From one of Britain's best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel about the tumult and unexpected nature of life, set in the 19th century.
1
Cashel always claimed that his first memory was of a man in
black, leading a black horse. A man who – he then suspected –
wanted to kill him, for some reason. This occurred when he was
about four or five or six years old (he would vaguely recall) and
the encounter took place when he was mooching around late
one wintry afternoon in the big copse behind the cottage where
he lived in County Cork, Ireland. He heard distant hunting horns
and snatched halloos from the fields beyond and then, closer to
hand at the fringes of the copse, out of sight, came a thrashing
and snapping of vegetation, of something sizeable pushing and
forcing its way through the undergrowth.
For some reason Cashel felt fear grow in him and chill his body.
And then, wheeling round a substantial stand of holly, came a
man leading a horse, a big, muscled, ebony stallion, huffing and
blowing, its neck and shoulders clotted with a beige lather. Cashel
could smell the tack and the musky, salty whiff of the horse’s
sweat thickening the air beneath the trees. The tall man holding
the reins was in a black, knee-length coat, silver-buttoned, wearing
a black top hat that made him seem even taller. His black
riding boots were polished to a bright glossiness, with small blunt
silver spurs, Cashel noticed.
This was Death, Cashel thought – so he claimed – come to
seek him out. Or the man in black was the Devil himself.
But it wasn’t Death and it wasn’t the Devil – it was a man leading
an exhausted horse through a wood. A square-jawed man
with a wide moustache, tobacco brown.
‘What’s your name, little boy?’ he asked.
‘I’m Cashel, sir.’
‘Where do you live, Cashel?’
‘In the cottage on Glanmire Lane.’
‘Ah. Do you, now . . .’
The man stared intently at him from his great height and
reached out his free hand as if to touch his face – or catch me by
the throat, Cashel thought, and strangle me dead. But then the
stallion stamped its feet and whinnied, tugging at the reins the
horseman held in his gloved left hand.
‘He’s lost a shoe so I can’t hunt,’ the man said reasonably, as if
he owed Cashel an explanation. ‘I’ll give that bastard farrier a
kick up the arse, all right.’
He pronounced the word ‘ahse’. His accent was strange, Cashel
noted, the same as the girls who lived in Stillwell Court. English
voices. They didn’t speak in the same way as he did or the other
people he knew.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’d better cut along home, Cashel, old chap,’ the man went
on. ‘The hunt’s coming through and they might take you for a fox.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Cashel turned and pelted breathlessly home to the cottage
where he lived with his Aunt Elspeth.
He found her in the scullery, peeling potatoes.
‘I’ve just seen the Devil,’ he said, trying to control his panting,
and described the man in black with the wide moustache, leading
the giant horse, and the strange accent he had.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ his aunt said, drying her hands briskly on her
apron. ‘That’d be one of Sir Guy’s friends, over from England for
the hunting. Don’t be a gomeral. The Devil’s not coming for you
yet, no, no.’ She laughed quickly to herself. ‘He’s got plenty more
work to do before he comes looking for you, Cashel Greville.’
She heaved him up into her arms – she was a tall, strong young woman
– kissed his cheek and took him into the parlour to look
out of the window onto the lane. Half a dozen hunters were
cantering heedlessly down it, great clods of mud thrown up, spattering,
from the horses’ hooves.
‘Was he nice to you, this man in the top hat? Was he a nice man?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did he ask you your name?’
‘He did.’
‘Did you tell him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right. Good.’
‘And he asked me where I lived.’
‘And did you tell him that?’
‘I did.’
She set him down on the tiled floor.
‘Was that wrong to tell him, Auntie?’
‘Come along and have your tea.’*
Elspeth Soutar, Cashel’s aunt, a Scot from the Dumfries region,
was unmarried and in her early thirties. She was an educated
woman and governess to the two daughters of Sir Guy and Lady
Evangeline Stillwell, of Stillwell Court, County Cork, Ireland.
The girls were Rosamond (sixteen) and Hester (fourteen) and
Elspeth had been responsible for their education for almost ten
years, now. It was tacitly apparent to everyone that her tenure as
governess was coming to its inevitable conclusion as the girls’
entry into society approached. Thereafter, there would be no
necessity for any more pedagogical refinement.
Cashel knew Rosamond and Hester well. They would play
with him when he was a toddler, almost as if he were a household
pet. Sometimes they would dress him up as a doll, in a frilly
skirt and bonnet, or a toy soldier, or a savage Aborigine. They
were fond of him and kissed and carried him and hugged him a
great deal until he grew too rough and ungainly. But the familiarity
remained. They had a host of nicknames for him: the
Cashelmite, Cash-Cash-Coo, Cashelnius the Great. They could
almost have been older sisters but for the social distance. Elspeth
Soutar was staff, after all, and, therefore, so was her little nephew.
Cashel never saw Sir Guy. A remote, almost mythic figure, he
seemed always away – in Dublin, in London, on the Continent –
and Cashel never really ventured into the grand salons of the house.
“There was a small amateur double portrait of a wooden-faced couple set on the mantel of the sitting room, the only visual record of his parents.”
He tended to stay in the nursery with the girls. Consequently, he
very rarely met Lady Evangeline either, who, it seemed, was always
ill and stayed for months at a time in her suite of rooms on the
second floor, attended by a nurse and receiving weekly visits, all
year round, from old Dr Killigrew with his patent medications from
the nearby town of Castlemountallen. The few glimpses and
encounters he managed left him with the impression of someone
very stiff and upright, but at the same time very pale and fragile. As
thin as paper, he thought – as thin as crumpled waxed paper.
Once, when Rosamond and Hester were wheeling him around
the corridors in a small toy cart, they bumped into Lady Evangeline,
fully dressed in a lace headcap and a gown of shimmering
ultramarine silk, being helped down the stairs to some social
engagement.
‘Who is this little boy?’ she asked Rosamond.
‘He’s Elspeth’s charge, Mama,’ Rosamond said. ‘Her little
nephew. The orphan, remember?’
‘I don’t recall,’ Lady Evangeline said vaguely. ‘Or perhaps I do,
now you mention it. The orphan. Yes. Is he a well-behaved little boy?’
‘Oh, yes. He knows that if he misbehaves we’ll give him a good
thrashing,’ Hester said.
Lady Evangeline smiled thinly and the nurse led her carefully
down the stairs to the drawing room.
When he was old enough to understand – when he was five –
Aunt Elspeth sat him down and told him the sad story of the
deaths of his mother and father, Moira and Findlay Greville, both
drowned in 1800 when the packet to Belfast had sunk in a storm
in the Irish Sea. There was a small amateur double portrait of a
wooden-faced couple set on the mantel of the sitting room, the
only visual record of his parents.
‘They left on a boat for Belfast before you,’ Elspeth explained.
‘You were meant to go with them but you were sick with the
croup so I was told to follow with you a week later. Thank the
Lord you didn’t go with them.’
‘Was it a shipwreck?’ Cashel asked.
‘Yes. The ship went down with all hands.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘There were no survivors. Everyone was drowned.’ Elspeth
smiled sadly. ‘That’s how come you’re living with me, my darling.’
She stroked his thick fair hair, ploughing it with her stiff
fingers. ‘I’ll never be your true mother but in every other shape
or form I’m just as much a mother to you, wee lad, don’t you
worry.’
Elspeth had placed the double portrait in his lap as she gently
related the story to him. Cashel looked at the ashen-faced puppets
that were meant to be depictions of his mother and father.
The man had a dense, spade-like beard. The woman wore a tight
bonnet and seemed to stare out of the picture with sightless eyes.
‘That’s Findlay Greville,’ Elspeth pointed. ‘And that’s my dear
wee sister, Moira, bless her soul.’
‘So, if I was on that ship I’d have drownded as well,’ Cashel
said, the reality of his situation slowly beginning to solidify itself
in his young mind. He didn’t know the words then, but he was
beginning to understand the concept of his being parentless, of
being an orphan.
‘I’m very glad I didn’t go on that ship, Auntie,’ he said. ‘And I’m
very glad I came to live with you.’
He was surprised at the ardour of the hug she gave him and by
the shine of tears in her eyes.
‘You’re a good boy, Cashel Greville. The best.’
Of course, Elspeth Soutar, being a very proficient governess,
made sure that Cashel was as well educated as the Stillwell girls
had been. He was writing and reading at the age of five. When,
aged seven, he was sent to the dame-school in Castlemountallen
he was immediately moved up two classes to study with the nine-and
ten-year-olds. He still found the lessons – Latin, Greek, composition,
mathematics, divinity – very easy and straightforward, he said.
Life at Stillwell Court in the early nineteenth century was as
ordered and seemingly unchanging as it had been throughout the
eighteenth. The extensive demesne had been gifted to one Colonel
Gervase Stillwell, an officer in Oliver Cromwell’s army of 1649.
The grant consisted of some five thousand acres in total, spread
largely along the north bank of the valley of the Baillybeg river
between Castlemountallen and Fermoy, with other plantations
and farmlands added elsewhere in County Kerry and County
Waterford. Gervase Stillwell, in addition, became the 1st Baronet
Stillwell in 1659. In 1782 when Sir Guy Stillwell, 5th Baronet, inherited
the property on the death of his father, Fielding, he sold off
the distant Kerry and Waterford farms and woodlands and used
the capital to build Stillwell Court, a project that took the best part
of a decade, cost many thousands of pounds and resulted in the
Stillwell family incurring serious and lasting debt. Mortgages were
taken out with banks in Dublin, London and Amsterdam – and
then the mortgages were re-mortgaged, the debt underwritten
by the ceaseless flow of rents from the Stillwell estate’s farmer-
tenants.”
* What is to be made of this story, a story Cashel Greville Ross retold
throughout his life? Whatever the truth about it – a frightened little boy in
a darkening wood; a tall man in black leading a nervy, shying black horse –
its repetition has embellished all possibility of verification out of existence.
But in a sense, as it applies to Cashel Ross, it doesn’t matter. This is the
biographical arena where the anecdote becomes the legend that sanctions
its own truth – a personal narrative that creates its own ‘reality’. More to
the point, the encounter, as he described it, established a tone, an atmosphere
and import that would prove very apt to his life’s story as it unfolded.
This is exactly what his first memory should have been like: it suited the
man he became. Therefore, it was true.
Extracted from The Romantic by William Boyd, out now.
