I don’t know who you are, you who will read my story. I am uneasy about telling it to someone I’ve never met, someone who might not even be alive today. We Irish always want to see the expression on someone’s face when we tell a story, so we can win them over as we talk. Well, it can’t be helped. I hope you will be tolerant of my weakness and my failings and forgive me. Perhaps you would have behaved very differently if you were in my circumstances. Perhaps not. I ask you to be tolerant of the world in which I grew up, just as you would want those born after you to respect your time and your culture, even if it were not their own.
I hope that my biography of my husband will tell the first part of my story. My heart was breaking when I wrote that little book. But I had to do it. I had to record what a wonderful man he was and how deeply I missed him. I was a very young woman then and perhaps too sentimental. I feel that I hardly know the author of the book, but I admire her restraint.
While I was writing it, I was thinking seriously of what to do with the rest of my life. I did not want to become a recluse living in a gloomy old manor house in which everthing was frozen in the spring of 1918. I realized I could marry again. I was not sure I wanted to do that It would be difficult, I knew, in my social class to find another man like my Arthur. I would always be making comparisons. Moreover, while I enjoyed the pleasures of the marriage bed with Arthur, enjoyed them intensely, there had always lurked in the background a, what shall I call it, a hint of another love, another kind of love. It was like that with Arthur, only deeper and richer and more demanding. As long as we were together it was not an option. The lover who lurked, just around the corner, was content to leave me alone. He did not, definitely did not, want to take me away from my husband. He left me alone when Arthur was in the trenches, too. Nor did he intrude in my life when I was paralyzed with grief. But he did let me know he was waiting.
I went to Canon Muldoon about it. “Can I become a contemplative nun?” I asked him. “Is that what God wants of me?”
He was not surprised at all. Nothing surprised the canon. “What do you think, Gussie?” he says to me. I think he’s calling me, inviting me, very gently, very tenderly, but very persistently. “You don’t want to marry again,” says the canon. “I wouldn’t mind,” I says, “though it would be hard to get used to another man. But this other lover is very persistent. Is it God?” I asked.
“Who else would it be?” he says, and that was the right answer, wasn’t it now?
Then he says that it’s possible for someone to be involved with both a human lover and a divine lover. Men and women have done it. I told him that I was sure some had, but I didn’t think that was possible for me or what this persistent lover wanted of me.
Then I asked him how I could enter Mount Carmel, and myself not even Catholic. The canon said that would be no problem at all, at all.
Then it was 1921 and the “Troubles” came to Ireland. I was not afraid. We had always been close to our tenants, and Garrytown was hardly a revolutionary hamlet. But anarchy has no memory. One stormy night a band of the Irish Volunteers, most of them from down below in Kerry, appeared in front of our house. They were badly drunk. They beat some of the servants and set fire to the outbuildings. They were removing furniture and paintings from the house. I went out to chase them away. They laughed at me and cursed me and then tied me to a tree and threw mud at me. I was soaking wet from the rain, which had started again and which was putting out the fires. I thought they would kill me. I was terrified, of course, but I was ready to die. I would join Arthur sooner rather than later.
Then a British Army patrol showed up and surrounded them. A British officer cut me down from the tree. He said he was General Tudor from the Ninth Scottish Division and that Arthur had been his chief of staff.
He carried me into the house, and we made love. I was frightened and lonely and hungry. I cannot say I was raped, but if I were in full command of myself, I would have said no to him. It might not have done any good.
He was a wonderful lover. I think I could have fallen in love with him and married him, if I had not found out later that he had a wife and children in England.
As we were lying in each other’s arms after love, I heard rifle shots outside. I paid no attention. When he left the next morning and I went outside to try to salvage what I could from the raid, the servants told me that the Brits were Black and Tans and had shot all the men whom they had captured.
You can imagine my desperation. I believed that the English government had no business ruling Ireland. Our family had supported Home Rule for fifty years. We should not have been a target. Now I understood that every landlord in the west of Ireland was a fair target. Moreover, I had committed a sin, fornication surely and probably adultery, too. Our own Vicar had gone to Dublin with his family, for which I no longer blamed him. So I went to the canon, who assured me that under the circumstances it wasn’t a serious sin. The canon, as you say, Father Mike, was way ahead of his time. Maybe even a little bit ahead of the present time. I am sure now, however, that I was not fully responsible and have long since forgiven myself, as I’m sure God has forgiven me.
I did not enter Mount Carmel because of that incident. I was not seeking a place to do penance for a sin which, at worst, was not my fault. But the incident made it clear to me that I would have to decide soon.
I said I would leave the castle as soon as the Troubles were over. We were all fools then. We thought the Troubles would be over in a few months. We were sure that the British Army would leave Ireland as General McCready wanted them to and that Home Rule would finally take effect.
We didn’t realize that the Troubles would go on for years and never really end, not even today.
General Tudor came back several times. He was always respectful and always persistent. I told him that I would not commit adultery again. He said that he and his wife were close to divorce. He would divorce her and marry me.
Did he mean it?
I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. Officers coming home from the war in those times found it difficult to adjust to family life. Perhaps he and his wife were really estranged. He was lonely, as I was, and overwhelmed by the carnage of the war and the violence in Ireland, which he did not, could not, understand.
I told him that I was grateful that he had saved my life, but that I did not believe in divorce.
Suppose, I used to ask myself in those days, that he was not married. Would I marry a man who had shot down captives in cold blood, a man who was the O.C. of the Black and Tans? Not very likely, but there was no point in bringing up that point, since adultery was my main argument against any romance between us.
He never tried to push himself on me. He probably thought that he was a perfect officer and gentleman and had never violated me. I had not resisted, had I?
Was I tempted?
I was a young woman of flesh and blood, alone in the world, and frightened. Certainly I was tempted, especially since the Church of Ireland tolerated divorce. I suppose there was enough Catholicism left from my ancestors that made me resist that path.
Yes, I was tempted, severely tempted.
Fortunately for me, I did not really believe that he would break up his family for me. Rather, I suspected that once the war was over he’d go back to England and his family and forget about me.
There was also this other love, lurking patiently all the time.
Then, just before the truce and the withdrawal of the Auxiliaries and the Cadets, the IRA came again to Garrytown, again up from Kerry, again dangerous wild men. This time, however, they were on the run from the Tans. They were all very young. The leaders were four brothers named Whelan, nice respectful young men, despite their later reputations. They took over the house as a kind of sanctuary, feeling that the Tans would not attack an English, as they saw it, manor house.
I didn’t try to tell them that I believed in their cause, that I was Irish, that my husband had died a Catholic, and that I was almost a Catholic. I didn’t think then it would have made a difference. Later when I accompanied Kevin O’Higgins’s daughter, who is one of our nuns, to the annual Mass they have and again met Tom Whelan, now a totally changed man, he told me that it would have made a difference, but they were not going to harm us anyway.
Tom is a remarkable man. He will go to his grave sorrowing for what he did that Sunday morning and grateful for Kevin’s forgiveness and for what it made possible in his life.
Then the lorries appeared with the Cadets.
I was at a loss as to what I should do. I really was on neither side. I knew the men in my house were very dangerous men and would do more harm. If Ireland’s cause was my cause—and it was—then their way of lighting for the cause was not my way. On the other hand, the Tans were no better. I didn’t want another massacre on my land. I went outside to forbid them entrance to my house, as daft an idea that a still-romantic young woman could possibly have.
They shouted obscenities at me. Hugh Tudor stood there in his puttees and his Sam Browne belt and glared at me coldly.
“You’d better decide pretty quickly whether you’re English or Irish,” he said in an icy voice.
“I’m Irish,” I said flatly. “And English, too. As you very well know, General Tudor, my husband, who is buried behind that house, earned the Victoria Cross. As both an Irish and English gentlewoman, I forbid you to enter my house.”
I turned on my heel and strode back towards the door of Castle Garry. As it turned out I saved the lives of my servants and of the IRA men. I had delayed just long enough for them to escape from the back doors of Castle Garry before the shooting started.
When the shooting started, I had not yet reached the house. I think they were trying to kill me. Did Hugh Tudor give the order to fire? I must say candidly that if he did, I did not hear it.
I fell to the ground, trying to escape the bullets, I suppose. Something hit my head and I lost consciousness.
Later, as dawn was breaking up the night, I awoke and saw that our lovely house was a mass of rubble with only two walls standing. I had a large lump on my head and a bad headache. Otherwise I was all right. I found it hard to believe that the house was gone. All traces of our family history and of my love with Arthur had been obliterated in a crazy burst of gunfire.
For a moment I felt hate. Then I realized that my lover had sent an unmistakable message. I hurried down to the Catholic parish house, awakened the canon, and told him I wanted to leave for Mount Carmel immediately. I was admitted the next day, a penniless postulant with only the clothes on her back.
The canon had a way of managing things. He arranged for the sale of some of the property which was left and provided me with a dowry for the convent He told me that the IRA men had escaped, as had my servants. He had arranged with the undertaker, the only other person who has ever known the truth, to bury a wooden casket in the grave next to Arthur. He promised me that when I died he would see that I was really buried there.
“ ’Tis better,” he said, “if you disappear altogether.”
It was. Much later, when Ireland was free, I could have claimed some compensation for my property. But I did not need or want the property. Lady Downs was dead. There was no reason to bring her back to life.
I heard nothing about General Tudor. I prayed for him of course. But I did not want to know what had happened to him. Tom Whelan told me four years ago at the Mass in Booterstown that Tudor was still alive. He had been living in exile in Newfoundland for thirty-five years. Kind of like he’s doing penance, Tom says.
For the men and women the Tans killed? I wondered. For killing me?
I wrote him a short note, assuring him of my prayers. I received an equally short note back. He thanked me for my prayers and asked me to continue them because he needed them. He said that he had become quite good friends with an Irish priest who lived near him. That was all.
My new lover has not deceived me. Like all love affairs ours has had it ups and downs, mostly because I am a selfish and weak human. But He always has been with me and will be with me when the time comes in the very near future for me to go down into the valley of death.
He will walk with me, and Arthur will be waiting at the end of the valley.
So, my young friends—I must think of you as very young—there is my story. As I read it over, I find it banal. Perhaps you will, too. In any event, I have been loved twice in my life, both times by wonderful lovers who in some fashion are the same lover. I have lived and died a happy woman.
Nuala piled together the sheets of the manuscript, written in a clear and forceful hand, and gave them back to Father MacNamee. In exchange he gave her a manila envelope.
“ ’Tis a photocopy,” he said. “Do I understand you have her memoir of Lord Downs?”
“And her poetry, which she never mentions.”
“Maybe she wrote more in the convent. You’d have to ask them about it.”
“Did they know the whole story?”
“The Prioress who admitted her did. I presume that the subsequent ones must have or the burial arrangement would not have survived. They never, never regretted it.”
“I’m sure not.”
“She had no way of knowing whether Tudor thought he had killed her?” Tasked.
“I don’t know, Dermot. I don’t know. Who can say what he thought or what he cared? Maybe he would have fled to Newfoundland anyway. He must remain a mystery.”
I looked at Nuala. “End of the road?”
“End of the road, Dermot Michael. I am reluctant to take this with us, yet I know she wants us to have it.”
We shook hands with the P.P., who still hadn’t opened the envelope, and left the rectory, Fiona trailing after us.
“ ’Tis a relief to get that off my mind,” Father MacNamee said with a sigh. “A great relief altogether.”
“Well, Nuala?”
“Do you want to tell the story, Dermot Michael?”
“I do.”
“Then Gussie will be happy to have it told at last.”
We walked slowly back to the castle under the thick clouds that hovered over us.
“Well,” I said, “we’ll have two more days here with nothing to do.”
“More golf?”
“Maybe a little bit, but mostly lovemaking.”
She looked at me anxiously, knowing that we had come to our turning point.
“Two whole days, Dermot Michael?”
‘Two whole days.”
She gulped but did not protest.
“That might prove interesting. … Do you mind if I take me shower first?”
“Not at all.”