Ruby Flynn (8 page)

‘What was it, Ruby?’ Mrs McKinnon asked.

‘I’m not sure.’ Ruby coughed and spluttered into the handkerchief Mrs McKinnon had taken from her apron pocket.

‘You looked as if you had seen a ghost. Had you? Was it a woman?’

‘I have never seen a ghost before, I haven’t got a clue what one looks like,’ Ruby replied.

‘Ah no, well you wouldn’t,’
Mrs McKinnon said. ‘Ghosts have no use of the poor. I’ve never heard of one haunting a sod house, or prowling across an earth floor. Ghosts need minstrels’ galleries and oak staircases, like this one. They need old houses and castles. Ghosts are a curse to the rich and it’s a blessing to the poor that they don’t have to tolerate them.’

‘Are there really ghosts here at Ballyford?’ Ruby looked about her uneasily, as though expecting to see one lounging against a wall watching her, casually examining a fingernail. ‘Surely the heat beating out of that fireplace in the main hall would scare away any ghosts. Wouldn’t the dog bark?’

‘The dog?’ Mrs McKinnon raised her eyebrows in exasperation. ‘Rufus?’ He sleeps so much, he would never notice if a ghost were to lie down next to him. Aye, there are ghosts, I am sorry to report and they are ghosts with a taste for wool carpets and fireplaces and big soft chairs and sofas. It is a fussy ghost with a taste for splendour and it lives at Ballyford. Oh, don’t worry you won’t see it in your room. There’s no carpet or chandelier in there.’

With the help of Betsy and Jane, Mrs McKinnon had lifted Ruby onto a chair to rest, while she caught her breath.

‘You do look shockingly pale,’ said Betsy. ‘Are you sure you feel well?’

Jane, who was still trying to work out how to put the top back on the smelling salts, decided to take a sniff herself, almost fell over backwards and then dropped the bottle on the floor.

‘God save us and help us,’ said Betsy, as she picked up the bottle and rolled her eyes.

To Mrs McKinnon’s relief, the colour flooded back to Ruby’s cheeks.

‘Have you ever seen the ghost yourself?’ Ruby asked. ‘Does it have a name?’

‘No, not I. It wouldn’t show itself to me or to Mr McKinnon. We shan’t have any nonsense with such a thing. I have been here since I was first married and I never saw any ghost,’ Mrs McKinnon said, ‘but there have been people recently who have reported sightings of a woman on the staircase and on the landing. A guest from London almost screamed the place down when she stayed here a couple of years ago. I thought just then that maybe you had seen her too. Are you sure you didn’t?’

Ruby wondered if she should tell her what she had really seen, what it was that had taken her breath away and made her head spin. The little girl in the painting had looked just like her own dead mother.

She thought better of it and merely said, ‘Maybe it was the marble statues,’ trying to be helpful.

Ruby looked up at the picture again and a shiver ran down her spine.

‘I think ’twas Lady Isobel,’ said Betsy as she put her hand down and helped Ruby to her feet. ‘The poor woman looks like a ghost and surely it must have been her they saw wandering along the gallery. Maybe the light was poor. I remember that woman, she was never off the wine. If ye ask me, ’twas the drink, not a ghost.’

But Mrs McKinnon had had enough talk of ghosts and now said briskly, ‘Right, if you have fully recovered, Ruby, on we go. Back to work, girls.’

The nursery wing was separate from the castle. Situated down a corridor that led from the main gallery. It stuck out like an appendage. An after thought of a construction erected by ancestors who would rather not have to see or hear their offspring. When they reached the nursery, Ruby thought that if she hadn’t already just fainted, she almost certainly would do now at the sight which greeted them.

A chill hit her as they opened the nursery door. It was hardly surprising, given that the sun had gone and it had begun to rain. The fire in the grate was almost out, which didn’t help. Lady Isobel was sitting in the nursing chair by the side of the cavernous hearth and staring out through the leaded windows towards the ocean. The rhododendrons, which ran wild along the perimeter of the grounds and lined the drive, obliterated the view of the beach, but on clear days, the ocean could easily be seen. Ballyford sat on the edge of almost two thousand acres and the view from the opposite side of the castle was of immaculately farmed tenants’ fields for as far as the eye could see.

Lady Isobel’s manner was wholly vacant and unseeing. Although the rain now beat a tattoo against the leaded windows and whistled an eerie tune as it forced its way in between the cracks, she appeared not to notice. She wore an emerald green silk dressing gown, which had fallen open and exposed a white linen nightdress. The first thing Ruby thought was that she had never seen anything or anyone so beautiful. The weight of Lady Isobel’s chestnut coloured hair had defied the grip of a green satin ribbon and fallen in spiralling tendrils around her face, where the skin was so transparent the blue veins beneath were plainly visible. Her collarbone jutted out above the neckline of the nightdress and Ruby thought she appeared so fragile and thin that surely she couldn’t be touched.

Mrs McKinnon walked over to Lady Isobel’s chair and indicated for Ruby to follow her.

‘The new nursery maid has arrived, Lady Isobel,’ she announced, gently, as though speaking to a young child.

Lady Isobel started slightly, as if she had been woken from a deep sleep.

‘Come here, Ruby, come closer,’ said Mrs McKinnon. ‘Come and say hello. Let Lady Isobel take a good look at you.’

Tentatively, Ruby took half a dozen steps towards the fireside, at which point it was obvious Lady Isobel became frightened. She began to cry and her cry quickly ascended into a thin, shrill, wail.

Ruby felt a familiar reaction to sudden and unexpected noise grip her. The hair on her arms rose, her skin prickled all over and she fought down the urge to flee.
Run, run, run
. The words beat in her brain and she felt her fingernails dig into the flesh of her hands, as she willed herself to stand still.

‘Send her away,’ Lady Isobel said, grabbing Mrs McKinnon’s hands. ‘Send her away!’

Ruby thought she might faint again and willed herself to be strong. She had become used to the noise and now felt her breathing steady to a normal pace. Ruby knew sadness. She knew loss. She knew the kind of grief that could only feel better if you screamed and screamed. Her heart contracted in pity for the bird-like form of the beautiful lady sat before her and now Ruby knew, too, that if anyone could help Lady Isobel, Mrs McKinnon was right, she could.

At last the screams subsided to a quiet sobbing and Mrs McKinnon held out her hand.

‘Come here,’ she whispered, ‘don’t be scared.’

Ruby looked into Mrs McKinnon’s eyes. She wasn’t scared now, not anymore. She allowed the housekeeper to lead her over to the chair. Mrs McKinnon held both Lady Isobel’s hands in her own, as much, Ruby realized, to prevent them from lashing out as to comfort the lady.

‘This is Ruby, she is here to help, just like you asked,’ Mrs McKinnon said softly. ‘Remember? We discussed it with the doctor. You need someone to be with you all the time, just for now, until we have you right again.’

Ruby thought she had better do something, to show this was the truth, and that she would be of some use and so she bent down to the fire and began to set light to the turf which Betsy had brought in while Mrs McKinnon was calming Lady Isobel. She picked up the bellows and fanned the almost dead embers and within moments, the flames were leaping up the chimney and warming the room.

Mrs McKinnon smiled and nodded approvingly. ‘See what Ruby has done,’ she said. ‘She will keep the room as warm as toast for you and make sure the fire won’t ever go out, won’t you, Ruby? I won’t have to worry about you sitting in the cold anymore.’

‘I will,’ Ruby replied. ‘I have kept a fire going many times at the convent. We all had duties as well as lessons, and we were taught to clean to a high standard.’ She was addressing her remarks to Lady Isobel as much as to Mrs McKinnon, to reassure her of her worth.

Ruby had actually never understood why they were taught lessons to such a high level. Maria had told them it was punish them, carrying an education they could never possibly use. But now, for the first time, as she looked around the room and saw the bookcase, Ruby felt that maybe she could put her learning to some use. She was surprised at her own reaction. She saw the challenge before her and felt excited to embrace it. She willed Lady Isobel to accept her. She truly wanted to help.

*

That night in the dark of the bedroom, after Jane had fallen asleep, Betsy and Ruby turned in their beds to face each other.

‘Well, ye have heard her pitiful crying now,’ whispered Betsy. ‘Jesus. She may be thinner than a trickle of water but she can give out something mighty when she wants.’

‘I remember a girl at the convent who sounded just the same,’ Ruby whispered back. ‘She had been brought in from one of the farms. Found alone, trying to survive by herself, Sister Francis said. A priest brought her in and she was covered in lice. Maria said that she was the child of a brother and sister and that her own mother had been the child of a brother and sister and that was the reason why she was as mad as she was. Screamed the place down she did.’

‘Well, the crying, it can scare you if ‘tis bad enough,’ said Betsy. ‘You should have heard her after each of the boys died, my God, ‘twas awful. Jimmy says that when her and Lord FitzDeane have gone themselves, her screams will haunt the castle, so they will.’

‘How long have ye known Jimmy for then?’ asked Ruby. ‘You never stop talking about him. It seems to me that Jimmy is the only person who works at this castle.’

Betsy squealed indignantly, but her voice trembled slightly as she admitted that she did indeed nurture a secret passion for Jimmy. As Ruby felt her eyes close, Betsy talked on, describing how her first kiss with him had almost made her faint herself.

‘I don’t think anyone will ever want to kiss me,’ whispered Ruby.

‘Sure they will now, why not, you’re gorgeous so ye are. I know someone meself already dying to catch yer eye, so he is,’ said Betsy.

Ruby wanted to know who it was, she would have loved to have known his name, but before she could respond, her heavy eyes won the battle and sleep claimed her.

*

It took only a few days before Ruby made a breakthrough with Lady Isobel and then a further week before they were getting along well. The first challenge had been to coax her out of her nightdress in the mornings and to consider dressing into day clothes.

For a few days, they were at war and she threw the clothes back at Ruby, until one morning the buckle from Lady Isobel’s belt caught Ruby in the eye. Furious now, Ruby hissed back at her, ‘Do that once more, and I’ll throw them back at you and see how you like it.’

There were just the two of them in the room. Lady Isobel stared at Ruby for a full minute and Ruby thought,
Here we go again, I’m in trouble
.

Nursing her eye, Ruby bent down to pick the belt up from the floor.

Lady Isobel whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’

She was so quietly spoken, Ruby almost didn’t hear. As Ruby rose from her knees she laid the belt gently across Lady Isobel’s lap. Softly done, but the message was clear. This morning was the last fight.

‘That’s all right,’ she said calmly. ‘I know you didn’t mean it. I know how you feel.’

Their eyes met and bewilderment sat in those of Lady Isobel. A silent question burnt deep within. In Ruby, she had recognized her own pain and loss.

They both knew they had crossed a bridge together and that there would be no more tantrums.

Out on the landing, Ruby found a worried Betsy hovering behind the door, about to burst in to find out what was happening. She was enraged when she saw the bleeding scratch on Ruby’s eye. While she had been looking after Lord Charles’s rooms on the first floor, she had noticed the huge effort Ruby had been making with Lady Isobel.

‘Don’t let her bully you like that,’ she said, dabbing the scratch with cold water and a napkin from the closet.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t. I don’t think it will happen again. She doesn’t mean to, you know, Betsy. I bet it’s not in her nature to have a temper. She’s just very sad.’

Betsy stopped dabbing and looked at Ruby.

‘Is that so? Well, now you mention it, there was no temper before the babies were born, that’s true, or so Amy says.’

Ruby took the napkin from Betsy and held it to her own eye. ‘Do you know,’ she said, as she walked to the window and looked out over the lawn, ‘sometimes I have this funny feeling that I just cannot understand. I feel as if I’ve been here before and that I know the castle, but of course I don’t. Sometimes I feel that I was always going to find myself here at Ballyford.’

‘I felt like that,’ said Betsy. ‘But then, I was born in the cottages, over yonder.’ Betsy pointed to the row of white cottages on the horizon, in front of the river that meandered through the estate. Ruby guessed there were a dozen or so dwellings. ‘I’ve always felt like I belonged here at Ballyford.’

‘It’s funny though, you know,’ said Ruby, ‘the rooms feel as familiar to me as they did at the convent. Mind you, that doesn’t mean I’m staying. It’s Doohoma for me, just as soon as I can get away.’

Ruby had already confided her plan of escape to Betsy.

‘You would never be so bold, would ye?’ Betsy said, aghast.

‘I would and I am, Betsy.’

*

Lady Isobel and Ruby spent the following few days in amicable silence, until the next breakthrough. Having picked up a book, without being asked to or even seeking permission, Ruby began to read out loud while Lady Isobel went through her usual routine of staring blankly at a magazine in her lap.

‘You have a nice reading voice,’ she said softly. ‘They taught you well at the convent.
Wuthering Heights
was always my favourite as a girl.’

‘It was mine,’ said Ruby, full of enthusiasm. ‘My mother used to read it to me all the time. I think it was hers, too. Fancy that would ye. We all have the same book as our favourite.’