Whistle for the Crows Read online

  “Now, darrlin’, you’ve been crying again. Oh! Who are you?”

  She had seen Cathleen standing outside the circle of the light.

  “I’m sorry for coming in like this,” Cathleen said hastily. “I’m Cathleen Lamb, Miss O’Riordan’s secretary. My room is directly under this one. I thought I heard a baby crying, and came up to see.”

  “Oh, it’s just her, poor soul. It’s the only sound she can make. I was asleep.” The girl rubbed her eyes guiltily. “I’m supposed to wake if she makes a noise. But it doesn’t make much difference. When she wants to cry, there’s nothing you can do to stop her. Now, darrlin’,” she bent over the little upturned face, “you close your eyes and settle down. It’s after midnight. You’re disturbing the house. You’re a naughty girl.”

  The woman in the bed had seen Cathleen now and was staring. Her lips twitched slightly. She seemed to be trying to speak.

  “Hush, love,” said the girl, “this is only Miss O’Riordan’s new secretary. You knew she was getting one. I told you.”

  She turned her head and said to Cathleen, “We don’t know if she understands anything or not. The doctor thinks she doesn’t, but I’m not sure. Anyway, I talk to her, to pass the time.”

  “Who is she?” Cathleen asked, feeling as if she were still in her dream. She had heard Debby crying, but when she went to her it wasn’t the round baby face but this strange little nightmare one that turned up from the pillow to her. She hugged her arms round herself to stop trembling, for the reality seemed almost worse than the dream.

  “Didn’t they tell you? She’s Mrs. O’Riordan. Rory’s and Liam’s and Kitty’s mother.”

  “No one told me,” Cathleen said dazedly. “I thought Miss O’Riordan—she seemed to be Loughneath Castle.”

  The nurse gave a short laugh.

  “She’s an old terror, isn’t she? I haven’t been here long, but they say—” She stopped, glancing at her patient, inevitably wondering how much the listening ears were taking in.

  “Mrs. O’Riordan had her stroke the night Shamus died,” she said. “That’s all I know. They say she hasn’t spoken since, poor lamb. Look, it’s nice that you’re here, but you’d better go now. I must get her settled.”

  The girl was very young, and her plain, kind freckled face was worried.

  “Of course. Perhaps I could come up and talk to her sometimes.”

  “You can talk to me,” said the girl in a low voice. “I haven’t been here long, but the place drives me daft. I’m not qualified, and I don’t like so much responsibility. But you see I don’t have to get such high wages as a qualified nurse, and the old—Miss O’Riordan—” her voice dropped to a whisper, “is mean. You’ll find out. My name’s Peggy Moloney. I come from Loughneath. But I’m not staying here long. I’m going to London as soon as I’ve saved enough.”

  There was no look of Rory or Liam in that pathetic face on the pillows, but it bore an uncanny resemblance to Kitty. It had the same wide, pale blue eyes, the fine small bones, the fragility. Cathleen wondered why she felt surprise that no one had told her of the invalid upstairs. Why should they have done so? She was a very new employee and the family affairs nothing to do with her.

  But even Liam in his friendly talk in the library hadn’t mentioned his mother. Almost as if she were being hidden away as a shameful secret. No one had said that Shamus’s death had had this tragic result.

  Still feeling deeply shaken and not quite out of the grip of the nightmare, Cathleen went down the stairs on the way back to her room. She was holding up her dressing-gown watching the steps, and didn’t see the tall figure at the bottom of the stairs until she almost cannoned into it.

  “Steady!” said Rory. And then, “What are you doing, Mrs. Lamb? Sleep walking?”

  He was fully dressed. This put her at an added disadvantage. She liked him little enough when he ignored her, but even less now that he stared at her in her state of undress. His eyes were not angry, merely curious, and quite cold.

  “I heard a disturbance upstairs,” she said. “I went up to see what it was.”

  He waited with that cool look of curiosity for her answer, as if he deliberately wanted to embarrass her.

  “What kind of disturbance?”

  She felt a flash of anger.

  “You know very well what kind of a disturbance. It would have been more thoughtful to have warned me, and then I wouldn’t have had to go and investigate.”

  “Do you usually feel the need to investigate the sounds in a completely strange house?”

  “When it seems to be a baby crying, yes. I had this thing—” She hadn’t meant to say that.

  “What thing, Mrs. Lamb?”

  She had begun to tremble and couldn’t stop. It was the chill of the floor on her bare feet.

  “I once had a child,” she said. “I suppose it haunts me.”

  He was staring at her hard. She prayed that she wasn’t going to cry. Shock and strain were conspiring against her.

  “You’re very young,” he said unexpectedly.

  “I was married very young.” She made to move past him. “I’m sorry I did this. It must seem like prying. Now I’d like to go back to bed.”

  “You’d have to have known soon enough. I don’t know why Aunt Tilly didn’t tell you.”

  “Why should she? I’m merely here to do a job.”

  “You might as well know Aunt Tilly and my mother were never the best of friends. Let me give you a small warning, Mrs. Lamb. We’re all practically incandescent, you know. One more quarrel and we’re very likely to go up in flames. If that sort of thing amuses you, stay. But don’t get scorched by us.”

  He gave a smile. It held the first flicker of friendliness.

  “You look too innocent,” he said. “You can let a baby crying hurt you. No one here’s been hurt by that sort of thing for a long time. I’m telling you the truth.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “SO YOU WENT UP to see my sister-in-law last night.”

  Cathleen faced Miss O’Riordan’s long expressionless face. The heavy eyelids drooped. One of the thin fingers was tapping on her desk. It was a measured tap, like the count before a race began, or a firing squad fired their volley.

  “Yes, I did, Miss O’Riordan. I made a foolish mistake. I thought it was a baby that was crying.”

  “And supposing it had been, what do you suppose we do with babies in this house? Lock them in a room and starve them?”

  Cathleen held her head high.

  “I can only say that after my own baby’s death I’ve been sensitive about these things. I investigated without thinking.”

  Miss O’Riordan’s features relaxed.

  “Well, never mind. You had to know about Cecilia sooner or later. She’s a hopeless case, as you could see. We don’t hide her away. One merely doesn’t intrude a person as sick as that into one’s daily life.”

  “I understand,” said Cathleen. “It was the shock, I expect.”

  Miss O’Riordan’s eyelids flew up.

  “What shock?”

  “Why, of finding Shamus dead that night.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The nurse did. Isn’t it true?”

  “There’s truth in it. And there’s been talk enough. But you’re here to work for me, not to discuss my family. I hope you’ll refrain from doing that.”

  “Of course, Miss O’Riordan.”

  “Even in the village. I don’t expect you know what a small Irish town can be, shut in on itself, full of suspicions, sins, inhibitions. Oh, they’ll make a scandal out of Paddy being seen carrying wood in for his neighbour’s wife, and Himself away at Galway market, or Bridget tiptoeing home down that long straight street after midnight with every house’s ears quivering. So you can imagine the shenanigans that must go on in a castle!”

  Cathleen laughed.

  “I do understand, Miss O’Riordan.”

  “I hope you do. Because I want you to go into the village later on and post
those letters we did last night, and do some shopping. You’ll need office supplies. I left getting those until you arrived.”

  “How do I go?”

  “Walk, bless me. It’s under two miles. You can do it comfortably this afternoon. I never work after lunch. I take a nap. If we stick hard at it this morning we’ll cover some ground. First, you can start sorting these letters and diaries. Underline anything that seems worth preserving. There’s someone called Cousin Catriona, for instance, who was a prolific letter-writer. A spinster, I’ll be bound, with her finger in every pie. She had nothing else to do, I expect. They had servants falling over themselves in those days. When you come to my brother Patrick, there may be a bit of censoring required. He was rather offensive, to say the least, about the British and since I have a London publisher, we must hold our fire until we see the whites of his eyes, eh?”

  Cathleen found the task completely absorbing. Miss O’Riordan left her to attend to other matters, and the hours slipped by. Ireland of the nineteenth century, fiery, loyal, quarrelsome, superstitious, romantic and most of the time starving, unfolded before her eyes.

  The material was rich and profuse. There were at least half a dozen novels in these letters, not the least the torn one which looked as if it had been meant to be destroyed, but then cautiously—or incautiously—had not. It simply said, “My dearest girl, you must have been bewitched, or under the influence of Patsy’s poteen. You’re talking nonsense, and I deny every word. See what you can do about that.”

  It was signed simply “Michael,” and across the bottom, in the thick-stroked writing that Cathleen already recognized as Miss O’Riordan’s, was scrawled, “The blackhearted liar!”

  Cathleen was learning caution. She had that letter tucked out of sight when Miss O’Riordan, quite unselfconscious about the incongruity of a duster tied round her aristocratic head, returned.

  “That’s better, that’s better!” she said, flopping into a chair in one of her awkward attitudes, her long sticklike legs thrust out at right angles. “Sister Mary Martha talked sense for once. The orphans’ outing is arranged. I must send off a cheque. Well, how’s your work going?”

  “Very well, Miss O’Riordan. There’s wonderful material here.”

  “Good, good! So now you’re enthusiastic. At first you didn’t think an old woman like me had the material for a book, did you? I was being humoured, for the chance of spending the summer in a castle in Galway.”

  Cathleen met the snapping eyes.

  “Perhaps, Miss O’Riordan. I really didn’t think—”

  “Very well, very well. I can see that you’re going to be invaluable. Your technique and my inspiration. But I don’t like secretiveness, Mrs. Lamb. Don’t conceal other things from me.”

  Cathleen recognized the warning. She wasn’t to stumble on anything and not report it.

  She set out cheerfully for her walk to the village that afternoon. Half-way there Peggy Moloney on a bicycle caught up with her and dismounted to walk beside her.

  “It’s my afternoon off.” she said. “Mam likes me to go home, so I do, since I won’t be in these parts much longer. Tell me what London’s like, Mrs. Lamb?”

  “Well—it’s a wonderful place for the rich, but not so good for the poor. You’ll find far more ugly grey streets there than here.”

  “At least it can’t be so dull,” Peggy said cheerfully. “Everyone here has to make up scandal, if there isn’t any, just to have something to talk about. You’ve no idea the supposing that goes on, and before long everyone thinks it’s true.”

  “Such as what?” Cathleen asked.

  “Well, poor Mrs. O’Riordan’s stroke, for instance. Did it happen because she found Shamus dead, or did he fall and bang his head when he caught his foot in the carpet rushing to her as she collapsed? Those carpets were in a shocking state, it’s true.”

  Cathleen had been telling herself that she knew all the secrets, but she hadn’t yet heard how Shamus had met his accidental death.

  “Why—doesn’t anyone know what happened?”

  “Not exactly. Mary Kate said she’d heard thumps and when she went up to see what it was all about there she found them both unconscious on the floor. Wasn’t it a desperate thing? Mrs. O’Riordan never spoke again and poor Shamus had struck his head on the corner of the desk when he tripped, and he died the next day from a fractured skull without recovering consciousness. And him only twenty-nine and engaged to be married, and yet his real wife there that very night.”

  “The night he died!” Cathleen exclaimed.

  “So they say. A young girl came to the castle asking to see Shamus, saying he was her husband. Mary Kate didn’t believe a word of it—she thought she was just a saucy red-head—but she told her to wait in the billiard room until Shamus came in. Miss O’Riordan was out somewhere, and she didn’t want to bother Mrs. O’Riordan and Kitty, she thought it would upset them. So she left the girl there and went off to tell Patsy. She was away for a while, because Patsy was in the glasshouse. When she came back Shamus had come in and gone into the billiard room, so Mary Kate thought it wasn’t her business to interrupt them. She went back downstairs, and it was some time after that she heard the bumps. That’s all anyone knows.”

  “Where were Rory and Liam that night?” Cathleen couldn’t help asking.

  “Liam was down at the stables with a mare who was foaling, and Rory got home late. He said he’d been into Galway.”

  “And the girl?”

  “Miss O’Riordan and Liam went to Dublin later on to look up the marriage register. The entry was there, plain enough. Who’d have thought Shamus would have been such a scoundrel, and him asking Magdalene Driscoll to marry him. Do you think he was planning to get rid of that red-head?”

  “Is that what they say in the village?”

  “Oh, they say all sorts of things. The black brothers, the O’Riordan boys were called. Sure, and you could expect any kind of shenanigans from them.”

  “Do you think that girl saw what happened in the billiard room?” Cathleen asked involuntarily.

  “Yes, that’s what people asked. Some say she saw and was so scared she ran away and has never been seen since. Others say Miss O’Riordan pays her to stay away. There’s a rumour lately—”

  Peggy stopped, biting her lips.

  “What?” Cathleen asked.

  “Mam said I wasn’t to repeat that one. She said it was wicked.”

  “Oh, all right. If you’d rather not. I expect I’ll hear it, anyway.”

  Peggy turned her young earnest face to Cathleen.

  “You will, and all, if you go to Loughneath. It’s a horrid place, everyone whispering, the men in doorways, the women behind lace curtains, everyone peeping out to see who comes and who goes, making up stories, lies.”

  “I’d rather hear the rumour from you than from gossiping old men,” Cathleen said.

  “All right. I’ll tell you. They say Shamus’s wife had a baby, and of course it’s the heir to the castle, there’s an entail, you see. But it’s being kept hidden. Taken from its mother and her kept quiet because if she talked the baby’s life would be in danger.”

  The cold breath was stirring in Cathleen’s heart again, although what Peggy had just told her was a shocking surprise, yet it didn’t surprise her. She had had that strange intuition all the time about a baby, thinking she heard it crying, almost feeling its, presence. Yet it must be imagination. There surely could be no baby, only the ghost of little Debby.

  “It must be a lie,” Peggy was going on. “I know Miss O’Riordan could be an old devil about it, but not Liam and Rory. Can you imagine Liam wanting to hide a baby or its mother? Or even Rory, although it would mean Rory would lose the estate. He’d be the one who had reason to hide the baby.”

  Cathleen found herself remembering Rory’s face extraordinarily clearly, and the way he had looked at her last night on the staircase. He hadn’t been particularly friendly, but she felt hotly angry that such a libellous stateme
nt could be made about him. She didn’t begin to understand her anger.

  “Couldn’t the baby’s birth be checked just as the marriage was?”

  “They do say there’s nothing recorded because Shamus tricked his wife and kept the birth a secret.” Peggy was looking anxious. “You won’t be telling Miss O’Riordan I gossiped, will you, Mrs. Lamb?”

  “Of course I won’t.”

  “You’d hear soon enough, anyway, if you talk to people in Loughneath. Where do you have to go there?”

  “To the post office, and then to buy typewriter ribbons and so on.”

  “If you’re wanting tea, Mam would be glad to make you a cup.”

  “Thank you, Peggy. That’s very kind. But I don’t think I’d better be away too long.”

  Much as she liked Peggy with her young guileless face, she wanted to get away from her now to digest that disturbing information. It was not only terrible to think that a baby might be callously used, but that Rory should be connected with such a crime was strangely unbearable.

  “One thing,” said Peggy vigorously as she turned to mount her bicycle, “I wouldn’t believe for a minute that that baby is around these parts.”

  This was another shock.

  “Do they say it is?”

  “Some do. But we’re supposed to be all crazy in this country, didn’t you ever know?”

  Loughneath was exactly as Peggy had described it, a low-roofed grey town of one long winding street. Small dark shops and flat-faced houses, like a line of spectators at a procession, were on either side of the narrow road. A few cars and one donkey with its small square cart were parked outside the single hotel which was called the Brian Boru. As Cathleen walked down the street she noticed a curtain pulled sharply back, and a face disappear into the gloom. Elderly men wearing the everlasting cloth cap stared at her from doorways. A couple of little girls bouncing their ball against a wall stopped and gazed.

  She was not only a stranger in this little town, but already word would have gone round that she came from the castle. She would therefore be the subject of delighted speculation. Was she really Miss O’Riordan’s secretary? Was she the friend of Liam or Rory? Or even Shamus’s missing wife?