Ashes In the Wind by Christopher Bland Read Free Book Online

Agnes come over from Cork by car. Ambrose O’Halloran and the two Doyle brothers, uneasy about going into a Protestant church, listen to the service from the porch and then join John and Josephine by the graves.
    After the funeral John goes to Cork with his grandfather and aunt. He has never been to Middleton Park; the war and Middleton’s attitude to Henry and Eileen’s marriage put paid to any social visits between the Burkes and the Brodricks.
    ‘We’ll eat in the small dining room now Agnes has gone back to England,’ says Middleton. ‘No need to dress for dinner in these times. Would you mind exercising the horses? They aren’t getting enough work now the IRA has banned hunting. Nobody has the guts to ignore the ban, though it’s not even popular with their own people.’
    Middleton manages to talk to John about Eileen as they walk to the stables.
    ‘Brave woman, your mother, no doubt about that. Never agreed with me about the Union, supported Home Rule early on. Didn’t do her much good in the end. You need a long spoon to sup with these people.’
    ‘Do you think she should have done nothing?’
    ‘I do, I do. You’d still have a mother, I’d still have my eldest daughter. She was always the headstrong one in the family.’
    ‘I think she was right to try. We should have learned the lesson of the Easter Rising.’
    ‘In 1916 we were in the middle of a world war, we were shooting men for desertion on the western front. Anything else would have looked like weakness.’
    By now John has saddled up one of the hunters; his grand­father walks slowly back to the house as John canters off down one of the long rides in the park.
    That evening Middleton is silent at dinner, drinking most of a bottle of claret himself, then talks about Ireland’s future over coffee and whiskey in the smoking room.
    ‘Look at our country now. The RIC are frightened to come out of their barracks and do their job, the courts aren’t working, taxes aren’t collected, men and women on both sides are being murdered every day. It’s hard to see a future for the Burkes or the Brodricks if they get their Republic. And we’ve every right to be here.’
    ‘By right of conquest.’
    ‘True enough – conquest and re-conquest. Ireland has always been like that. There’s been war or rebellion two or three times every century since 1690 and the Battle of the Boyne. We’ve had the ’98, Whiteboys, Caravats, Ribbonmen, the Peep o’Day Boys, Captain Rock and Pastorini, the Terry Alts, the Rising in 1848, Land Leaguers, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. They’ve all come and gone. Until now we’ve had the will to fight – that’s what we’ve lost.’
    ‘How do you think it will end?’
    John’s grandfather takes a drink from his glass of whiskey and looks into the fire.
    ‘Unhappily, unhappily. It’s already been disastrous for Eileen, and for you, and for Derriquin. We’ve been outflanked by the Ulstermen, and Lloyd George will hang the Southern Unionists out to dry. John, I don’t want to talk about it any more, it’s too depressing. I’m off to bed. Good night to you.’
    On his way out he pats John’s shoulder in a rare display of affection. The next day John travels back to Drimnamore.
    The sale of the Derriquin estate takes place in the ballroom of the Drimnamore Hotel: 24,929 acres, three roods, twenty-two perches, the Derriquin Oyster Fishery, three islands in the estuary, the Drimnamore River (‘a spate river, seventy-one salmon in a good year’), forty-two cottages, the demesne and the home farm, all go under the hammer. As the auctioneer reads out the townlands to be sold – Derriquin, Drimnamore, Inchinaleega, Ardeen, Gortfadda, Slievenasaska, Lomanagh, Derreenavurig and Fermoyle – John, dry-eyed since the funeral, weeps again. The hotel buys the demesne and the fishing. The proceeds of the sale bring John £2,850 after the mortgages have been paid off and the creditors settled. He gives half of this to