The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman Read online

  ‘When a comma is not required.’

  ‘I shall repeat. For the umpteenth time. For the benefit of your inattentive ears. When a sentence is complete and independent and not connected in construction with the following sentence, it is marked with a period. As, fear God, period. Honour the King, period. Have charity towards all men, period.’

  ‘But I do not honour the King.’

  ‘Kildare you’re being tiresome, you know. Do you have charity towards all men, period.’

  ‘No, period.’

  ‘Well that is a pity, period.’

  ‘No one has charity towards me, period’

  ‘Ah you are getting the point, period.’

  On wild rainy days he came hunched and huddled up under a naval great coat from which his head emerged to wipe his nose gently against his sleeve. And if the day continued dark and cook brought us up bowls of hot vegetable soup, he would tell his little stories, looking down now and again at his bitten fingernails, his thumb rubbing along his spoon and then pulling his soiled shirt cuffs back under his frayed jacket sleeves.

  ‘Yes my absent minded tutor. He was always nervously rushing hither and thither never fully realizing where he was. Until one day, stepping off a ladder backwards from a book shelf high in the college reading room he was killed. For the world of scholarship it was most sad. He broke his brains. They hopelessly tried to revive the poor man on the reading room steps. But he was as absolutely dead as an old bone.’

  And those afternoons following lessons, Darcy Dancer would wander to the stables. To see the big hunting mares bred by his mother in off the grass in their loose boxes chewing hay and waiting to foal. Foxy Slattery the head groom’s son, milked the cows and fed the chickens and would be lurking there silently behind the bales of straw glancing up sideways as he made a sucking sound with his lips secretly pulling smoke out of a cigarette. His one or both eyes blackened and his face bruised if not by the kick of a cow then by his father’s fist the previous night.

  ‘What is wrong with your face.’

  ‘Ah I have a knock on it now and again.’

  And as the herd came mooing in from the fields, udders swollen and led by three goats, Foxy ran back and forth behind them waving his hat, shaking his fist, kicking with his boot and throwing sticks, stones or anything at wayward beasts. When a chicken was to meet its doom he would charge after it, his two hands outstretched, his mouth spitting vile oaths and curses as he galloped crashing and banging through barns and sheds tripping over rakes and ploughs, lashing out with swipes of his sharpened axe at the fleeing hen. And once when he fell full length immersed into the water trough, he surfaced, swinging his axe and roared out two words I had not heard before.

  ‘Fucking cunt.’

  Crooks on one of his frequent insomniac tours of the sleeping house, shuffling in an old pair of my father’s slippers embroidered in gold with a stag’s head, caught Foxy stealing whiskey from the wine cellar. In the struggle, as the bottle broke on the red tile corridor, Foxy kicked Crooks in the shins and shouted that Crooks himself had been stealing the wine and whiskey for years. Next day Foxy’s head all wrapped in white bandage and his both eyes closed to two blue little slits. Catherine the cook said his father had socked him like a football all over the Slattery cottage. And when Foxy’s bandages were finally gone he celebrated on a bottle of poteen, picking the lock of the cabinet in the tack room where it was specially kept to cure beasts of blackleg. Then half delirious atop an unlit bicycle heading down the drive on his way through the black night to the village pub, he sailed on the first turning straight into a tree. Crooks hearing the news of cracked ribs, fractured skull with various contusions and abrasions as well as a broken arm, announced solemnly to every member of the household.

  ‘That should keep that regrettable rapscallion quiet for a while.’

  But before these bandages were off, Foxy, his arm still in a plaster cast, was trying to ride an evil minded stallion which had already attacked and nearly killed two grooms. And every able footed inhabitant of Andromeda Park ran for their lives when Foxy mounted bareback came charging out of the stable lashing the wicked brute on its quarters. Suitably named Thunder and Lightning, the beast bucked, its hooves flashing sparks across the yard with Foxy hanging on like a leech two handed to its mane. Till with an almighty undulation of its equine spine, Thunder and Lightning threw Foxy eleven feet high over the wall into the orchard. Where Sexton, a six foot four inch tall man who wore a black patch over his blind eye, was pruning trees. And who in his great shambling way, produced Foxy back out again crumpled unconscious in a wheelbarrow with a daisy chain wreathed around his skull.

  ‘Here’s the hero served up with laurels. Now tell me what will I do with this stupid sack of imbecility. Lateat scintillula forsan. If any of you uninitiated understand me Latin.’

  Later when I came into the shed where Foxy, his plaster cast arm brushing away the swinging tail of the cow he milked, had his head again newly wound with gauze.

  ‘What this time is wrong with your head.’

  ‘Ah I have a knock on it now and again.’

  With summer, new grasses growing thinly over his mother’s grave, where an obelisk, tall as a man, now stood, letters gleaming in gold leaf, chiselled deeply in the grey stone.

  In everlasting memory of

  Antoinette Delia Darcy Darcy Thormond

  beloved wife of

  Caesar Reginald Sean Kildare.

  When Darcy Dancer went there, he found placed on the granite plinth a fresh bunch of flowers just as were placed freshly round the house on hunting days. When always there was great commotion and feverish activity with the sound of boots down the halls and servants at the windows watching my mother in black and my father in pink be mounted by grooms at the foot of the steps. And Sexton said that her ladyship’s favourite mare when it grazed the surrounding field came each morning and afternoon to neigh over the cemetery wall. And I felt a strange loneliness growing. Just as the bright green moss did on the tops of the old deer park walls. And now when some of the stones had fallen and lay there in the growing grass, I’d wonder who would ever come and build them back up again.

  For two months now, only the men to talk to in the barns and stables. After Foxy Slattery finally ended up in the hospital. With two broken legs. Got in the course of stealing exotic fruits from a neighbouring Lord’s greenhouse one midnight. A crack shot and former colonel of a crack regiment, his Lordship cornered him in the top of a tree in the walled orchard. When Foxy refused to descend, his Lordship blasted him down with the near misses of his shot gun. And now the only excitement stirring was when a foal or calf were born. With men tugging sometimes six or seven of them on a taut rope out a barn door. To all fall thump on their backsides as a calf with one last almighty heave was finally pulled out of a groaning heifer.

  ‘There he is lads a fine big strong bull with not a bother on him.’

  It rained till autumn. One unending caravan of clouds after another heading east, carrying mists and vaporous winds across darkened days. When suddenly the sun shone blazing. And Darcy Dancer’s father returned for three weeks of harvest. Selling the barley and the wheat as soon as they stood near ready and ripe to be cut and an auction was held for the two hundred cocks of hay. And before he left, ten more big bullocks, fifty sheep and five sows went off to market. And trays of silver egg cutters my mother had collected over the years along with selected pieces of Wedgwood and Meissen were packed by Crooks to accompany my father’s luggage.

  Two upstairs maids Norah and Sheila and Kitty from the kitchens were given notice. And when Norah and Sheila were miraculously next morning reinstated, Kitty, in tears and howling out the act of contrition, was nearly dragged all the way to the front gate. And times she had minded me, her blue eyes wide like footballs and her red kink hair electrified around her head, as she said God would get even and had cast a curse on the house because my father a Catholic was raising me as a pagan Protestant. But wherever s
he was, she would, she promised, pray for the redemption of my immortal soul.

  Sexton, in his Sunday best, his black bicycle cleaned and shined to go off to mass, went gently pumping his pedals with his long legs. And shouting as he rode by the front of the house and down the drive.

  ‘Incorrigible, incorrigible cur, that’s all he is or will ever be and you couldn’t whisper pax vobiscum within a mile of him without being branded a liar for life.’

  Foxy had following the mending of his broken legs used one of his crutches to break his father’s arm, who, he claimed next morning, punched his mother all night over the house. Catherine the cook said what better hand to administer justice than a husband’s and it was about time someone had caught the wench who’d go behind a cock of hay with any stable lad, she with her skirts up and they with their trousers down. With Crooks mumbling as he gloomed through the pantry, nervously scratching at the tiny spots of dried soup and gravy that dotted his livery.

  ‘No good will ever come out of that bunch.’

  Mr Arland on recent instructions from my father now came only Monday, Wednesday and Fridays, assigning me work to do alone on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he went instead to the great castle where the heaviest nobleman in the world lived and which could be seen on clear days from the high land of spy glass hill, its turrets and towers nestled distantly between the forested downs. Sexton exaggeratedly said it was where he worked for slave wages till my mother visiting remarked on his most splendid roses and chrysanthemums. And he wasted no time before he got himself fired by levelling a few sophisticated insults to the foreman which had to be made less and less so until that thick headed eegit understood. And soon after he was with cap in hand taking favoured instructions from the lady of Andromeda Park.

  ‘Ah young master Darcy there was no more beautiful woman than your mother. She was a saint, god rest her, a beauty. God speed her soul to heaven. She was a madonna. By god she was a madonna. With the purity of the blessed virgin, sine dubio and the kindest of the master creator’s creations, sine ira et studio, as surely as you follow my Latin.’

  Days when Mr Arland was absent I found much pleasure climbing in the lofts and searching the attics. And on fine days, followed by my mother’s wolfhounds Kern and Olav, I would ride my white pony as far as I could get the stubborn animal to go across the fields. Trying once to make my way fording the streams and around the lakes to the great castle, but with its tower out of sight I would lose my direction and get lost. Returning muddy and scratched and leading my tired sweating pony into his box and fetching oats. I’d wait till Foxy would come in with the cows for their evening milking. Watching him reach in under their bags to hammer out jets of milk with his jerking fists, his woollen hat pulled down over the scars on his brow.

  ‘And where has master Darcy been today.’

  ‘I tried to find the way to the castle.’

  ‘Ah you’d have to know the way around the woods and lakes for that. Sure I’m taking that old Thunder and Lightning for a gallop again and I’ll show you the way.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s time you stopped getting knocks on your head and your legs broken.’

  ‘Ah don’t worry I’ll be giving out the knocks soon enough. And the ones I’ve been getting will be like taps of a feather compared to the ones I’ll be handing out.’

  ‘Sexton says you’re a cur not fit to have conversation with the likes of me.’

  ‘That dirty filthy one eyed liar. What’s he doing but riding his cycle around pulling his prick into every hedge because not a woman in the countryside would let him near her.

  ‘What do you mean by that.’

  ‘Now don’t go around asking them questions and saying the answers that they came from me.’

  ‘But I do not know what you mean.’

  ‘Sure you’re old enough don’t you pull yours.’

  ‘I do not know what you are saying.’

  ‘The thing between your legs you piss out of. Haven’t you seen the bulls at the cows and the stallions at the mares.’

  ‘I am always shooed away.’

  ‘Well I’ll show you sometime, some night when the time’s ripe. It’s like so, the milk I’m squirting out the teat I’ve got in me hand. You can come with me over beyond where there’s the woman.’

  ‘What woman.’

  ‘The wife of the one eyed one armed man. She’d soon teach you.’

  ‘I’m not allowed out at night.’

  ‘I’ll get you out.’

  ‘Crooks locks the doors.’

  ‘Never mind that stupid eegit Crooks. I’ll have you out and not a soul will know. And here for a start I’ll show you mine. It’s only a middling size now but in two seconds it’ll be as long as an axe handle and spitting in a minute like a squirt of milk out of that cow.’

  ‘Nurse Ruby said that’s wrong till you’re old enough and married.’

  ‘Never mind that cross eyed hunchback who’d never find a husband in donkey’s years.’

  ‘Don’t say such a thing about my nurse.’

  ‘What harm, she’s gone now and you’re old enough. Sure what would that old crone know. Who’d put a hand to her when there was the likes of Norah and Sheila with nobs on them that would open a treasure chest.’

  ‘You shouldn’t speak of our servants in that manner if what you are saying is not nice.’

  ‘Sure nice or not there are goings on in the big house I could tell you plenty about. Four of the girls this last year are gone from there now with their bellies bulging to the nuns in Dublin.’

  ‘And what do you mean by that.’

  ‘That they’ll be having their bastard babies before long.’

  Darcy Dancer went crossing the cobbled stable yard that night. Pony’s bridle draped over an arm. The word bastard blazing on the mind. A distant whistle of the train and a beast groaning out somewhere on the evening pastures. To know now for certain that men did something to ladies. And that Nurse Ruby went red in the face as I sat on a chair by the copper bath. She slapped my thigh when she looked down and saw what Foxy was showing me, sticking straight up at her from my lap. And to know now that a cross eyed hunched back was ugly to the rest of the world.

  And a

  Beauty

  Only

  To me

  4

  As the autumn days shortened, cobwebs were getting thicker and darker on the ceilings of the house. The crack where the bees made honey in the wall of my mother’s bedroom grew wider. And each time I came there to see where she lived and touch the things she owned I found a turf fire glowing in the grate. With Crooks still entering her door with trays and once passing in the hall I heard his voice which suddenly made me stop and shiver.

  ‘Madam I do believe there is a little sun this morning, shall I part the drapes further for you. And I do hope Catherine is making the coffee more to madam’s preference, ah allow me, madam to freshen your water decanter. I understand madam it’s twenty eight instead of thirty to dinner. The smoked salmon will be at the station at three. Certainly madam, the Sèvres. And the blue candles, of course.’

  I tiptoed to the next door down the hall to enter my mother’s ablution room to listen. And could see through the half open door Crooks reflected in the dressing table mirror as he stood at the foot of my mother’s lace canopied bed. His right hand clasping his left, his chin held high and his head inclined to the side. He stepped forward touching the counterpane, his voice still full of urgent ministration, and a fear crept up my spine. That all in this house had died. And dwelled in an eternal world like heaven or hell.

  At nights it took Darcy Dancer hours to sleep. Feet chilled under the damp blankets. Alone, with his sisters and nurse gone away. And now every day to go down the hall and with no one near, to go into my mother’s room. See myself in the painting picnicking under our greatest oak tree, my sisters and I seated around our mother. The colours matching the fresh flowers put each day on her writing desk and the tables by her bedside. And in the ablut
ion room her toothbrushes laid out on the pink marble wash stand. The glass shelves of her soaps and bath salts waiting ready for her hand. Her scent bottles wiped and polished gleaming and once even her tub filled with hot steaming water. When I heard Crooks’s voice again.

  ‘Norah how many times must I tell you to air madam’s towels.’

  Pastures growing soft again with rain and grazing cattle shortening the grass, leaving only the clumps of stiff stemmed sharp ended rushes. To walk early mornings wandering with Olav and Kern by foxes’ coverts and watch the big dogs bark and dig furiously only to suddenly whirl and chase a zig zagging bounding hare, the great hounds stretching across the turf pounding furiously in pursuit. And wandering back up the hill towards the house I’d detour down into the servants’ entrance. To find Sexton cutting stems and filling vases in the basement flower room.

  ‘Why does Crooks draw my mother’s bath.’

  ‘Ah Crooks doesn’t know he’s half gone daft. The man’s sine dubio as mad as a hatter. But your mother, Master Darcy is with us nevertheless, living and breathing like life and any man who doubts that will have to reckon with a fist in the gob from me.’

  A lead drain around the domed skylight of the front hall began to leak and in the worst rain storms would make floods on the black and white tiles. Until basins and finally buckets were all over the floor. And with water seeping in, mushrooms were flowering up from skirting boards and carpets in the cloakroom. Where when Mr Arland was hanging his coat I asked him what he meant by his Latin remark about Sexton, insanus omnis furere credit ceteros.

  ‘Kildare does it not ever dawn on your lazy head to refer yourself to your dictionary if, as is clearly the case, you cannot translate even the most simple of phrases.’

  ‘My mind goes blank at the thought of Latin.’

  ‘Pity.’

  And Mr Arland smiled as I presented my sheet of paper.

  EVERY MADMAN THINKS EVERYONE ELSE MAD