The Marriage Bed Read online

  Bairbre pressed her shoulder and upper arm against mine and stirred unhappily. The carriage rocked and bounced on the hilly road. I felt Manus’s eyes on me, but a long interval passed before I returned his gaze. He looked at me with a bold curiosity, the corners of his mouth poised before a smile.

  Bairbre startled me by taking my hand and securing it possessively in her lap, then casting a dark look at Manus, who blinked and looked away, growing thoughtful. For a while the tension between brother and sister made my chest ache.

  Bairbre kneaded my fingers in her two hands as if she would milk them. I wished she would stop, the way she was knitting uneasiness into my very skin. I stole a look at Manus in the long, jostling silence of the ride. The strand of hair he had earlier swept aside he now left to hang negligently before one eye.

  As the carriage brought us closer to Kenmare Bay, I was surprised at how deeply the humid, saline vapors of the ocean unsettled me, bringing back a younger, lonelier time. The house that came into view as we turned a mountainy road was like nothing I’d ever seen, palatial and rising up before the sea, the gray-white stones of it polished by the rain. When we descended from the carriage, throngs of gulls rose from the many blue gabled beams, pleading in the sky, swinging back and forth in intricate arcs.

  The central area of the house had a monastic look to it, pinnacled as it was with a church tower, complete with a bell. The wings to either side were more modern looking, as if they had been grafted on at a later date.

  “The original house was an Augustinian abbey,” Manus explained to me.

  “Really?” I said.

  He walked a few strides ahead then turned and, pointing, directed my attention northerly on the grounds to the ruins of a single standing wall, weed choked and overgrown in ivy. “Hundreds of years after the rectory had fallen around it, that particular wall still stands.”

  I was still looking at it, marveling, when Manus disappeared with the groom, walking the horses to the stables.

  Bairbre and I proceeded to the main door of the west wing, climbing the stairs between two massive stone urns in which camellias flourished. Bairbre did not respond to the salutations of the servant who ushered us in. Behind the dull thrum of silence that filled the vestibule, the sea’s low roaring continued to echo.

  We moved directly into a grand room. Through the window the backs of the waves glimmered in a mild sun that appeared sporadically through the gray. The sea moved slowly, not as I remembered it, the waves now powerful in their lift and swell, yet somehow constrained.

  “Are you glad again to be near the sea?” Bairbre asked softly, coming behind me.

  “Yes,” I said, though I struggled against a feeling of vertigo. I turned to face her but found myself distracted by the play of waves on a copper vase just past her shoulder.

  As we’d stood together in the main room I’d heard the entrance door open and close and footsteps on the stairs. I’d believed it had been Manus going upstairs, so as the serving woman led Bairbre and me up to our rooms, I expected to come face-to-face with him, but was startled at every turn in the passage to meet with a different statue. Most were religious in nature: saints or marbles of women at prayer. Occasionally something more mythical appeared: a lion with wings, a unicorn with a silver horn. The deeper into the maze of hallways, the darker the passages grew. Figures gazed somberly from every alcove as if each had once trespassed into this place as I was doing now and had been paralyzed with fear. I was entering into the dark mystery of a family, queasy as if we were coming closer to a central room that enshrined a Eucharist. I could not separate the sinister from the sacred, as I could not separate my foreboding of the place from my fascinated attraction to it.

  The bedroom where I was to stay was drained of light, the bedsilks crimson and deep green. The servant went to the window and parted the curtains, but the daylight did little to cut the dimness.

  Bairbre told me she was going to rest in her room a few doors down the hall, and that she would come back for me when the servant called us down to tea.

  She left, closing my door behind her. I strolled, awestruck, around the room, touching things, looking into drawers and cabinets and little wooden recesses, carefully oiled, where I found prayer books and icons; a white folded cardigan, handkerchiefs and pillowcases. A statue of the Virgin stood on her own pedestal, her cape spread, her eyelids heavy, as if she were struggling to stay awake.

  At an angle and facing me from one corner stood a grand dresser with a large oval mirror. Approaching my reflection, I took off my postulant’s veil.

  The clarity of my own figure filled me with wonder. It was not as I’d imagined it, having for so long only seen my incomplete face in the small edges of mirror. There was a fluidness of line to my tall self. I moved my arms in graceful motions and turned my face this way and that. Laughter of pleased surprise surfaced from within me.

  I looked outside over the cobbled drive and beyond the property walls at flatlands and ditches running beyond to the unreachable horizon. Dead blackberry creeper ran along the wall directly below my window toward the back of the house, where I could see a neglected garden, all out of character with the rest of the transplendant facade.

  I had lain down and closed my eyes when I heard horse’s hooves and a creaking and turning of stiff wheels. Peering out I saw a carriage stopping, swaying slightly as Mrs. O’Breen descended from it. My heart clamored wildly as if she were the one I was in love with. She stood a moment, brushing her skirts, adjusting the fitted ice blue jacket she wore, then turned with authority toward the house, a stately yet feminine figure. I heard the doors open below, and she disappeared from my view.

  An embankment of clouds moved to cover the sun and the day deepened. I lay down again, struggling to relax, waiting for Bairbre to summon me downstairs.

  Startled by a soft knock, I sat up. The door opened soundlessly, and as Mrs. O’Breen peered in, I stood.

  “Deirdre, I’m sorry I wasn’t here to meet you when you came.”

  “Oh no,” I said breathily. “It’s fine.”

  We both hesitated a moment, regarding one another.

  “Let’s sit,” she said, gesturing to two richly upholstered chairs. She turned the flame up in a small lamp, glancing as she did at my postulant veil, which I had draped over the footboard of the bed.

  In her presence I earnestly assumed the demure and pious demeanor learned from Bairbre.

  She gave me such a look of approval that I tingled within.

  “Did you know, Deirdre, that I was once going to be a nun?”

  “No,” I cried softly.

  “And at Enfant de Marie!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I was always meant to be a nun. As a tiny girl I received instruction. I even wore a veil and learned very young to accept solitude. While my sisters played, I stayed in my room and prayed. And I was the youngest, so it was very hard.” She paused. “But life presents us with surprises, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I answered quietly. Her words felt rich with portent. I looked beyond her at the glimmer and order of the room.

  When I met her eyes again, they were so set upon me that a little thrill rushed me. “I was her beauty, my mother had said. Her flower petal. She said it was right to offer her most beautiful one to Christ. All the paintings of the female martyrs depicted them as romantic beauties.

  “We were always told, Deirdre, that we must uphold those who came before us. That we were responsible for our ancestors. Being from an ecclesiastical family was like having royal blood. She had no sons, but she had a beautiful daughter. She gave me the looking glass, and while my sisters wore their hair in braids, mine was left loose and long.”

  I was exhilarated by her presence, drawn into her story, but confused by her desire to lay herself so plainly before me. She’d seen me only from a distance in the choir at Enfant de Marie, and had spoken to me very briefly, yet she was confessing to me as if we were close.

  She paused and was
gazing beyond me at the window, a thoughtful intensity about her. When her eyes met mine again, they looked wistful. In a softer, even more confidential voice, she went on. “A fortnight before I was to become a postulant, my mother read an advertisement in the Evening Chronicle. A man was looking to publish a book of photographs depicting saints, and he needed models for them. We traveled across Ireland to Dublin by train. My mother put rouge on my cheeks and mouth. She thought I might be selected to represent Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the little consumptive nun, but I was chosen to be photographed as Saint Lucy and as Saint Cecelia. The man, his name was Mr. Holohan, said I had a natural flair for the dramatic.

  “In Dublin I inwardly reveled in the romance and theatricality of my own nature. I swelled with an awareness of my own beauty and worldly potential, and then my mother took me directly from that experience back across Ireland and to Enfant de Marie. It seemed like a form of cruelty at the time, but I have come to understand why she did this. In order to make the sacrifice greater to God. She had produced no sons, but a beautiful girl with gifts was as close as she’d come in this life to offering God a priest.

  “Francis O’Breen saw the photographs in a gallery in Dublin. He wanted to meet me. Mr. Holohan gave him my name and told him I was a novice at Enfant de Marie. He wrote to me.”

  I was hoping she’d go on and tell the story of how she’d come to leave the convent, but all she said was, “Ah, well then. In the end I did not become a nun.” She sighed. “Sometimes, Deirdre, I imagine what it must be like to give oneself fully to God. Fully. Body and soul. What my mother wanted for me. And I think, Deirdre, there could be nothing finer. No finer, truer life. And seeing that you are embarking on such a life, you must be in agreement with me.”

  I ached to reveal myself truly to her, to tell her I was not meant to be a nun, but I was flooded with an urgency to say whatever it was she wanted me to. “I am in agreement with you,” I said.

  She studied me with thoughtful curiosity, then said, “You have magnificent hair.”

  My hands flew to smooth it. “It’s always been difficult to control,” I said, and smiled awkwardly.

  “There’s so much of it and such waves!” She smiled at me. Leaning slightly toward me she asked in a quiet voice, “May I touch it?”

  I tried to hide the little pulse of shock I felt. “Yes,” I uttered.

  She stood and walked around to the back of my chair. I felt the faint pressure of her hands on the outer nimbus of waves. Very gently and with one finger she tucked a strand of fine hair behind my right ear, and a pleasurable shiver took me, gooseflesh rising on the back of my neck. I closed my eyes, reduced to most primitive longing, resisting the memory of my own mother’s touch and soft ululating voice at my ear.

  Mrs. O’Breen’s hand brushed past my face, soft and smelling like cake flour.

  “In the Middle Ages, voluminous hair in women was a sign of fertility,” she said, then came around in front of me.

  “Was it?” I asked.

  She nodded, her eyes picking up the lamplight.

  “Don’t wear your veil down to tea,” she said. She took a jeweled comb out of her own hair and arranged it into mine.

  “Look,” she said, taking my hand, leading me to the mirror. Amazed, I moved in close to the glass, tilting my head in different directions to watch the jewels glint and sparkle. In the dimness of the room I looked at her image beside mine in the glass, a swift answering flash of admiration in her eyes. Through her I sensed my own potential.

  She led me out to a wide marble staircase, and we began our descent into the dining hall. I had never imagined that a ceiling could be so high. The walls were a deep cornflower blue, and the ceiling was painted an even deeper shade of blue and damascened with gold and silver stars.

  Escorting me down, she held the tips of my fingers and smiled at me. I told myself that she was not one to be deceived; that she recognized something in me. I took a deep breath. I would not disappoint her. My poise intensified, my movements were slow, weighted in time. It was Bairbre I had studied this grace from, but now it went beyond Bairbre. I could be a daughter to Mrs. O’Breen as well; a different daughter. I would dizzy myself with pleasing her. I would take the poise further.

  After we sat down together at the table, Bairbre appeared on the staircase, and I saw a spasm of confused emotion on her face as her mother leaned close to me, adjusting a strand of my hair around the jeweled comb. But like a momentary ripple that had passed over a still surface of water, Bairbre’s pain was suddenly undetectable. She nodded to her mother as she took her place, then seemed to enclose herself in a circle of silence, her eyes cast beyond us as if she were in a religious revery.

  The table was set with a multitude of cutlery and crystal, dozens of candles lit at its center in elaborate candelabras. Beneath the branch of each candle hung a clear jewel pendant.

  Manus appeared, storming through the front door, which he left open behind him. He threw his riding gloves down on a side table and walked with a jaunt into the room. Mrs. O’Breen suppressed a smile, her eyes widening and lighting up at his irreverence.

  “Mother,” he said, and she extended her face to him obliquely, and he kissed her cheekbone. “Bairbre,” he said as he crossed to his own chair, and when he kissed the top of her head, she squeezed her lips together almost indetectably.

  Under his close attention I kept my eyes cast down.

  Mrs. O’Breen reached for her snow white linen napkin, and as I followed suit, I was mortified to see that my fingernails were dirty. I withdrew my hand suddenly and felt everyone’s eyes on me.

  The fire of a flush burned my skin. I winced, looking down at my rough postulant skirt. Silence filled the room.

  “What is it, Deirdre?” Mrs. O’Breen asked.

  I did not know what to say. “I’ve never sat at such an elegant table before.”

  A look of empathy moved over Mrs. O’Breen’s face. “Do you think knowledge of such things has anything to do with a person’s character? It means very little in the grand scheme of things, Deirdre, and I will guide you along.”

  She made the sign of the cross: “Pray for us honorable vessel, vessel of singular devotion. Mystical rose.”

  A man in a black coat served dishes of cold segmented orange and chopped apple, and Mrs. O’Breen pointed to the fork I must use.

  Mrs. O’Breen and Manus spoke as the meal was served, about profits on various properties. In a silver pitcher on the table I caught my reflection, the jewels a riot of twinkles in my hair.

  I glanced at Bairbre, prim in her postulant veil, and with downcast head, looking as if she had collapsed into herself. She seemed on the verge of disappearing. At last Mrs. O’Breen addressed her with questions about this nun or that, and about the timetable on our novitiates. I gazed at Bairbre as she responded. She had her mother’s eyebrows and long fingers.

  Unused to wine, three or four sips relaxed and warmed me. I stole covert glances at each of them.

  They were of peerless lineage, their skin like cream, black hair heavy and straight as fine silk, while mine was coarse in its abundance and like brambles, dark but wrought with browns of various sorts, some strands coppery, some light pewter.

  My eyes were drawn up to the heights of the room. As afternoon deepened outside the window, shadows consumed the upper stratosphere near the ceiling so I could barely discern the gold and silver stars I had seen there only half an hour before.

  Looking down once from the ceiling, I found Manus searching me with his eyes. He looked shyly away, that softness out of character with the swaggering, more self-assured persona. The flush on his cheek made my heart swell.

  Emboldened by the wine, I kept looking at him. His hair was the blackest of the three, and burnished with the most intense cobalt blue; a blue that could hurt the eyes with its brilliance. Like an Immortal! I exulted within myself.

  That evening I walked with Bairbre along the darkening beach. I was wearing my postulant’s veil again,
having taken Mrs. O’Breen’s jeweled comb from my hair. Not wanting to part with it, I had placed it in a dresser drawer in the room I would sleep in, thinking I might put it on again at night before the mirror.

  Along the sea the sky was immense and streaked with darkening clouds, the last light of day filtering away. We held hard to each other, bowing into the force of a cold, cleansing wind. I had been hesitant to walk along the beach, afraid of the old sadness the waves might rouse in me, but here they came in in steady, rolling sheets. They were nothing like the chaotic crash against Blasket rock or the weedy, straining water running up the White Strand. Here the shore was majestic, and the sea struggled for poise and conformity as it drove inland, foaming at its edges and discreetly withdrawing.

  “I don’t like the way the two of them are together,” Bairbre yelled over the noise of wind and waves. “You know how he came in tonight all jaunt and canter, acting the very lad. He does that for her. Manus isn’t really like that. And all that talk about the properties. I know he doesn’t care about profits or properties. He puts it on for her, and they’re very cozy together. His little dance for her. I don’t like to be near it.”

  The sea’s roar diminished and returned. I looked at her, struggling to understand her words. It would not occur to me until later, when I was alone in bed, that she had seen my euphoria and had not liked it.

  But she had not dampened my excitement or my intrigue. Alone in my room, I opened the drawer, looking for the jeweled comb, but it was gone. My heart fell at the thought that someone had been in here, but I told myself this was not my house, and Mrs. O’Breen had not given me the jeweled comb, only loaned it to me.

  That night, unable to sleep, I got up and opened the curtains, looking out until the dusk came gradually in over the trees and flowers, causing the cobbles to glisten below.

  The next morning was brilliant. I dressed and wandered through the hallways in search of the staircase that led down to the drawing rooms and the dining hall. But I got lost along the way and passed through a long gallery of marble busts on pedestals, ghostly white and with vacant eyes, and I knew I was in a very old part of the house, the walls leaning slightly, the window frames deeply recessed, the moldings primitively carved, and the ceilings low.