “We’ll see what I’m like in fifty years, Father Mike.”

“But she did write a document for you, didn’t she?” I interjected.

Nuala started in surprise, causing the snoozing Fiona to look up sharply. “Go back to sleep, darlin’; me man was brilliant again.”

“Och,” said the smiling leprechaun priest, “aren’t I surrounded by dark ones?”

“Did she know that General Tudor died in 1965, three years before she did?” I asked.

“If she did, she didn’t say. I didn’t know it meself. She cared for him or at least felt sorry for him. She had ways of finding things out, and herself in the cloister.”

“She probably found out where he was and wrote him, forgiving him,” Nuala said thoughtfully.

“It would be very like her. … She was not a mournful person. She had absolute confidence that the castle would be restored. She carried grief over her husband’s death to the grave. But she had long since given up mourning. She prayed to him every day.”

He paused and shook his head.

“The last time I saw her before she died, she gave me the document I’m going to show you … give to you. ‘Father Mike,’ she says, ‘you know that I didn’t enter Carmel to expiate my sins, don’t you?’ And don’t I say, ‘Mother Augusta, I never thought you did.’ And she says that the old canon tells her that what happened between her and General Tudor that night was, under the circumstances, not a serious sin. … I told you that the old canon was way ahead of his time, didn’t I?”

“He was that,” Nuala agreed, now patiently waiting out the old man’s story, since he had promised to give us—well, to give her—Mother Augusta’s final testament.

“ ‘My whole story is in this, Father Mike,’ she says. This and the little book I did about me husband that you have in your rectory. Just as I am certain that Castle Garry will be restored someday, I am also certain that sometime people will come along who want to know my story. For a long time I felt, well, too bad for them. It’s none of their business. But I realize now that it’s wrong to think that way. My story is just a little bit of them terrible times, but it also shows how grace works. I’ll be with Arthur soon, and he’ll want to know why I didn’t put it all down, and himself loving history. Moreover, I think Himself will be a little upset with me, because it’s a story of His grace. So here it is. Give it to anyone who wants to know what really happened out here if you think you can trust them. You read it, too, because I want you to know the whole story when you sneak me into the grave where you’ll bury me forty decades too late.’

“And then doesn’t she laugh? She was a great one for laughing, Mother Augusta was.”