Blackwater Hall, County Kerry
March 1958
Papa said that St Patrick’s Day took winter and gave it one last loving hug before opening the door to spring. And as the morning dawned, after a week of rain, Hattie tiptoed down the quiet stairs of Blackwater Hall and out the front door into a crispness that momentarily burned her lungs. It was glorious; a rare cloudless Kerry day.
She passed Albert as she crossed the lawn, those ridiculous breeks hoisted high on his hips and the shotgun over his shoulder.
‘Does Papa know you’ve got that?’ she said. Once – when they were a team – he would have risen to the tease, but now he ignored her and carried on walking. ‘Albert, you’re only allowed to shoot alone when you’re good and ready.’
He paused, turned back, held the stock end towards her so she could look along the open barrel, two discs of blue sky visible at the end. It was empty. ‘Just practising my mount. Mama’s going to meet me later.’ He closed the gun with aplomb and lifted it to his shoulder, one green eye squinting as he sighted his imaginary target.
Hattie watched him. ‘Papa says you should shoot with both eyes open.’
He lowered the gun and ruffled her hair. A little of the old Albert shone through. He was like that now: variable. It seemed the further he went from the house, the closer he came to himself.
His waxed jacket sat heavy on him, its pockets bulging. Hattie pointed to them. ‘And I can see what’s in those.’
‘Well,’ he said with the air of someone who had been caught out but cared nothing for it, ‘it’s difficult to shoot a pigeon without bullets.’
‘Shells,’ she corrected.
He paused. A stalemate. Then he nodded and turned, making for the edge of the woodland where the lawn was swallowed by ivy.
Hattie wondered if she’d ever eaten pigeon.
Or if, indeed, she ever would.
She met Tomas in the walled garden. He stood by an overgrown arbour where small drops of dew hung like diamonds from the bare tentacles of a clematis.
She smiled uncertainly. ‘Hello.’
‘Happy St Patrick’s Day.’ He laughed; he had a lightness that had been absent the week before.
As he walked to the shed, Hattie followed two steps behind. He lifted a bag of potatoes over his shoulder, then pointed to a sack at his feet; it was a third of the size of the one he held. More sacks sat outside the shed, each small one partnered with a Tomas-sized bag. ‘Make hay while the sun shines,’ he said, already walking back towards the garden’s archway.
Hattie shouldered her potatoes and scuttled after him. ‘How are we ever going to plant all these today?’
‘’Tis quick work,’ he said. ‘And thirsty work. There’ll be men all over the valley planting out this morning.’
‘And girls?’
He paused, looked back at her. ‘Girls too.’
From the garden they followed an overgrown gravel path through a coppice, emerging onto a field of freshly dug earth. ‘Here we have the ridges. Been growing potatoes on this spot since my father started at the estate.’
Each ridge was a foot wide and as long as the field, which stretched a hundred yards down the gentle slope. There was a pleasing regularity to the rows. It looked, to Hattie, like God had raked his hand across the soil in readiness for the season ahead.
‘Did you do all this?’
‘I did.’
She looked up at him.
‘The soil is yielding, Hattie. My father pulled the rocks out of this ground with his bare hands’ – he indicated the stone wall surrounding the field – ‘and still there are more each summer. Gifts from God.’
‘Gifts?’
He nodded. ‘They keep coming and coming. A surprise and yet . . . not surprising.’
He’d picked up his spade and was leaning on it, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond the field. In the silent blue morning there wasn’t yet a breath of wind. Hattie shifted her weight from one foot to the other and dropped her sack, the thick thud drawing Tomas’s attention with a sudden flinch. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead.
‘Everyone has their way of planting, and this is mine.’ He pointed to the field’s central ridge. ‘We’ll start here.’
‘Is it normal to begin in the middle?’
He smiled, a small laugh chasing away the faraway look in his eyes. ‘I got a head start.’ Hattie tried not to show disappointment. ‘Wouldn’t want you missing the parade.’
She nodded without expectation.
Last night, Papa had announced that Hattie and Albert would join him at Ballinn’s St Patrick’s Day festivities. ‘They most certainly will not,’ Grandmother had said, her rheumy eyes narrowing. ‘It’s a weekday and this girl’ – she’d waved a hand in no particular direction, but of course she meant Hattie – ‘needs to get used to discipline.’
Tomas moved forward, indicated she should start planting next to him, that they would work together. Side by side.
Albert, as so often now, had made matters worse. He’d used his stubborn voice, learned from Mama, and said, ‘Who’d want to celebrate an institution that’s shackled Ireland anyway?’ turning Grandmother’s face so red that Hattie felt she might explode. She’d clutched her chest and heaved heavy breaths before sending both of them to bed with just a look, and without dinner.
The soil was warm at its surface, cool beneath. It crumbled in her fingers. As each potato disappeared into the ground, she felt her spirits begin to lift.
Mama wasn’t at dinner either – she’d had a headache, again – and when Hattie peered into her bedroom she was fast asleep, the sheets twisted round her body like a rope.
When Hattie had dug her last potato into the ridge, she said, ‘Will we get more?’
Tomas picked up the sacks, let them hang, deflated, over his arm. ‘We will. We will. But first: tea.’
She followed him to the far corner of the field, where a flat stone topped the wall. Tomas reached behind it and produced a canvas backpack. Out of it he took a red-checked napkin containing two large scones, a square of butter and a jar of dark jelly.
‘Bramble jam,’ he said. ‘Blackberries mostly, but you never know what my sister gets in there. Once she added hawthorn berries. I never forgave her.’ With his penknife he spread a thick layer onto the scone and handed it to Hattie, watched with fascination as she devoured it in four bites.
‘Don’t they feed you in the big house?’ he laughed.
She didn’t want to tell him about last night’s argument. Or the way she felt about Grandmother. Or how lonely she was. Instead, she said, ‘Did your sister make the scones too?’
‘Tabby? Yes. She takes care of me, so she does.’ He said this in a way that was affectionate but also grudging. A shadow passed across his face and Hattie looked up; a skein of geese flew overhead. ‘When she heard there was a little lady up at Blackwater Hall, she insisted on sending morning tea.’
‘I’m not a lady!’ Hattie laughed.
Tomas tilted his head to the side and gazed across the field. ‘The daughter of Blackwater Hall is a lady,’ he said. ‘And one day your father will become lord.’
She’d never thought about this before. ‘I’ll really be a lady?’
He nodded. ‘I think so. At least, ’twas like that before.’
‘Before when?’
‘Look! Two magpies.’ Tomas’s hand was outstretched, and Hattie followed his gaze. Loping along the edge of the furthest ridge were two birds, their iridescent wings glinting in the sunlight. ‘That’s for joy, you know?’
She’d heard the driver say the same thing during the week. ‘I wish I could have some joy,’ she said, her bottom lip pushing forward.
Tomas began to fold the napkin, flicking it clear of crumbs before stashing it in his bag. ‘Complain not that you have no shoes, lest you meet a man who has no feet.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means, Hattie, that it’s good to be thankful for what you have: your hearth, a place to lay your head. And normally, I think, enough to fill your belly.’
‘It’s just that I don’t like it here.’ She looked down at her fingernails. They were drawing small circles on the soft sandstone. ‘I wish . . . I wish I could leave.’
Sharply he said: ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’ Then he softened, caught her eye. ‘’Tis not a comparison I’m making, Miss Hattie. Only something someone told me once when I too was wishing for more luck.’
‘Who?’
At this question he laughed, shaking his head. ‘You’re a brazen one, I’ll give you that.’
Although he was a man and she only a small girl, she was at ease with him. But still her cheeks flushed.
He brushed a lock of hair back from his face. ‘’Twas Tabby told me that. She put me on the straight and narrow, one foot at a time. She’s a dote. One day, Hattie, you can visit the rambling house. It’s in her front room.’
She wanted to ask him what it was, the rambling house, but he’d already stood, and she started after him as he made his way along the edge of the field. ‘Would Tabby like me?’
He stopped and turned. ‘Yes, Hattie. Tabby would like you very much. My sister takes care of souls, so she does.’
She continued ahead of him, puffing. ‘I wish my brother would take care of me.’ When they were younger Albert had been protective of her. Always by her side. Then, the six years between them wasn’t a wedge but an elastic with just enough stretch to give them space but keep them together. ‘But all he wants to do is go back to England. To study. But Grandmother says he has to go to university in America.’
‘Does she so?’
Hattie lowered her voice. ‘I don’t think he likes Grandmother much.’
Tomas laughed quietly at this.
‘But he likes England . . . or a girl there. He told Mama’ – at this she blushed, another thing she wasn’t meant to know – ‘and she’s going to help him get into Cambridge. He studies with her in the library almost every day. I never see him!’
They rounded the corner and walked out of the field, returning to the overgrown path that led back to the garden, back to the waiting sacks of potatoes. The crunch of the gravel was the only sound in the undergrowth.
But then, a flutter, in the trees to Hattie’s left. A flurry of wings, a splash of grey in the bare branches. She turned to show Tomas, but he was already looking, already admiring the display before them. He glanced at her briefly, raised his eyebrows in the way that Albert would once have done, then turned back to the entertainment. Two pigeons. Not fighting, wooing, as Mama would say with a slight flush to her cheeks.
At that moment, Albert appeared through the archway of the garden, fifty feet ahead. Mama was with him, pointing to the treetops. The most important thing about using a gun, Papa had said as they’d crossed the heath, is to pay attention to what’s around your target, not just the target itself. The gun was already mounted, Albert’s face hidden behind the stock as it swung in an arc. What’s happening beside you, and in the distance. He followed the noise of the courting pigeons, while Mama hung back, eyes only for her son. Where your companions are. What they’re doing.
Hattie wanted to turn, to warn Tomas, but she couldn’t look away . . . and then Albert pulled the trigger.
There was a thunderclap, an instant, and it took her breath away.
She turned back. Tomas was no longer standing; he lay on the path in a ball. His hands covered his ears and his eyes were squeezed shut. His shoulders were so rounded it looked as though they’d disappeared into themselves.
She stepped forward, put her gentle hand on him.
He struck out. Hard. Hattie tumbled backwards. Hit the ground. The whoosh of her breath felt like it came from another place, another body. Her shoulder wrenched painfully beneath her and she cried out, but it was garbled, deflated. She lay gasping. Felt a pressure on her shin.
A hand.
Tomas pulled himself to his knees, leaned over her. She lifted her hands protectively.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. The gunshot. I didn’t mean to . . . Sometimes I . . . panic . . . I’m sorry.’ And she knew he was.
Perhaps Hattie tried to say something, perhaps not. But no words came out as she looked towards Albert and Mama, who were searching the ground below the leafless hazel grove. For just a moment, she felt a flush of pleasure.
Albert had missed. The pigeons survived.
And then Mama, her hand on her son’s shoulder, turned to them. Saw them for the first time. Took in the sight of the gardener kneeling over her daughter. Her face crumpled in confusion. Then fear. In one swift movement she pulled up the hem of her skirt and began to run towards Hattie. Crying out, pushing Tomas aside with such force that he was flung from the path.
Falling to her knees, she placed her hands either side of her daughter’s stricken face.
A moment before she turned to look at Mama, Hattie locked her gaze with Tomas – his wild eyes pleading – then he melted backwards and away, into darkness and shadow.