lying here in the room in the tower. She would wave her hand, and blow a kiss to him.
The darkness was upon him once again, and whether it was day or night he did not know, but in a moment of strange lucidity he suddenly saw the whole chain of incidents that had brought him to his bed, and how, but for the lending of the blunderbuss to the Clerk, he would be out in the garden now with Fanny-Rosa and the children. The Clerk riding down from the mines, with three hundred pounds in his purse.
'Jane always said the mines brought ill-luck upon the family,' he thought, 'but my father will not believe it. He will still be selling copper twenty years hence, when all that remains of me is the silver cup I won for coursing in 1829.'
He must have slept a long while, because when he woke he could see a chink of daylight coming through the drawn curtains, and he could hear the pigeons in the woods behind the castle, and the familiar clanking of pails in the stable yard. He felt very tired, and peaceful, and content.
'At least,' he thought, 'if I have been the dullest of the Brodricks, I have also been the happiest.'
BOOK THREE
'Wild Johnnie', 1837–1858
When Johnnie looked back on his childhood it appeared to be one, long series of escapades after another, all with the sole object of provoking grown-up people to wrath. It had always seemed to him that there were two worlds, the world of fantasy that he created for himself, where he was master of a lawless band of children who did exactly as they pleased, and the true world of authority, symbolised by his grandfather Copper John, a figure of such power and might that he had only to move about the grounds or enter the front door of Clonmere to rouse in Johnnie a strange fury of rebellion. That grave, set face, that square jaw, those hard eyes, meant that young children must curb their spirits, quieten their voices, and take themselves to the attics if they wished to shout and laugh. And Johnnie, used to sprawling about the untidy living-room at Lletharrog, tumbling his mother's cushions, kicking his muddied heels on the furniture, found banishment to the attics of his grandfather's house a degradation and an insult.
Copper John was therefore an ogre, one of the giants in fairy-stories who lived in a fortress, and Johnnie the gallant young prisoner who ultimately would cut off his head and stand in triumph over his dead body. Family prayers were a time to bait the ogre. This would be accomplished by setting a trap for one of the servants. Sometimes he would fasten a piece of cord round a hassock and lay it underneath the carpet, and, taking himself to the other end of the dining-room and kneeling beside his chair, he would jerk the cord from time to time, shaking the luckless minion upon the hassock, to the great discomfiture of everyone present. Or he would bring in one of his tame mice, and set it free about the floor. Sooner or later the animal would find its way beneath the petticoats of one of the kitchen girls, and he would peep between his fingers and watch the wretched creature struggle with her feminine terror of mice and finally be overcome, uttering a shriek, and thereby incurring the severe displeasure of the ogre. The curious thing was that none of the servants betrayed him to his grandfather. In a sense they seemed to be in league with him, and later in the day Johnnie would go round to the kitchen and sit on the table, where Mrs. Casey would be making pastry, and he would call her his love, and his queen, and tickle the old woman under the chin, so that she would find it impossible to be angry with him, and give him some of the pastry into the bargain. 'Master Johnnie is too forward,' would be the verdict below stairs, but even so none complained of him to the master. He had 'a way with him,' so they declared, and so for that matter had all the children, even down to young Herbert with his twinkling brown eyes, and for poor Mrs. Brodrick to be left a widow after barely nine years of married life and bring up this lively brood alone, was a sadness the servants could not forget. In fact Mrs.
Brodrick herself seemed to forget it sooner than they did.
For three months or so Fanny-Rosa had shown every wild extravagance of grief. She had threatened suicide, she had stayed in bed and been nursed tenderly by Barbara and Eliza, she had vowed that she would never be able to continue living, and then, shortly before Christmas, the sisters-in-law had prevailed upon her to accompany them to Saunby for the winter, and the change of scene, the visits of friends, the high spirits of the children, all combined to make her throw off the first transport of grief, and when she returned to Clonmere in the spring she was almost the same Fanny-Rosa as before. Almost, not quite. Something indefinable had gone out of her, never to return. The light, joyous quality, the glow of loveliness that John had awoken in her with his love and tenderness, flickered and died, finally and for ever. Her appearance, her dress, the care of her hair, suddenly these things ceased to matter. Once it had been amusing to buy gowns and hats, because of John, because he would look at her with that light in his eyes, and hold out his arms.
Now there was little point in bothering to purchase material; last season's gown would do for this as well. A widow of twenty-nine might be expected to marry again, and Doctor Armstrong, when he saw Fanny-Rosa after her return to Clonmere, some six months after her husband's death, said to himself that no one of her temperament and vitality would be likely to remain single for long. He was wrong.
All that side of life was finished and done with. The future remained, with one day Johnnie master of Clonmere, Mrs. John Brodrick was a person of importance. One day, surely before very long, her father-in-law would die, and Johnnie would come in for the estate and the money. Fanny-Rosa would be mistress of Clonmere. It would be she who would give all the orders, pay the wages, have the handling of Johnnie's purse; and his fortune would be enormous, no doubt, for the copper was bringing in vast sums, and Mrs. John Brodrick, running the estate for the benefit of her son, would be someone of considerable significance in the barony. She had never forgotten that she was the niece of the Earl of Mundy, and now and again she would remind Eliza and Barbara of the fact, just dropping a casual word or two, but those words sufficient to bring them to some sense of reality, if familiarity with her presence had caused them to neglect it.
Little by little she began to talk of what she would do to Clonmere when the house became hers, or rather Johnnie's, which Barbara and Eliza felt was rather premature. Their father was not yet seventy and enjoyed excellent health, and there seemed small prospect of his making way for his grandson for several years to come.
'It is a pity,' said Eliza one day to Barbara, 'that Fanny-Rosa talks so incessantly as though Clonmere belonged to her. For my part, I find she has become very altered since John died. She has lost much of her gaiety, and is overbearing.'
'Poor Fanny-Rosa,' sighed Barbara; 'we neither of us know quite how much she misses John. We must be patient and not mind; and don't forget how devoted she is to darling Johnnie.'
'I say nothing against her devotion to Johnnie,' replied Eliza, 'but I find it rather trying when Fanny-Rosa gives orders in the stables, and has my horse saddled for herself when she wishes to ride.'
'You forget,' said Barbara the peace-maker, 'that Fanny-Rosa has been used to giving orders too. She did everything at Lletharrog, and a married woman who has had a house of her own is lost without servants to command. I am always finding her in the kitchen, countermanding my instructions, because she tells cook that certain dishes are bad for the children's digestion, and as she is probably right, I say nothing. Whatever she does, do let us avoid any unpleasantness.'
'It amazes me that father does not become annoyed at times,' said Eliza. 'She flatly contradicts him at dinner very often, which was a thing he never would accept from any of us.'
'Fanny-Rosa has travelled, which you and I have never done,' said Barbara, 'and she has also read many more books. And I have frequently noticed that men will argue quite amicably with women who have had husbands, when they will snub unmarried women like you and me. I suppose they have some sort of superior knowledge of life that we do not possess.'
Eliza sniffed. She hated to be reminded of spinsterhood and her middle years. But her brother's widow had come to live with them for good, and Barbara was right, it was no use having any unpleasantness. So 'Mrs. John,' as she was known to the servants, began to take a more prominent place in the running of the household than either 'Miss Barbara' or 'Miss Eliza,' but in a different way. Meals that were late and rooms that were undusted meant little to her, but if pastry appeared on the table when she had ordered a milk pudding she would storm into the kitchen and shout at Mrs. Casey, shaming her before the other servants, and if some article of dress or a trinket was missing from her dressing-table (and no doubt fallen behind it, for Fanny-Rosa had no sense of order in her room) the housemaid would be summoned and upbraided as a thief, and possibly be sent from the castle at once,
