Cloud Castle Page 8

  Judy made a little movement, surprised but not embarrassed that they should be discussing her as if she were not there, and Raff, perhaps because he sensed her restlessness, said, with a return to his more familiar manner: “Miss Ware is my new secretary. She helps to keep the books straight and the bills in order. She’s from over the water.”

  “There’s too many from over the water at Slyne,” the woman said with a disapproving glance at Judy. “Secretaries, lady receptionists—grand titles for an O’Rafferty’s servants! And what would you be wanting with two women in file house, I’m askin’ you?”

  “We must go,” Raff said with a smile, ignoring the question which, Judy knew, could never be taken as an impertinence, for were not these people, and others like them, once tenants of Slyne with a personal interest in the affairs of the castle?

  Judy got up, stretching her young limbs with contented unconcern. She had a restoring suspicion that the elegant Marcia was not well liked in the neighbourhood.

  “Thank you for my lovely tea, Mrs. Farrell,” she said shyly, and the woman’s eyes rested on her with fuller attention, observing the planes and angles of her face in the lamplight, the coltish grace of her immature body, and the familiar fall of bright hair which, even to her, stirred an almost forgotten memory.

  “Come again, young miss, if himself will bring you. You may be from across the water, but your heart’s already in Irish soil, I’m thinkin’,” she said with unexpected softness, and, for Judy, the earlier magic of the day returned.

  They reached Slyne to hear angry voices raised in the hall. Miss Doyle’s plaintive whine, Mary Kate’s more robust spate of words and Marcia’s polished tones with already an edge to them. The evil smell from Timsy’s oil stove was particularly pervasive and the mournful sound of his cornet rose every so often above the babel of voices.

  “What on earth’s going on?” Raff demanded, and there was immediate irritation in his own voice. “If you must brawl and argue, can’t you choose a less public place? It can’t be very edifying for the guests.”

  “ ‘Tis that Grogan, takin’ the furniture away in a van, and he with no permission from the master of the house, as you’ll be tellin’ them yourself, Mr. Michael,” Mary Kate said, her fat round face red with temper, and the flouting of her authority.

  “Mr. Maule gived permission,” Miss Doyle stated stubbornly for doubtless the twentieth time.

  “I keep telling you, Mary Kate, it’s gone to be repaired,” Marcia managed to interrupt, and Raff, in very few words, ordered the two servants back to their quarters, without waiting to hear their explanations. It was rather enlightening, Judy thought, how definite and authoritative he could become when he chose.

  “Now, Marcia, perhaps you’ll explain.”

  “It’s perfectly simple,” Marcia replied, pushing irritable fingers through her dark, disorderly hair. “A bit of the veneer had peeled off a panel of the William and Mary tallboy in the Grand Saloon and one of the legs was shaky. Grogan has taken it away to repair, that’s all.”

  “Was the damage bad? I hadn’t noticed,” Raff asked with unusual persistence, and she made a small grimace of amused tolerance at him.

  “Oh, darling, but you never notice anything! You’ve lived with all your lovely pieces much too long to be observant. You take them all for granted,” she said, and turned to Judy. ‘You noticed the damage, Judy, didn’t you? You’re always prowling round, looking at stuff.”

  “Yes, I noticed it several days ago,” Judy said slowly, aware that Marcia’s dark eyes were watching her carefully. “Are you sure this Grogan person knows his job, Marcia? That’s a valuable piece and should have expert attention.”

  “Grogan’s very clever,” said Marcia glibly. “He’s done repairs for us before, hasn’t he, Raff?”

  “So Noel tells me,” he said, “but I would prefer to be consulted another time. I don’t care for Grogan, or the way he tries to make a fool of poor Agnes Doyle.”

  “Then you’d better take the matter up with Noel. I had nothing to do with the arrangements—and for heaven’s sake can’t you do something about Timsy playing that horrible instrument in the house?” snapped Marcia, suddenly losing patience, and turned on her elegant high heels and left them to relieve her feelings on Timsy in the pantry.

  “Well,” said Raff wearily, I’d better go and have a word with Noel. Sometimes he takes a little bit too much upon himself.”

  He went away in the direction of the manager’s office, but Judy continued to stand in the middle of the hall, a slight frown between her eyes, and wondering what, in the small disturbance to which they had both returned, had made her feel uneasy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I

  AS March drew to its close with a mildness which heralded an early spring, so Timsy said, Judy felt herself to be an established part of the household. The fact that she was called upon to fulfil many more duties than those for which she had been employed pleased rather than dismayed her, and even the servants had come to accept her. Rosie Boyle, one of the young girls from the vast family at the farm, who came daily to wait in the dining-room, was sent up each morning with an early cup of tea by Mary Kate, and a can of hot water was usually left outside her door to save her the chilly trek to the sink at the end of the passage.

  “You’re quite the daughter of the house now, aren’t you, darling?” Marcia said, but there was an edge to her lazy comment. The servants had never been persuaded to address her as if she belonged there, whereas they called Judy “Miss Judy” with the easy familiarity they accorded to Raff. “They confuse you, of course, with Kathy. Does Raff suffer from the same confusion, I wonder?”

  As always, in her dealings with Marcia, Judy was made to feel that under that indolent charming manner, the older woman did not really like her.

  “I don’t think so,” she replied, guardedly and, indeed, of late, Raff had afforded her nothing more than the casual consideration of any impersonal employer. The moments in which he had seemed to reach out to her as one human being to another had, she thought now, been moments of nostalgia, even of irritation, at the passing reminder of an affair he would prefer to forget.

  “Men are extraordinarily adolescent, aren’t they?” Marcia observed, suddenly admitting Judy to a cosy feminine conspiracy. “Raff is nearly thirty-seven—you’d think he would have grown up—but life here is very cut off from reality, I suppose.”

  “I don’t think so,” Judy said slowly. “Reality is where your roots are, surely?”

  “My dear girl, how very deadly! And who has roots now, with life a hand-to-mouth business at best?”

  “But the lucky ones are like Mr. O’Rafferty. The old traditions are something to hang on to. I wouldn’t find it deadly.”

  Marcia looked at her with closer attention, assessing the girl’s possible attractions. She had, she supposed, some latent charm in the fresh quality of independence of the youth of today, and an inquiring mind which might compensate for a time, a lack of feminine awareness. Her clothes were cheap but well chosen and emphasised her long lines with casual carelessness. Judy, thought Marcia with sudden shrewdness, would not care whether she was dressed by Balmain or the cute little numbers she picked from the cheap stores and wore with such indifference.

  No, she wouldn’t find Slyne deadly, or those tiresome roots she had mentioned with such extraordinary solemnity.

  “Because, to you, it seems like security,” Marcia said a little sharply, not caring for the conclusions she had drawn.

  “But don’t all women want that—don’t you?” Judy asked simply, and Marcia’s eyes narrowed.

  “Meaning would I marry for just that?” she said with slow deliberation. “Very possibly, my dear, since I’m broke, and you might as well know it now as later, but if we’re speaking of Slyne—and I think we are—I wouldn’t be content to stagnate here for ever, for all your dreary talk of roots. The place is worth nothing as a decayed inheritance, but the contents are; Raff needs jolting up,
that’s all.”

  Judy returned the slightly defiant stare with faint compassion. To her it seemed extraordinary that a woman of Marcia’s beauty and worldly knowledge should have such little understanding of the ties of blood and inheritance or the fundamental demands of a man bred to another way of life.

  “He would never sell, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said softly, and saw the little smile of amused tolerance curve the corners of Marcia’s mouth and reach her eyes with lazy confidence.

  “What can you know of Raff? If a man’s enough in love he will do most things,” she said. “You may learn that yourself some day, darling. Have you never been in love?”

  “No.”

  “Then you speak without experience, as one would expect. You can make a fool of most men—just once, anyway. You’ll learn that, too, Judy—or perhaps you won’t, with a temperament like yours.”

  “But not Raff!” Judy exclaimed with shocked candour, and Marcia’s eyebrows rose.

  “Raff?” she repeated inquiringly.

  “Mr. O’Rafferty, I mean. It slipped out.”

  “I see. Well, in learning the simple arts of feminine wiles which I’ve been trying to explain, don’t set your cap too high, will you?”

  It was not a remark, Judy thought afterwards, which either of them could be expected to take seriously. Marcia was too secure in the assessment of her own powers, Judy too ignorant of hers, to join issue on such an unpromising subject, but she knew now that she minded that Raff should be exploited, and that it was probably true that a man enough in love might throw away his beliefs, even though he lived to regret it.

  “Could a man live without roots?” she asked Timsy one morning, watching him swill down the yard with the inadequate broom he preferred to the new one which had been provided for his use weeks ago.

  “Well now, I wouldn’t say that,” he replied, leaning on his broom to consider the question, prompt, as always, to seize any excuse for stopping work. “A plant now—you pull it up and it dies. Had you himself in mind, Miss Judy?”

  She nodded, unembarrassed by his shrewdness. She had found for herself that when the old man forgot to be what Noel termed a Character, he could be both wise and understanding.

  “Ah, well, the master’s roots is in Slyne soil, the same as the rest of us,” he said, “but you’d not be knowin’ what takes a man when the fever comes on him. Miss Kathy, now, would be guided and not set herself up to cry for the moon—for the moon, you see, was right here at Slyne and she wantin’ no more than the things she’d known since a child—but that was long ago.”

  “But he still remembers?”

  “We all remember—but a man must put away his dreams and bring comfort to his bed and beget children to follow him.”

  That was how Raff saw her, taking them unawares as he came unexpectedly into the yard. Swinging on the gate with her red hair flying and the laughter in her eyes, she reminded him, not of Kathy, but of a little girl playing truant from school. Every so often she bit into an apple and, whether she knew it or not, she was flirting outrageously with the old man, safe, no doubt, in the assurance that on him she could innocently practise the least expected of her charms.

  She called out something provocative, then arriving at the core of her apple, spat it out with blithe unconcern for the niceties, and saw Raff watching her.

  “Oh!” she said, scrambling down from the gate, and looking suddenly guilty. “Did you want me, Mr. O’Rafferty? I thought you said you were going to Casey’s.”

  “So I am,” he replied, adding unexpectedly: “Would you like to come?”

  “Oh, yes!” she cried eagerly. She had not been out in the boat yet, and she had a great curiosity to know what the other shore was like and to see for herself the redoubtable Casey’s store which, besides providing for every imaginable contingency, combined the offices of public house, post office, coal and timber merchant and, when the season was right, game and fish openly poached by himself and his cronies.

  “I’ve kept you cooped up too much,” Raff said, with an unfamiliar sense of apology at seeing the pleasure in her face, and Timsy paused in his half-hearted labours to remark:

  He was still the disreputable figure of fiction, with his short, flying coat-tails and knotted kerchief, an ancient, shapeless hat that had once been Raff’s on the back of his head, but his faded eyes had a poet’s look for a moment and she regarded him curiously.

  “Give her time to play, O’Rafferty, and maybe she’ll teach you, too.”

  Raff’s eyebrows rose inquiringly. When Timsy addressed him by his title it usually meant he was disapproving of something.

  “I’ve got past the frolicking stage, Timsy,” he said with a grin, but the old man gave him a sour look.

  “Och! You’ve got into their fine ways at the castle now. That Miss Maule, with the two heels of her shoes like grasshoppers’ legs, and the per-fume she puts behind her ears like they do in the pictures, would never go rollicking with you over the mountains like Miss Kathy did.”

  For a moment Judy thought from the expression on Raff’s face that he was going to administer a sharp reprimand, whether at the reference to Kathy or Marcia, she was not sine, however, but he merely shrugged and turned away.

  “It’s useless, arguing with you when you’re in this mood. Come along, Judy,” he said, but saw, out of the tail of his eye, the furtive kiss she blew to the old man as she turned to follow.

  “What have you been doing to Timsy?” Raff inquired as they walked down to the jetty.

  “We were having a quite serious talk about roots,” she said.

  “Roots?”

  “Belonging somewhere—you know. But Marcia thinks roots are deadly.”

  “And what does Timsy think?” he asked a little grimly, and she was afraid that she had been in danger of becoming indiscreet.

  “It wasn’t very clear,” she answered.

  “Well, well! You mustn’t demoralise my not very active staff or I shall have to issue a rule for no fraternising.”

  Her eyes were round and suddenly uncertain as she watched him pull the boat alongside the jetty, afraid that she had annoyed him by gossiping with Timsy in the yard, but looking up, he caught sight of her expression and laughed.

  “I was only joking, you silly child! Here, jump in—not like that, you little loon, you’ll capsize her!” he said, then, as she hesitated, he picked her up and lowered her firmly on to one of the thwarts, following himself and starting up the engine.

  She twisted round excitedly to watch the shore receding and catch a glimpse she had not seen before of Slyne. The house rose above its sloping lawns in muted graciousness, its long mullioned windows sparkling in the sun. Its faded grandeur was, to Judy, made friendly by that gentle hint of decay; the neglected lawns showed bright promise of the new spring grass, and moss grew with a brilliant splash of colour over the ruins of the wing that had been burnt out in the “troubles”.

  “Not a very edifying advertisement for an expensive guest house, is it?” Raff observed, following the direction of her gaze.

  “It’s lovely,” she said softly, and indeed, with the water widening into a clear mirror of ripples which threw back the reflection, Slyne had a beauty enhanced by its decline. “How could you bear to do it?” she asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Turn the place into a guest house, with strangers poking about and wanting modern plumbing and cocktail bars and most likely neon signs flashing out across the lough. You’d never have neon signs, would you, Raff?”

  “No, Judy,” he said gently, “I wouldn’t do that—though Marcia has some idea for floodlighting the place. It might look rather effective from the lough.”

  “And hideously expensive,” she retorted. I think the Maules have the wrong idea about this place. Instead of trying to run it as a flash establishment for rich tycoons, it should have been left as it was for people who appreciate the old world, and like lamps because they’re homely, and don’t mind ab
out the plumbing or want a cocktail bar. You could have made it pay without all this extra expense and upheaval.”

  “Dear me!” he exclaimed softly, “I’d no idea we’d taken on such a shrewd little critic. Have you voiced these ideas to Noel or Marcia, by any chance?”

  “No—I’ve only just thought about it.”

  “Then let it remain a thought my dear. They won’t thank you for interference.”

  “But it’s your house—your home. You have the final say, surely?”

  “How persistent you are! Yes, I have the final say, but I, no less than you, have little idea of the running of a commercial business.”

  “I,” she said, quite unabashed, “would make it pay.”

  He grinned.

  “Would you, indeed? It’s beginning to pay now.”

  “Not enough. You have to set off all the expense of what Timsy calls contraptions before you can even begin to show a profit.”

  “By the end of the summer—” he began, starting to sound impatient, then refused to argue any further.

  “Ah, may the divil fly away with you!” he exclaimed, just as Timsy might have done, and suddenly began to laugh. “A flash establishment for rich tycoons—Castle Slyne! I shan’t forget that one in a hurry!”

  “You see? You think as I do,” she said with the satisfied smirk of one who has had the last word, then her attention became wholly taken up with the approaching shore of the north side of the lough, and she cried: “Look! Look!” pointing in first one direction and then another until Raff told her brusquely to sit still before she upset the boat

  They climbed the steep path cut into the bank which led to the road, and Judy was aware of sharp disappointment The cottages which from the other side had seemed a charming huddle of picturesque stone were a mean little straggle of ugly slate and dirty windows, and Casey’s store was a tumbledown structure with a galvanised roof and torn posters stuck to the walls. The straight, macadamed highway had none of the wild charm and unexpectedness of the ill-kept south road.