Chapter Three
An Unexpected Rendezvous
"All in good time Danny lad!" said Tom. "Along with all the rest of France, those cranes and the engine will both still be there when we get off. At least, I hope they will! Now, son, these stairs are steep so mind what... Saiorse, darlin' don't push!"
"I'm not Da! Robert pushed me!"
"No I didn't!"
"Yes, you did!"
"Didn't!"
"Did!"
"Now just stop it the pair of you!" exclaimed Mary. "Honestly! Any more of this squabbling and I'll pack the both of you back off to Downton with nanny!"
"Well I don't live there, so that's just fine by me!" retorted Saiorse promptly.
"Saiorse! Don't you dare speak like that to your aunt! Apologise this instant! And I don't mean some time next week, but now! Understood?" responded Sybil just as smartly.
Saiorse flushed.
"It was Robert that started..."
"I'm not remotely interested in what Robert did or didn't do. I will not have you speak to your aunt, or to anyone else, in that fashion, now is that clear?" demanded Sybil. "And just remember, if there's any repetition of this nonsense, from any of you, not only can nanny travel back to Downton, she can just as easily travel onto Dublin! Can't you nanny?"
"Yes mum. If you, or Her Ladyship, just say the word!" Nanny Bridges nodded her head slowly in confirmation; eyed in turn all of the children sternly.
Saiorse looked mutinously at her mother. She knew her adored father would never dare do such a thing, but much as she loved her mother, well, with Ma, it was better not to push things too far.
"I'm waiting Saiorse" said Sybil. "And so, is Aunt Mary".
"Yes Ma" nodded Sybil's daughter miserably.
"Then, please do as I have asked you, and apologise".
"I'm sorry Aunt Mary" Saiorse mumbled.
"Apology accepted" said Mary quickly. Her dark eyes flashed momentarily and but for an instant, those same eyes met those of Sybil over Saiorse head. The two sisters grinned at each other ruefully.
"I'm sorry, Sybil, I shouldn't have snapped at Saiorse like that, but honestly when these two are together, it's enough to try the patience of a saint - which of course I'm not. As well you know!" She laughed.
"And just remember, all of you, what I said about nanny and Dublin!" ended Sybil.
"Ma! You wouldn't, would you?" asked young Bobby nervously, his eyes watering.
"Wouldn't what, darling/"
"Send me back to Dublin!"
"No of course not Button!" laughed Sybil hugging her youngest child tightly to her. Christened Robert Joseph, but always called Bobby, the little lad had acquired his nickname of Button from Ma, Tom's adoptive mother, when the little boy proved, just like his Da, to be so precocious in all manner of things
"Why, you're just like your Da, bright as a button!" had said Ma and the nickname bestowed by accident upon the happy, laughing little boy, who of Sybil and Tom's three children looked most like Tom, had somehow stuck.
To Tom's great distress, and that of Sybil too, Ma herself had passed away in 1929, living just long enough to see her adopted son, of whom she was inordinately proud, become deputy editor of the Irish Independent. Her passing, at the age of seventy five, although not unexpected, had served to put something of a damper of what otherwise should have been a very happy occasion, which was perhaps why Tom had been so moved by Robert's effusive telegram, congratulating him upon his new appointment.
Ciaran and Aislin were still at the farm, but their brood of five children, with the exception of young Riordan who at eleven was but a year or so younger than Danny, had now all grown up. Ruari the young, good looking, dark haired boy who, at thirteen years old, had been so smitten with Sybil and who had learned to dance the foxtrot at her instruction in his father's barn at Christmas 1919 was now twenty five, married, with two young sons of his own, working as an engineer for the Great Southern Railway, and still, all these years later with a very soft spot both for his Uncle Tom and especially for Aunt Sybil.
Ruari's pretty young wife was none other than the eldest of old Mrs. O'Neill's grand-daughters for whom he carried crates into her grandmother's store room at the back of her shop down in Clontarf. Not surprisingly, throughout his life, Ruari always retained a special fondness for ginger beer.
Ruari's younger brother Ronan was also married, working alongside his father at the farm and living with his wife, with a baby on the way, in a tenanted cottage on the Clontarf Castle estate. He hoped to take over the tenancy of the farm when Ciaran felt no longer able to carry on with it. No-one was getting any younger.
While both still living at home, although for how much longer remained to be seen, Mairead and Rosaleen were courting, or so said Aislin. Mairead was working for 2RN, the first radio broadcasting station in the Irish Free State, which now operated from the recently restored General Post Office building on O'Connell, formerly Sackville, Street. Rosaleen had followed in the footsteps of her Aunt Sybil and was training to be a nurse at the Rotunda hospital over on Parnell Street.
And even at eighteen, Padraig, Donal and Niamh's son, now following in the footsteps of his Uncle Tom and working as a cub reporter with the Irish Independent, still had a fascination with dragons, and, if the truth be told, hoped one day to find one. When Padraig had landed the job at the Indy, naturally there was talk in the Talbot Street offices, that his uncle had pulled strings, but Tom denied doing any such thing and said to have done so would have made him a hypocrite. Padraig, he said, had got the position on his own merits.
Following Peadar's death at the hands of the British in Kilmainham Gaol, as the years had passed, Emer had gradually drawn more and more into herself. She never remarried, and in 1923 had joined the Sisters of Charity who ran both St. Vincent's Hospital on St. Stephen's Green as well as the Magdalene asylums scattered throughout the city. For her part, Ma thought it a waste of Emer's life, but had to admit that her daughter found her new vocation both challenging and fulfilling.
By now, the initial steady trickle of passengers disembarking in a more or less leisurely fashion down the stairways and gangways of the S.S. Canterbury had turned into a veritable, but still orderly flood, among which in its midst were to be found both the Bransons and the Crawleys; while on the quayside, its engine impatiently blowing off steam, the dark green empty carriages of the Paris portion of the Rome Express now awaited their eager passengers.
Back on board the Canterbury, the cargo hatches of the steamer had been thrown open and, accompanied by raucous shouts, sprinkled with profanities in both English and French, punctuated in turn by blasts on steam whistles, the two cranes, which had so excited young Danny Branson as the Canterbury had nosed into the harbour at Calais, now swung into action. Moments later, they were busily engaged offloading all kinds of cargo from the steamer, chiefly of course luggage belonging to the passengers booked on the Rome Express, a disparate consignment of steamer trunks, portmanteaux, numerous leather suitcases, packages, parcels, as well as bulging sacks of mail, wooden crates and packing chests, all bound for the luggage vans of the waiting train.
Meanwhile, stewards from the Canterbury, resplendent in their immaculate white, brass buttoned tunics, carried down the gangways to waiting railway trolleys that small amount of hand luggage considered absolutely indispensable to them by their owners, even during the comparatively short afternoon journey to Paris; the loaded trolleys being in turn drawn to the appropriate carriages and there offloaded by uniformed porters of the Chemins de Fer du Nord, where in due course the requisite items deemed so essential were reunited with their owners and then either promptly stowed away on luggage racks or else not opened until the train reached the Gare du Nord in Paris later that very same afternoon.
With the brief formalities demanded by French customs now duly completed - along with their fellow passengers, the Bransons and the Crawleys had already shown their passports at Dover - the officer on duty came smartly to attention, saluting both Matthew and Mary, bidding "Monsieur le comte et Madame la comtesse de Grantham, bienvenue en France" with Tom muttering good naturedly behind them to Sybil that the officer hadn't seen fit to salute him, a citizen of a fellow republic in all but name.
With a grin and in a stage whisper especially for her much loved brother-in-law's benefit, Mary had then remarked to Matthew that it was so very gratifying when people of quality were recognised and accorded the appropriate respect their position demanded. It was perhaps for the best that Tom's pithy retort about the French Revolution, the nobility, and Madame La Guillotine was drowned out by a sudden sonorous blast on the ship's whistle of the Canterbury!
Thereafter, along with the other passengers, the Bransons and the Crawleys walked the short distance to their waiting train, and as they did so, standing by their compartment, it was now, at last, that they finally encountered the woman the adults had seen but a short while ago from the boat deck of the Canterbury.
It was young Robert who saw her first.
"Look everybody! Look!" he shouted excitedly, earning himself in the process a rebuke from his mother about making a display of himself in public. "It's Aunt Edith!" And, so indeed it was. But moments later, Edith found herself smothered in hugs and kisses from all of her nephews and nieces, each of them vying for her undivided attention.
"Edith, darling, what on earth are you doing here?" asked Mary. Despite the seriousness of her question, her tone was one of abject and bored disinterest. If Edith really wanted to spend her life away from them all living in some fly blown tent in the middle of nowhere in the Arabian desert, that was her affair. The two sisters embraced lightly and exchanged the most perfunctory of kisses.
"From your last letter, we understood you were in Palestine for the next few months".
"I was, or rather I was supposed to have been" said Edith, "but there were some local difficulties and the dig there ended rather sooner than we... than I envisaged".
Mary didn't bother to pursue the nature of the local difficulties which had brought the dig in Palestine to such an abrupt and early end, nor did she ask what or who it was Edith had been excavating at Petra. She reasoned it couldn't be Strallan who had died a few months ago, not at Petra wherever that was, but in a nursing home at Scarborough over on the Yorkshire coast. From all accounts, he had been decidedly decrepit by the end but, despite now being definitely both dead and buried, was, thought Mary, presumably not yet ancient enough to merit the attentions of Edith's spade and trowel.
"But that still doesn't explain why you're here now".
"There were some papers in the library of the Archaeological Institute in Vienna which I wanted to read up on before going back out to Iraq. The Mallowans have closed down the excavation at Nineveh, at least for the time being, so I travelled down to Cairo, took the train to Alexandria, and flew back to Genoa in a flying boat courtesy of Imperial Airways".
"My, you do get about, don't you" observed Mary flatly. "But I thought you said something about Vienna?"
"Oh, yes, well that came after. Anyway once I'd finished what I... what I had to do there, I thought I'd travel back to England and see Mama. But when I telephoned the house, Barrow explained that Mama had sailed for the States and that you were all travelling on the Continent. I have to fly back from Genoa in... well eventually, so here I am. I do hope you don't mind?"
"Mind? Why should we mind? Presumably you've booked yourself a compartment because..."
"Oh yes of course. I've..."
"Hello, Edith. You look well" said Matthew cutting in, and kissing her lightly on the cheek.
"Do I?" asked Edith absent-mindedly, looking over her shoulder. "I suppose it must be all that sun!" She glanced again in the direction of the salle d'attente situated just behind them in the Gare Maritime.
"Sybil, darling, how absolutely wonderful to see you. I must say I do like your hair!" Edith smiled warmly at Sybil.
"Tom never liked it when I had it cut short back in 1919. This is a practical compromise!" Sybil laughed, before embracing Edith warmly.
"Darling Tom!"
"Hello Edith! Dug up any more pharaohs?" laughed Tom, his blue eyes sparkling with mirth. He had always had a very soft spot for Edith ever since the explosion at the Shelbourne Hotel.
"Wrong country I'm afraid, darling. That's Egypt".
"I know" Tom grinned, before hugging her warmly to him, and as he did so, saw her glance yet again towards the door of the salle d'attente of the Gare Maritime, thought he saw a face at one of the windows, but if so, it was gone in an instant.
"Do you mind if we all go inside the waiting room and sit down for a moment?" she asked
"Why should we want to go inside?" asked Mary. "The train will be departing shortly".
"Because... well because... there's someone I would rather like you all to meet" said Edith.
"Who?" Mary asked.
"Oh Mary, don't be so tiresome. Just humour me please?" asked Edith, chewing her lower lip.
"Humour ... Oh, very well".
"No!" Edith laid a restraining hand on Tom's arm. "Not the children; at least, not just yet".
"As you wish". Tom smiled gently at Edith. For someone who could travel across Sinai, take a train to Alexandria, and then fly to Genoa in a flying boat, he thought Edith seemed uncharacteristically nervous.
Then, with Sybil having made sure that, at least for the time being, that, ably, if unwillingly, assisted by Mary's maid Hodges, Nanny Bridges was comfortable with looking after both the Branson and Crawley children out on the platform, with Edith leading the way, Matthew, Mary, Tom and Sybil now followed her inside the salle d'attente of the Gare Maritime at Calais.
Author's note:
All the members of Tom's adoptive family figure prominently in my other story "Home Is Where The Heart Is".
2RN began broadcasting in 1926 and continued doing so until 1933.
The General Post Office in Dublin was the scene of fierce fighting during the Easter Rising of 1916 during which time the building was completely burnt out. It was only fully restored after the establishment of the Irish Free State.
Founded in 1745, The Rotunda is one of the three main maternity hospitals in Dublin.
The original St. Vincent's Hospital was founded in 1834. Run by the Sisters of Charity, it was open to patients of all denominations, provided they could afford to pay for their care.
Run by nuns and set up with good intentions to save women from the evils of prostitution, the Magdalene asylums (or laundries) were established throughout both Europe and North America. Later, they became notorious as grim places which institutionalised "fallen women" against their will. The first such asylum in Ireland opened in 1765 and the last in that country closed as recently as 1996.
The Chemins de Fer du Nord was a French railway company which served that part of France lying essentially to the north of Paris.
Petra is a world famous archaeological site, situated in what is now the Kingdom of Jordan. It remained unknown in the west until 1812. Aptly known as "[the] rose red city, half as old as time", since 1985 it has been classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Imperial Airways was a commercial airline which operated between 1924 and 1939. While serving parts of Europe, its principal routes linked together the far flung quarters of the British Empire.