3

“Of course you can,” Lady Gregory said. They were alone in the library. The other guests, including now her father, were in the walled flower garden, where the wine and food had been spread.

The library was dark and cool, musty with the pulpy odor of old books. The French doors, which opened on the garden, were tightly shut and, to make their privacy complete, Lady Gregory had drawn the curtains. A pair of electric sconces flickered dimly on either side of the black marble mantel, but the book-lined walls of the room seemed to suck the light up before it actually illuminated the space. Reading would have been impossible in here, but it was just as well. Jane was reclining on the plum-colored Victorian chaise longue. At her elbow was a side table on which sat a pair of gilt-edged books, Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men. They were the first two editions of Irish epics that Lady Gregory had published more than a decade before. These two exquisitely bound volumes had been gifts from Willie Yeats.

Lady Gregory was sitting erect in an upright desk chair she’d pulled close to Jane. Her dark figure loomed over the young woman, but not threateningly. On the contrary, her sympathy was powerful; Jane felt it as a kind of pure oxygen and, even in that closed room, she breathed more easily. At last she allowed her most awful thoughts to take the form of words.

“But I’m all that’s left of him. If Douglas is killed—” She stopped, feeling the full weight of those words she had never dared speak aloud. Horrible, yes, but still only words, and they certainly had not killed him. “—Pamela and the children would never return from London.”

“Has your father told you not to leave?”

Jane shook her head. “It’s never occurred to him I might want to.”

“But you do.”

A long silence followed those three words that were as much conclusion as inquiry. The silence was reply enough. Jane was lying back like a patient in a hospital. She had unpinned her auburn hair and it was loose to her shoulders, a pillow beneath her head. The luminous gray fabric of her dress contrasted not only with the plum velvet and with the darkness of the room, but with the upright woman at her side. She said in a quiet, resigned voice, “If I don’t go now, Lady Gregory, I never will. I haven’t been apart from my family, not at all, not even for school like other girls. I’ve always had governesses at Cragside.”

“I know that. I must tell you that I was the one who encouraged your father to keep you at home. But that was when your mother died. You needed your father and he needed you. Your brother had returned to London to read law. It was a lonely time for all of you. But that time of need is past for both of you.”

Jane’s hand fell to her collar and she began to toy absently with her gold locket. She said, “I’ve been to Dublin, of course, but never alone. It wasn’t until Douglas went away that these feelings got the better of me. More and more I began to think of him as already dead, and I knew what that would do to my father. And I knew that, with Douglas dead, I could never leave him.”

“But Douglas isn’t dead, darling.” Lady Gregory dreaded her own son’s departure for the war. But she knew how important it was to resist living as if the worst had already happened. What had already happened that year was bad enough. One brother’s only son had been killed at Ypres, and another’s at Passchendaele. How could she not be terrified for Robert? But she repeated calmly, “Douglas isn’t dead.”

Jane closed her eyes. “I know, I know. But Pamela’s father is dead. And Mr. Lane. That great ship went down just beyond our cliffs, and they weren’t even soldiers! And then Pamela and the children had to leave. And that was when I began to grow terrified. Not only for Douglas and all those boys in France, but for myself. I saw all of my life before me there. And I knew that much as I have cherished it till now, from here on I would hate it and I would end by hating him.” She sat up and reached desperately for Lady Gregory’s sleeve. “Oh, I love my father! I love him as he loves me! But I cannot spend my life at Cragside! I cannot!”

Lady Gregory covered her hand. “I know your father better than you, my dear. He knows that you are a woman now and not a child.”

“But he’ll be heartbroken.”

The older woman shook her head, smiling sadly. “Hearts as old as ours have been broken and put together many times. Your father will miss you, but he’ll do well enough. The more important question is what will you do?”

Jane replied at once. “I thought to go to Dublin, to find work.”

“There! You see! Dublin! It’s only three hours by the Great Western. The train comes right to Gort. You’ll visit each other often. It’s not as though you’re going to America.”

“Father won’t go to Dublin, Lady Gregory. You know that.”

“To be with you?” She nodded dramatically, widening her eyes, a stage effect. Then she became serious again. “But you’ll need a place to stay, and as for work . . .” She leaned toward Jane, full of a new thought. “You handle all the accounts at Cragside? Bookkeeping, correspondence, the lot?”

“Yes.”

“And you use a typewriter?”

“Not rapidly, but I’m careful. I manage with few mistakes.”

“Well, I could see a variety of positions for a smart girl like you. What would you think of serving as secretary to a famous folklorist?” She picked up Gods and Fighting Men and idly flipped its pages. “She’s forever transcribing notes, an endless task, as endless as these stories are. A good typist would be invaluable.” She put the book down, then clapped her hands girlishly at another idea. “Or you could work as assistant manager of a struggling Dublin theater, a job doing accounts and correspondence at which you’ve proved yourself already, though not also involving midwifery to cows.” Lady Gregory laughed appreciatively. Hugh, in explaining why they were late, had said this girl could do anything, and she believed him. “And you’d be with people your own age. And after the west of Ireland, my chick, you’d find that refreshing. All the players at this particular theater are under thirty.”

“I’d never find positions like that.”

Lady Gregory stroked Jane’s hand. “They’re one and the same position. I’ve been looking for someone like you for ages. You’d be my general factotum.”

“Factota!”

“And she knows the Latin!” The two women laughed. “If you started by living in my house in Merrion Square, how could your father object?”

A startled look crossed Jane’s face.

Lady Gregory misunderstood it. “Well, you’d be on your own through the fall. I’ll be out here most of the time, you know that. Coole Park in the fair weather is where I belong. After I brought you on, you’d hardly see me. The theater season gets under way in a month. Rehearsals begin this week. You’ll be catering to the whims of self-anointed geniuses. Keeping them in shillings and tea will leave you exhausted, and when their audiences fail to appreciate them, your job will be to laugh loudly, weep audibly, praise the show at intermission, and at the end clap until your hands hurt. It’s not the glory days of the Abbey when John Synge and Willie were slaying dragons every time, but our writers and actors are serious people. You could help them do their work better. It’s a position in Dublin I’m offering you, Jane. Not here in the west. I didn’t mean you’d be at my side. Where I need you is the theater. And you’d live in Merrion Square only until you found a flat of your own. It’s not another parent’s shadow I’m offering you.”

“I know that. What I’m thinking for the first time is that I can do it. That’s what makes me nervous. It’s one thing to dream of going, quite another to see a way—Oh, Lady Gregory, I believe you! I can go! You’re right. And my father might accept my leaving if it was to work for you.”

“He’s not much for theater or for folklore.”

“But he’s much for you.”

“And would it be what you want?”

Without hesitating Jane nodded, then threw her arms around Lady Gregory’s neck. After a moment she pulled back, embarrassed. “This is no way to behave with my employer.”

“First I’m your friend,” she said simply. She looked directly into Jane’s eyes, and she liked the way the girl returned her hard, searching look. This young woman’s confusion and distress were signs of the intelligence she possessed in sufficiency to recognize what a lonely life on the remote, unfriendly coast of Ireland would do to her. The love of her father might sustain her for a time, but one day he would be gone and then what? She loved the animals, the work, the land, but no aspect of Cragside—not even her idea of the place—reached to the core of who she was. That her longing for something else was undefined did not make it less urgent. And that this instinctive rejection of her family’s hallowed tradition was implicitly forbidden did not make it less right. What? She should make Cragside the absolute center of her life, her only future? And if her brother did return to claim his place as heir and lord, a wife at his side as lady, what then? Jane’s position was impossible. A life alone? A life as spinster aunt? It was strength, not weakness, to reject a life that someone else had chosen, no matter that that someone else was her beloved father. It was honor, not disloyalty, to prefer her will to his in the matter of her life.

Lady Gregory identified, in other words, with the daughter, not the parent, perhaps in part because her own son had never inflicted such a pain upon her. He’d never felt stifled at Coole Park because she hadn’t wanted him to stay. Robert’s departure had not been rejection but acquiescence. She’d wanted him to leave because, upon reaching his majority, he’d become the legal owner of the place and nothing threatened Lady Gregory more than that. Oh, the position of women was impossible! Coole Park was the center of the world she’d created for herself, for Ireland, for literature. Gracious as Robert and his wife Margaret would have been about protecting her prerogatives, she’d have felt usurped if he’d asserted his right in any way.

“You should walk with your father down by the lake. Tell him today, my dear.”

“Will you tell him with me?”

Lady Gregory shook her head. “Your father and I have a history that would make it doubly hard for him.”

“He never spoke of what happened between you. I knew there was a time after Mother died that he . . .”

Lady Gregory waved her hand in front of her face, a fanning gesture or a banishing one. But instead of shooing the memory she called it forth. “It was sad for both of us. He was ready to throw off widowhood, but I had grown into it. How could I marry again, even him?” She smiled that sad smile once more, and her brown eyes were flecked with feeling. “I’m Lady Gregory. It’s who I am. But I love your father, and I know how difficult it is to deny him.”

“I always assumed you and Mr. Yeats—”

“No, dear, not Willie. It isn’t like that with us. My goodness, he’s thirteen years younger than I am.” She laughed. What people made of her relationship with William Butler Yeats always amused her, and in fact in their earlier days she had secretly rather liked the air of innuendo that attached itself to their association. Now the prurient gossip of strangers irked her. Friends knew, of course, that the love of Yeats’s life was Maud Gonne, the nationalist and sometime actress. Her portrayal of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the mythic embodiment of a free Ireland, had given Yeats and Lady Gregory their first triumph. But that was more than a decade ago. Since then, in Augusta Gregory’s opinion, Maud Gonne had squandered her beauty, her talent, and the love of that great man for a bizarre series of self-destructive flirtations with men and movements, the most recent of which was with the dreaming madmen of the Fenian revolution. But Lady Gregory owed Maud a great debt, for her steadfast, cruel rejection of Yeats had made him all the more dependent on Lady Gregory herself. “Willie is my confidant and my muse, my inspiration. We never know whether he’s created me or I’ve created him, and now, after all these years, neither of us is anxious to find out.” When she unclasped her hands to touch a finger to her lips, the damage of arthritis was apparent. Her hands had been her best feature, but now they were crooked, misshapen. Behind her hand she was smiling, though, and she seemed the most gently self-accepting person in the world. “Willie is my best friend, Jane. Your father is my special love.”

Jane saw that what Maud Gonne was to Yeats, Lady Gregory had become to her father. No wonder he was reluctant to come to Coole Park. She felt a wave of sadness for him unlike what she’d felt before—it was not guilt this time—and now it did not swamp her.

Lady Gregory said, “After you talk to him, then I will. It’s the right thing, my chick.”

“I keep thinking of Cragside. Who will—”

“Do you think he loves Cragside more than you?”

It was a question she’d never dared put to herself directly, but now that this woman had put it to her she saw the answer. Her father’s love for her and for Cragside were of different orders and each in its way was absolute. Yet her father wasn’t the one who had to choose between absolutes. She was. But that was done already. Her anxiety fell away. Already she was gone. She was alone. And she was—this realization came as a surprise, a gift from Augusta Gregory—strong.

Lady Gregory drew artists and writers almost mystically, but if Coole Park was a Capistrano for two generations of Anglo-Irish swallows, there was something in the place itself too that brought them. The house, with its yellow mortar walls, its gracious bow windows, and the elaborate flowering vine that lay against the façade like a lace veil, was more a home than a castle. The lawns were modest. The orchards, gardens, and woods were beautiful but not extraordinary, and all that distinguished the lake were the swans that made their nests there and the distant view of the Connemara hills. Yet altogether—house, grounds, garden, and lake—Coole Park achieved a decorum which, set against that wild Irish countryside, never failed to soothe its visitors. And in the house itself they saw the relics of the best of their own tradition, for the Gregory family had lived at its pinnacle for a hundred years. On the walls were mementoes of service to the Empire: scabbards and shields, Oriental paintings, and the photographs, all signed, of potentates and generals and field marshals, but also of family friends like Browning and Tennyson. There was a framed letter from Edmund Burke and a mezzotint given by Gladstone. The men and women who, unconsciously at first and then with an overriding self-consciousness, were reinventing the meaning of Irish life came to the Gregory estate for the sense of continuity it gave them. It offered a past from which a future might come. Against the mixed-breed hating chauvinists on two sides, Coole Park stood as a self-asserting middle ground that would not be denied. To be there was to breathe in the “dreaming air” of the new Ireland to which nearly everyone who came was devoted. Coole Park refreshed them in their conviction that already it had come, if only they knew to look for it.

Passing time that day in the blooming walled garden was Yeats himself. Since 1913 he had been spending most of each year in Sussex, where he lived with Ezra Pound; but swallow that he was, he’d returned the week before to Coole Park, where he would stay for the summer. He was still a bachelor and, though an eminent poet for twenty years already, he still had the air, even at fifty, of a youthful genius in which achievement is far outweighed by promise. His clinging boyishness probably derived more from the still unsettled character of his personal life than from any want in his writing. For example, at this moment, he was standing moodily away from the others, like an adolescent, having stalked from the table because his opinion had not carried. Dressed in bow tie, waistcoat, and somber gray suit, he was standing on the ledge of the small fountain in the center of the garden, the toes of his black shoes overhanging the water.

Across from him, seated in the corner of a stout wooden bench, was George Bernard Shaw, tall, skinny, white-bearded, wearing dark glasses, a cap, and a belted jacket. His arms were folded over his chest. His glasses obscured the fact that he was asleep, though his breathing, rhythmic and faintly whistling, indicated his absolute indifference to whatever else was going on around him. Not quite sixty, his nature was the opposite of Yeats’s, for he seemed very old. His wife, a frail woman in the other corner of the same bench, was intent upon her needlepoint.

On the oval-shaped pebbled terrace near the house was a long wooden table covered with linen and spread with the remains of lunch. Half a dozen people lounged in their chairs. One was Augustus John, the painter, whom Lady Gregory had asked to do a portrait of her grandson but who had spent the weekend doing Shaw. His canvas and easel were in a corner of the garden across from the bench on which the Shaws sat, but he still wore his paint-spattered smock and there were blue smudges on his face. Next to John was Sir Hugh Tyrrell. He had maintained a preoccupied silence through the animated meal, partly because the dominant topic until talk turned political was Gaelic folklore. The others regarded the subject of ancient Irish mythology with reverence, but in Sir Hugh’s opinion it was a trivial genre awash in superstition. He couldn’t say so, of course, because his hostess had herself almost single-handedly established its respectability. The other reason for his preoccupation involved his hostess’ absence from the table; he couldn’t get his mind off Jane.

Next to Sir Hugh, no doubt the reason Yeats had left the table, was Maud Gonne. At five feet ten inches, she was always the tallest woman and often the tallest person in any group; which led her detractors to feel justified in calling her an Amazon. Yeats had never forgiven her for condemning him to the conviction that he was short. Middle-aged now, the mother of a nearly grown daughter and son, she was still beautiful. In her day she had mesmerized theater audiences and royal audiences. When she was presented at court as a girl, the Prince of Wales had declared himself smitten, and she still had the perfect features and dark eyes that so beguiled him. Even the excessive drapery of Victorian clothing had not muted her sensuality, and still the curve of flesh below her chin, the veined white skin inside her wrists, the subtly revealing line of her bosom heightened her appeal more than the voluptuous display of later generations would. In fact, her appeal depended on contradictions. Her womanly flare, so inviting to men, contrasted absolutely with the harsh, anti-English histrionics that were the mark of her public appearances. Working for the cause of Irish freedom—not Home Rule but total independence—she had become in her own way a legendary match to Lady Gregory, particularly in the west of Ireland, where, instead of collecting ancient Gaelic tales, she was a leading organizer of peasant resistance to evictions. The peasants worshiped her not just because she was on their side but because she wasn’t a peasant. She served the dispossessed, but she was a wealthy woman who always traveled with a maid. She was brilliant and self-disciplined, but her husband was a meanspirited drunk. It was the great humiliation of Yeats’s life that, having rejected him, she should have married the vainglorious buffoon John MacBride. But wasn’t that the point? She had rejected the ambivalent poet who sought to hold justice and truth in the same moment in favor of a diehard Catholic whose hatred of England and willingness to act upon it were unqualified even by so basic—to him, base—an instinct as self-preservation. Maud had left her husband when his violence turned toward her, but she never divorced him. Yeats, for his part, never put aside his worship of her. Was it her radically univocal mind that drew him? Her rebelliousness? Had he never recovered from the shock of love when she’d brought his Cathleen—his Ireland—to life on stage? Or was it only her rare beauty that obsessed him?

Maud was outrageous in Lady Gregory’s garden that day, not in her attitude toward Yeats—she hardly noticed him—but in her argument with Robert Gregory who, next to his stunned wife Margaret, sat across the table from her.

Sir Hugh listened in silence as the two went at each other with the fierce but simultaneously detached energy of people who have known each other and disagreed for years. Maud was older than Robert, and she had been a figure of such stature at the Abbey Theatre as he came of age that he always deferred to her as if she were fully of his parents’ generation. But there was no deference in him now. He was an officer in the King’s Army and it was, finally, his duty to defend the King’s honor.

Neither spoke for Sir Hugh, though he could not look at Robert or hear his defense of the British position on the war in Europe—that was the issue—without thinking of Douglas.

“We supported the Boers against England, didn’t we?” In her anger Maud’s voice became quiet and her pronunciation became even more precise, more aristocratic. “Why should not right-thinking people be against England now?”

“The Gregorys did not support the Boers, Miss Gonne, I can assure you of that. My father was an officer of the Empire, as you know.”

“My dear Robert, your mother stood with me in Dublin protesting Queen Victoria’s visit when that war was over.”

“Well, my mother wouldn’t stand with you today.”

Robert’s wife touched his sleeve as if to say, Don’t go on with it. She was offended by Miss Gonne’s politics, but even more by her manners.

Maud said, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, that’s my credo. I really don’t see why the Irish people should regard the Germans—”

Before she could complete her statement, Willie Yeats turned around at his place by the fountain and cried loudly, like a director crying from the back of the rehearsal hall at a mulish actor on the stage, “Maud!”

Everyone fell silent at once and looked at him.

Willie had loved the talk at lunch, lighthearted yet intelligent. Gaelic mythology was the wellspring of his inspiration and as such set him apart from all the other poets of his generation. It made his work impossible to emulate. He knew the subject as no one else did and nothing pleased him like sharing his enthusiasm with others, particularly Irishmen. Yeats was giving them back a long-lost past, although whether they could ever fully have it back had been the crux of that fine, midday conversation. Shaw had said acutely, “To revere the old tradition is to realize one’s separation from it.” But Yeats of all people should have known that in Ireland—this was a major theme of his—culture always leads to politics. And so the conversation had stumbled out of the Celtic twilight into the pitch dark of England’s Irish policy, from which, as a topic, sensitive souls like Yeats had withdrawn utterly. Hadn’t he been battered for years at the Abbey by the primitives on both sides? And hadn’t that tension, culminating in the awful Abbey riots of 1907 when Synge’s Playboy of the Western World opened, led to his severe nervous breakdown? He protected himself now by keeping his enthusiasms in check and by regarding his early idols with a certain disdain. He couldn’t imagine how Lady Gregory maintained her interest in a Dublin theater. Dublin opinion of every stripe seemed crude. And so, frankly, he finally admitted to himself, did Maud.

What he could not admit was that his anger at her was not only about her insensitivity toward Lady Gregory’s son—the Germans had killed three members of his family in as many months—but also about the slight he himself felt from her. He’d been stunned with happiness when Maud showed up unannounced in midmorning. He’d thought she’d come to see him, but her indifference had soon belied that. She hadn’t known he was there. She was simply at loose ends, waiting to address a Fenian rally that night in Galway.

He said sternly, “You’re disgracing yourself. You exalt the hatred of England above the love of Ireland.” His eyes flashed at her, but eccentrically. He had a skew cornea that destroyed the symmetry of his stare. “Please consider what this family must feel today. Robert leaves for France tonight.”

Maud blinked across the table at Lady Gregory’s son. “Is that true? You leave for France?”

“Yes. I asked Mother not to mention it. I didn’t want our picnic to be a wake.” He smiled sardonically, fingering his Sam Browne belt.

Maud blushed. It was as if a man had announced his terminal illness.

Robert enjoyed her embarrassment. He lifted the flap of his tunic breast pocket and withdrew a cheroot case. He took one, then offered the case to Sir Hugh, who also took one. When his eyes met Maud Gonne’s he offered it to her, and she took one too. “By God, Miss Gonne, I’ll give you this. You’re the only person I know who hasn’t changed a thought in her head on the Irish question in fifteen years.”

Maud leaned toward Sir Hugh to accept a light from him, then inhaled a lungful of the rotten smoke. “I hate to say it, Robert, but my ideas on the Irish question became permanent when I played that part in the play your mother wrote with Willie.”

“I wrote that play alone,” Yeats said good-naturedly, returning to the table.

“That’s right,” Robert said, winking at Sir Hugh. “Mother only helped with the dialogue.”

When Sir Hugh waved out the match, he asked, “What have they told you about things at the Front, Robert?”

“We held our own at Festubert. Since then it’s just a constant bickering with grenades and mortars, Sir Hugh. I shouldn’t expect much news until our lads are set for the big show. The reserves are positively pouring over. The Channel is glutted with ships. Soon we’ll have in place the greatest army the world has ever known. Then . . .” he took his wife’s hand. His cheer was what she lived for now. “. . . you’ll hear about the race for the Rhine. Put your shilling on the Irish regiments.” He grinned. “Meantime, everyone wants assignment to the trenches now that summer’s here. Only in the lines can one rest properly. The reserves are employed in constant night digging.”

No one spoke. Robert’s display of optimism was to be expected, of course, but still it seemed anachronistic. Did he believe what he was saying? The British public had no direct access to information from the Front. Censorship was rigorous and correspondents were addicted to the high-flown rhetoric of official explanations. And the public, lacking any larger sense of the overall situation, had no way to evaluate the bits and pieces of information gleaned from letters or rumors. Nevertheless, everyone knew that since the losses of the previous winter, the government’s effort to fill the ranks had been carried out with an urgency approaching panic. And as for Festubert, the costly battle of the month before, even civilians knew that the goal had not been to “hold our own” but to break through the German line. Festubert had been another British disaster.

Douglas had written his father that he was being dispatched to Saint-Omer, and that had seemed good news because it wasn’t Festubert. From maps in his study Sir Hugh had concluded, however, that Saint-Omer meant Ypres. Trying to ferret anything from Robert, he said, though it wasn’t true, “I read that we’re turning up the heat at Ypres again.”

Robert replied easily, “They say in the trenches that anything can be true unless you read it.”

“But the Connaught Rangers are being sent there.”

Robert looked directly at Sir Hugh. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know that.” But he wasn’t convincing. All his chums were still in the Connaught regiment, and he’d have known everything about it.

Willie touched Sir Hugh sympathetically. “Is Douglas with the Rangers, Sir Hugh?”

“Yes.”

Yeats gave Maud a look. You see, woman!

And suddenly Tyrrell realized that Robert was being reticent not to protect his wife from the grim realities, but because he regarded Miss Gonne as some kind of threat to British security, as if she would pass on what he said to German spies. It was so ludicrous he almost laughed. Robert, trying to live up to the cultivated image of his long-dead father, was the last imperialist, and he was as self-inflated as Maud Gonne was. These people, all of them, seemed mad and their smug certainties preposterous.

Since his retreat to Cragside after Parnell he’d felt an abiding repugnance toward the political realm, even while disdaining his own attitude as antinomian. But lately his feelings had become more pointed. He’d instinctively supported Britain’s war in Europe, but only until Douglas’s enlistment. Since then he’d tried to understand precisely what justified the mounting carnage. He’d begun subscribing to London newspapers again and had read their pathetic moral boosters—“How Civilians May Help: Be cheerful, Write to friends at the Front, Don’t think you know better than Lord Kitchener.” By the time Douglas’s regiment received its orders for France, Sir Hugh was in the grip of a fatal skepticism. It was just as well his son had spent his few days leave with Pamela, for the last thing he needed was a blast of his father’s disgust with the pronouncements of the politicians.

Farmers were what Sir Hugh wanted, not statesmen and not poets either. Theirs was the only real Ireland, as his was only Cragside. Nothing is less abstract than a cow giving birth, nothing less ennobling than the harsh work of mucking stalls, nothing less “national” for that matter than the obsessive love of a parent for his children. All of this was the soil of Tyrrell’s life. Cragside was not just an ancestral home he preserved for tradition’s sake, as if he were, like most gentry, an idolator of his dead relatives. Cragside was meaning itself for him, the opposite of what he feared most—and this is an Irish fear—the loss of rooted identity, the permanent drift of exile. The war was, of course, destroying already the rooted identity of Europe itself, and that was why, even if one’s son was not at risk, it threatened absolutely. By June of 1915, after months of failed brutal offensives by both sides, the deadlock of the trenches was absolute. One needn’t have been privy to the reports of spies to sense with an awful dread how the primeval mire of that conflict had begun to rise, a foul tide, against not only the high-flown rhetoric—Rupert Brooke on soldiers’ blood as “the red / Sweet wine of youth”—but also against the conventional British cheer of men like Robert Gregory. That was why his estimate of the coming “show” was received at his mother’s picnic that day, even by those great talkers, with silence.

Sir Hugh turned away from the table to tap the ash off his cheroot. As he did, he saw through the opened garden gate a maze of boxhedges and beyond that the towering copper beech that stood apart from the other trees. The burnished red leaves of the luxuriant boughs contrasted with the mass of green of the firs and catalpas in the woods beyond. What drew his eye was the pair of figures approaching the tree from the far side of the house. Instantly he recognized Augusta and Jane, the black and bright gray of their long dresses, and he watched as they crossed the lawn. At that distance Augusta looked like Victoria herself. In contrast Jane’s figure was youthful and modern.

He knew well the tree toward which they were walking. In its rough bark Lady Gregory had for years been having her most important guests carve their initials. The autograph tree, as she called it, had begun as a whimsy but was by then a Coole Park institution. Bearing the initials now of W. B. Yeats, John Masefield, George Moore, Lady Margaret Sackville, the Countess of Cromartie, George Bernard Shaw, Douglas Hyde, J. M. Synge, Jack B. Yeats, and many other artists, it had become a totem of the self-conscious Irish literary circle, and Lady Gregory loved to show it off. Sir Hugh watched as she and Jane drew close to the relic, and even from far away he could sense the hush of their awe. But then, to his surprise, he saw the sunlight flash off the small blade of a penknife. Lady Gregory handed it to Jane, and she began to carve upon the tree too. The surprise was that his daughter should have been asked to join that company. He stood, excused himself from the table, and approached the gate, where he stopped to watch. What had passed between them? he wondered.

When Jane closed the knife and handed it back to Lady Gregory, they embraced. Sir Hugh was moved as the two women stood, immobile, in each other’s arms. Oh Augusta, he thought, thank you! When at last they turned and began to walk toward the garden, he dropped his cigar and went through the gate toward them, strolling with a casualness he did not feel.

“My dear Jane,” he said with a broad smile as they met in the middle of the open lawn, “you’ve joined Augusta’s living legacy! What an honor!”

Jane lowered her eyes, but not before he saw how red they were. It would be a mistake to treat this lightly. He looked at Lady Gregory.

She took Jane’s hand. “The initials J.T. will be the ones the scholars come to see. You watch.”

Far be it from a girl’s father to undercut such a compliment, but Sir Hugh was more mystified than ever. Lady Gregory saw that, and she handed Jane over to him, saying, “Why don’t you two walk down by the lake? Tell me if the willow leaves are touching the water yet.” She moved away toward the garden, saying over her shoulder, “My guests must think me awful.”

Sir Hugh and his daughter, after a moment’s awkwardness, dropped each other’s hands and began walking toward the lake. “I don’t think her awful, do you, Jane?”

“Hardly. She’s like Mother.”

“I’m glad you feel that.”

They walked in silence. Sir Hugh knew enough about coaxing creatures out of corners to leave the initiative with her. His job, if anything, was only to point the way once she began to move. God knew he had questions enough for that.

At the water’s edge, Jane stooped for a pebble and threw it toward a line of swans. They veered away.

Then she faced her father. “Miss Augusta has offered me work in Dublin, father,” she blurted. Then realizing that wasn’t it at all, she added, “I told her I had to leave Cragside.”

Sir Hugh’s mouth fell. With her he was incapable of the stony impassivity that he had always shown opponents. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I couldn’t have heard you—”

“You did.” One could only do this brutally, brutally to him, brutally to herself. It was like cauterizing that cut umbilical. Exactly. “I’m leaving.”

Tyrrell turned away from her. Now that she’d said the words, it was obvious. This was what he’d dreaded in every part of his being but his conscious mind. Jane was leaving him. He would be alone. If Douglas did not return—

He snapped his mind shut against that thought, but the pain he felt even short of that loss was too much. And he felt anger. Yet another absolute betrayal, and from the one person he’d never thought to protect himself against. Douglas had always been ambivalent about Cragside. He’d considered the west of Ireland too small a world, which was why he’d read law in London and why he’d married Pamela. But Douglas had surprised him by coming home. Now Jane had surprised him too, and for the first time. His daughter leaving him? What was the feeling, that she’d run him through with a blade? Worse. Had she cauterized his skin with white coal between pliers? No. She’d used the scalding pliers to pluck his heart out.

Only by a fierce, dutiful act of will did he turn his mind away from what this meant for him. What did it mean for Jane?

To Tyrrell the world away from Cragside was a shallow, dangerous place. Dublin? Had she said Dublin? It was impossible for him to imagine at that moment, his daughter, his child, living in that harsh, bleak city. Miss Augusta? She would work for Augusta? How could his old friend have done this?

“What do you mean, she’s offered you work?”

“At the Abbey, as assistant manager.”

“The Abbey!” He swung around to face her again. “The Abbey! You can’t mean it! I refuse to believe you mean it.”

“I’m going, father.”

“But to be with these people? They’re all gas, Jane. Or they will be until the gas blows up in their faces!”

“They’re Lady Gregory’s—”

“I’ve never stomached her coterie, and you know it. I won’t have you becoming one of them. Your place is at Cragside. The theater’s nothing to you! Why would you give yourself to that . . . that . . . ?” He dammed his emotion and stopped. She was giving herself to anything but Cragside. “Was this something you and she—”

“We never discussed it until just now, father. I told her that I had to go away. It was only then she offered me the work.”

“But shouldn’t you think about it? Shouldn’t you have talked it over with me?”

“I knew what you would say. I knew how it would hurt you.” Her voice faltered, and she lowered her eyes. “But that isn’t why I’m doing it.”

Her statement should have undercut his anger, but instead his anger bubbled over. He nearly grabbed her shoulders to shake her. Instead, he faced away. And, in a flash, he saw his own father doing the same thing, showing him his back. But his father had had good reason; this was the son who would renounce his title and sell off most of the ancestral land for nominal sums to the peasants who worked it. This was the son who would put cows in the squash court!

And how his father would be laughing now!

“Jane,” he said quietly, “what they’re doing at the Abbey will come to no good. It’s part of a brew of plots and movements that you know nothing of.”

“It’s theater, father. It’s culture.”

“Culture leads to politics. Listen to these fools here. You’re enthralled with them, no doubt. With the great Maud Gonne. But Maud Gonne is playing a dangerous game, and she won’t be the one to pay when the points are counted.”

If you do this, he added to himself, you will be the one to pay.

“My mind’s decided, father.”

She seemed so determined. Where was his fragile vulnerable child? He looked at her again. His Jane was already gone. On an impulsive, ill-thought-out whim, perhaps, but gone. And now his duty was to accept it. To do better than his own father had done with him.

But he could not. He stared at her. Who was this tough-willed stranger? Tears streaked her face, but she was not sobbing. He realized with a shock that he wanted her to cry with him as she had with Augusta, to show him her anxiety, her fear, her ambivalence. But was that wish of his the unreferred-to obstacle between them?

Tyrrell had loved his wife precisely for her vulnerability. With his daughter the pretense was that their hard, west-of-Ireland life would make her strong. And so, apparently, it had. Would his wee child defy him so? Would his darling girl so confront him with the flaw of their life together? Yes, she had a kind of strength, but what he wanted now was weakness. He wanted her will to fall before his. He wanted submissiveness.

But submissiveness was what he hated in the impoverished Catholics. He hated submissiveness more than the high-flown romanticism of stage-bound nationalists. He hated—

He checked himself, and, suddenly thinking of Anita again, he blurted, “My weakness, Jane, was that I loved your mother in her weakness. But that’s not how I’ve meant to be with you. Perhaps my . . . what do I call it? . . . protectiveness? . . . has been a disservice—”

“Don’t say that, father.”

“You had lost your mother. I was worried for you. If I’ve held the reins too tightly . . .” He stopped. Why was he protesting? To prove that he’d clung to his daughter for her sake, not his own? I had lost my wife! His grief choked him. Douglas and Pamela are gone now too! He wanted to cry out at her, How can you leave too?

He said nothing. He knew enough to recognize that these feelings of his—his need—were themselves driving her away. Yet he was at their mercy.

“I can’t accept it,” he said then, simply.

Once more she lowered her eyes. She was mute.

She was gone. He saw it.

He turned slightly. On a nearby path, a pair of ragamuffin stablemen staggered past, drunk. Tyrrell stifled his repugnance. How little the lives of the desperate country folk resembled the lives of his rich friends. But no one was untouched by the world’s cruelty. For once the sight of men like that did not leave him feeling blessed.

He looked again at Jane. She was unprepared for the world beyond Cragside. He was certain of that. If it hurt her he would rail against it more than ever, but he would know whose fault it was. And he would not forgive himself.