daily the same from October to May. In summer the sunlight penetrates to the kitchen in a way that at first seems alien but later is welcomed. It spreads over the surface of the table, drying it out. It warms the Fogartys, who move their chairs to catch its rays when they rest in the early evening.
‘You would not credit,’ remarks Miss Fogarty, ‘that Brigid has been three years in this kitchen. More like three seconds.’
‘There are some that are untrainable.’ His teeth are less well preserved than his sister’s. She is the thinner of the two, razorlike in face and figure.
‘I said at the time I would prefer a man. A man is more trainable in my opinion. A man would be more use to yourself.’
‘Ah, Cready knows the dining-room by now. I wouldn’t want a change made there.’
‘It’s Cready we have to thank for Brigid. Wasn’t it Cready who had you blackguarded until you took her on?’
‘We had to take someone. To give Cready her due she said we’d find her slow.’
‘I’ll tell you this: Cready’s no racehorse herself.’
‘The slowness is in that family.’
‘Whatever He did He forgot to put brains in them.’
‘We live with His mistakes.’
Miss Fogarty frowns. She does not care for that remark. Her brother is sometimes indiscreet in his speech. It is his nature, it is part of his cleverness; but whenever she feels uneasy she draws his attention to the source of her uneasiness, as she does now. It is a dangerous remark, she says, better it had not been made.
Fogarty nods, knowing the nod will soothe her. He has no wish to have her flurried.
‘The road is going great guns,’ he says, deeming a change of subject wise. ‘They were on about it in the dining-room.’
‘Did they mention the ground rice pudding?’
‘They ate it. Isn’t it extraordinary, a road that goes round in a circle, not leading anywhere?’
‘Heddoe left her ground rice. A pudding’s good enough for the dining-room but not for Madam.’
‘Was there an egg in it? Her stomach can’t accept eggs.’
‘Don’t I know the woman can’t take eggs? Isn’t she on about it the entire time? There were four good turkey eggs in that pudding, and what harm did a turkey egg do anyone? Did eggs harm Larvey?’
‘Oh true enough, Larvey ate anything. If you’d took a gate off its hinges she’d have ate it while you’d wink.’
‘Larvey was a saint from heaven.’
Again Fogarty nods. In his wish not to cause flurry in his sister he refrains from saying that once upon a time Miss Larvey had been condemned as roundly as Miss Heddoe is now. When she’d been cold in her room she’d sent down to the kitchen for hot-water jars, a request that had not been popular. But when she died, as if to compensate for all this troublesomeness, Miss Larvey left the Fogarty s a remembrance in her will.
‘A while back I told Heddoe about that child. To see what she’d say for herself.’
Miss Fogarty’s peaked face registers interest. Her eyes have narrowed into the slits that all his life have reminded Fogarty of cracks in a plate or a teacup.
‘And what did the woman say?’
‘She was struck silent, then she asked me questions. After that she told me an extraordinary thing: the Legend of the True Gross.’
As Fogarty speaks, the two maids enter the kitchen. Miss Fogarty regards them with asperity, telling Brigid she looks disgraceful and Cready that her cap is dirty. ‘Get down to your work,’ she snappishly commands. ‘Brigid, push that kettle over the heat and stir a saucepan of milk for me.’
She is badly out of sorts because of Heddoe and the ground rice, Fogarty says to himself, and thinks to ease the atmosphere by relating the legend the governess has told him.
‘Listen to me, girls,’ he says, ‘while I tell you the Legend of the True Cross.’
Cready, who is not a girl, appreciates the euphemism and displays appropriate pleasure as she sets to at the sink, washing parsnips. She is a woman of sixty-one, carelessly stout. Brigid, distantly related to her and thirty or so years younger, is of the same proportions.
‘The Legend of the True Cross,’ says Fogarty, ‘has to do with a seed falling into Adam’s mouth, some say his ear. It lay there until he died, and when the body decomposed a tree grew from the seed, which in time was felled to give timber for the beams of a bridge.’
‘Well, I never heard that,’ exclaims Cready in a loud, shrill voice, so fascinated by the revelation that she cannot continue with the parsnips.
‘The Queen of Sheba crossed that bridge in her majesty. Later – well, you can guess – the Cross to which Our Lord was fastened was constructed from those very beams.’
‘Is it true, Mr Fogarty?’ cries Cready, her voice becoming still shriller in her excitement, her mouth hanging open.
‘Control yourself, Cready,’ Miss Fogarty admonishes her. ‘You look ridiculous.’
‘It’s only I was never told it before, miss. I never knew the Cross grew out of Adam’s ear. Did ever you hear it, Brigid?’
