Chapter 14
The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.
I hadn’t anticipated how freeing it would be to step outside the walls surrounding Browne House, to breathe the salt-tinged air and close my eyes for a brief moment, forgetting all the secrets held within its walls.
So many secrets. But one I would have the details of shortly, and another was revealed—thanks to the chatterings of Cook’s assistants.
Whatever was going on here, it seemed Lord Browne—when alive—knew something of it. I drew to mind the journal I’d found in the second-floor study, and thought I should read through it in more detail, as soon as possible.
If I was in danger—both the future I’d dared dream, and bodily—I needed to know what awaited so I could face it head-on.
“M’Lady, please wait,” called Beth, struggling to keep pace somewhere behind.
But I simply pointed toward the sky and ploughed ahead. The weather would wait for no one.
I’d already been accused of causing Lady Catherine’s episode. In Aggie’s own words, I’d “thrown a fit over silly incense and sent her ladyship spiraling into a melancholic state,” and I’d not be accused of not making haste.
At least Aggie had agreed. It was best to fetch Dr. Brady.
I balled my fists as a scowl took hold of my face. I was right to question the contents of the incense. I was right to be wary. But that didn’t stop the roiling of guilt bubbling in my gut as I thought of Lady Catherine’s tear-streaked face.
A storm brewed in the distance, and the rising damp churned the heady, grass-tinged tang of turf, weighing the salt-laden air with the promise of thunder.
Squinting, I glanced out over the violent sea and beyond to the horizon.
Not a bird to be seen. Good. When the birds flocked inland, we’d have only a few hours before the sky opened and God rattled the earth.
As the sound of Beth’s determined steps crunched closer, the roaring ocean battered against shale-laden shore, pulverizing pebbled beach as rocks cracked together—the wrath of Old Gods who’d once battled for control of our isle, before being driven to a land beneath the waves.
The jolt of each tidal push pulsated through my veins.
Boom—wave in. Crackle—wave out. The sound of a hundred carts sliding on slack shale.
My new walking shoes pinched around the laces, but at least I wasn’t the only one suffering.
Beth had a new uniform—that of a lady’s maid.
My lady’s maid, to be exact.
“I don’t think tugging will do much to help loosen it,” I noted as Beth caught up, finger hooked beneath the laces of her new ensemble.
Gone was the black cotton U-necked dress and white linen apron, replaced with a high-necked gown made of dark, soft French twill draped over a frame made of stiff crinoline, as became the maid of a dowager countess.
No apron, not while accompanying her ladyship into the village. Me. I was her ladyship.
There were things power could accomplish that ordinary people could not.
“Sorry, m’Lady,” Beth mumbled, dropping her hand to clutch up her skirt. “It itches something fierce.”
With a scowl, I kicked a stone down the road, but it didn’t provide the release of frustration I hoped for. Instead, it ricocheted off the tufts of grass that grew down the road’s center, untouched as they were by carriage wheels and the maintenance of man.
M’Lady. My Lady, my employer, my mistress, my better. A necessary evil, for now. I glanced at Beth, at her neatly coiled bun and the bonnet atop her head. The flush of her cheeks and the way she stared ahead, biting her lip, as if searching for something.
There’s only one thing I’d be searching for. The shuffling graves.
“What is the condition in the village?” I asked, glancing down the road. It dipped around a downward-sloping corner, but all was clear from what I could tell.
“Sorry, m’Lady?”
“I fear I’m out of sorts, given events. Should we have brought alms for the villagers?”
“Oh … oh no, m’Lady. Not at all.” With a shake of her head, Beth smiled.
“What I mean is, her ladyship has always provided. We’re very lucky to have her.
As soon as the potato failed, she took food straight out of the Crown’s share and distributed it to us, she did.
Even wrote to the queen across the sea—to account for the poor yield.
Told her majesty that the hunger hit us hard, and she had no one to tend the crops bound for England’s shores.
And when the potato failed again last year, she partnered with Lord Belmont and Lord O’Brien to start the green roads, so those in neighboring parishes might earn enough to purchase food.
Though, God above, the cost of everything has made that scheme futile.
What kind of gobdaw decides the solution to a famine is to sell back the food we labored to produce at ten times the normal price? ”
An Englishman determined to kill us off, with the British Parliament’s approval.
I pressed my lips together and shook my head.
The people of Gortacarnaun were lucky indeed.
Landlords all over the country had simply evicted whole families when they were too starved and weak to work the fields, replacing them with strong laborers from Dublin and beyond.
Or turned their hands to livestock, requiring a third of the laborers, which meant two-thirds of the families relying on the landlord were left at the side of the road.
Someone had to do something. Da had told us they thought the Act of Union, bringing us into the United Kingdom, meant an end to centuries of war and persecution.
But, here we were, nigh on fifty years since, and the British used the treaty to steal our crops and continue to make it illegal for Catholics to own land or be educated at school.
Yet they called us barbaric savages, lazy, with naught between our ears to allow us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.
“Th-that—” I cleared my throat, or tried to. A lump had settled large and heavy. Breathe. “That was very kind of Mama.”
Certainly not the action of a woman I feared might harm me.
“Oh, her ladyship is very kind,” Beth gushed, as we reached the downward curve of the road. “Look at what she did for ye.”
I forced a smile, chest tight with guilt, and turned my attention to the road.
Below, in the distance, the main street of the village sprouted from the rocky ground.
Six large buildings surrounded a wide area of beaten soil that likely served as a marketplace, and from that life force, several lanes ran between where smaller thatched structures sprang from the earth. Business, industry, homes.
“Don’t fear the people, neither,” Beth continued.
“Ye may not be the first fake Wilhelmina, but all of Gortacarnaun will swear blue that yer as bonny today as ye were as a child. We owe our very lives to her ladyship, and we’d go to the very ends of the earth to repay all she’s done.
” Beth’s eyes widened, and she clapped a hand to her mouth.
“Oh, forgive me, m’Lady! Please don’t repeat it, else I’ll be discharged from the Big House. ”
As though my heart was a horse and Beth its rider, her words whipped my pulse to life. A cavalry charge that stormed the gate of my rib cage.
That was the second mention of such a thing—confirmed by a living, breathing person.
Not the first to step in Wilhelmina’s shoes.
These shoes. The ones that now dragged as if slogging through rain-drenched muck. The tattoo of my heart rang hollow, a thud-ump that shook my bones and left me half-blinded as I stumbled along the road.
The wind picked up, an ice-cool breeze that floated in from the sea. I glanced to my right, at the storm-tossed ocean, and spied the first gull coming ashore as a semblance of a plan formed.
I needed to discover what had happened to these other Wilhelminas—in a way that would not incriminate poor Beth.
After interrogating Dr. Brady about the contents of the incense.