Chapter One Hundred And Forty
Letters From An Officer
Wonderingly, his hand held tightly in hers, Tom let Sybil lead him slowly upstairs to their bedroom where carefully she set down the lamp, sat him gently on the bed with Danny in his arms, then assuring him she would be back directly, disappeared off downstairs to return but a few moments later. Having taken Danny from him, she now handed Tom both the diary and the bundle of letters which she had found and brought down with her from the abandoned attic room.
The diary Tom recognised immediately.
"Where ever did you get this?" he asked.
"I found them, both the diary and the letters… in your trunk" she said hesitantly, looking down at him, her eyes never once leaving his face.
"My… my trunk? You mean… it's…"
"Still up there, in your old bedroom? Yes".
"Do you know, since coming here, back to Skerries, I never even once gave it a moment's thought".
"Having seen that room, I can well understand why". Sybil grimaced, sat down with Danny on her lap next to Tom.
"Everything's still in there you know; your clothes from when you were a boy, all your toys. I thought, perhaps when he's older, if you've no objection, then, some of them might do well enough for Danny" she ventured cautiously.
Tom nodded absent-mindedly.
"All right" he said softly.
"You're sure you're not just humouring me?" She grinned, bouncing Danny gently on her knees while the little boy chuckled with pleasure.
Slowly Tom shook his head, fondled his son's hair.
"Would I ever dare do that? No, of course not". He gave her one of his beguiling lop-sided grins.
"You really wouldn't mind? I half thought…"
"No, to be sure". He smiled at her again, glanced towards the window as another smattering of raindrops peppered hard against the glass. "Jaysus but it's turning into a really rough night". Then he returned to the matter of his old bedroom.
"Darlin' how on earth did you ever find you way up there? From what I remember, those stairs are very steep. You should be more careful".
"You mean in my present condition. Oh Tom, really!"
"At any time! But especially now" he remonstrated.
"I know but as to how, I don't really know. There was something… Oh, I know you'll think I'm being foolish. And, anyway, Edith's supposed to be the sensitive one in the family, but both times I've been into that room I felt that somehow, I'd been drawn there. That someone… Does that make any kind of sense?" She laughed.
Tom shook his head.
"No, not really. But then, perhaps it should. After all, darlin', this is Ireland! Over here, we believe in all kinds of things others would dismiss as foolish nonsense".
At that, Sybil smiled. A moment later, her smile faded and she grew serious.
"Tom, darling, a while ago, downstairs in the kitchen you asked me if I could forgive you and I told you that you'd done nothing in all of this that merited my forgiveness".
Tom nodded.
"Well, there's something for which I now do need to ask your forgiveness". She bit her lip nervously.
"For what?" Tom sounded genuinely mystified.
"For… for reading some… most… all, of your diary. Tom, my love, what you went through as a boy…" At the thought of what she had read, Sybil's eyes misted, filled with tears. Tom drew her and Danny to him, kissed them both softly.
"Hush now. It's all in the past".
"There are some later entries in it, written after you'd left Skerries". Tom's eyes shot up. "I think the handwriting is Maeve's". Sybil sniffed; dabbed at her moist eyes with her handkerchief. "Do you forgive me, Tom?"
He looked questioningly at Sybil for a moment and then nodded his head vehemently.
"But Sybil, darlin', there's really no need".
"Truly?"
"None at all".
"Then thank you" she said huskily; now leaned in and kissed him softly on the cheek. "But before you read what Maeve has written, may I suggest you make a start with these". Sybil patted the bundle of letters lying beside Tom on the bed.
"All right, if you say so. Have you read these too?" He eyed her cautiously awaiting her reply.
Sybil nodded.
"Most... not all. I couldn't… Tom darling, your own letters apart, I should warn you that they don't make for very pleasant reading. But my love, you need to know what really happened; that you were not in any sense to blame; for any of it".
"Not to blame?" echoed Tom. "But I don't understand".
"Trust me, my darling, you will… after you've read what's written in those". She pointed to the letters.
He nodded thoughtfully and now reached for the bundle lying beside him on the bed.
The three most recent letters were indeed from Tom himself, written to Maeve and wholly innocuous in their content. These he now swiftly set aside and turned his attention instead to the remainder, some sixty or so, also addressed to Maeve and which began in December 1916 and continued, he found, through until August 1918, all written, it transpired, by her brother, Christopher. Well thumbed, the letters were postmarked from France, the earliest written shortly after Lieutenant Branson had gone up the line for the very first time at Christmas 1916 and the last but a matter of days before he was killed in the late summer of the very last year of the war.
Much of what was written in the letters recounted details of Christopher's daily life in the trenches. These echoed very much what Matthew had related to Tom one evening in the billiards room at Downton just before Mary and he were married, when, after they had consumed several more brandies than was usual, Matthew had become maudlin and for once had been disposed to talk about some of his experiences during the war; before William Mason and he were so badly wounded.
Grateful, heartfelt thanks expressed for letters and parcels received from home "… you will be pleased to hear that all arrived safely… you must have taken very great care in packing everything up… the cigarettes and the matches much appreciated… the socks and the mitts will be particularly useful", snippets telling of life in the trenches, of the constant shelling "… in time I might even get used to rifle bullets, but I don't think I'll ever get used to the shells, they make such a damned, awful noise", the mud "… which gets everywhere and into everything" and the terrible price of the war measured in the loss of human lives "… had a horrible time. I can't tell you how awful it all was but after, saw the bodies of over fifty of my men which had been blown to pieces by a huge shell. It's turned midnight and I think I will turn in now".
Interspersed with Christopher's accounts of life as it was lived in the trenches albeit seen through the eyes of an officer - descriptions which drew grudging praise from Tom - was the vouchsafing of far more personal information. Some of this made clear that Tom's suspicions about Christopher's elder brother William and which he now disclosed to Sybil were well founded; there had been some unpleasantness, as it was termed, involving a young man from Cork, which had been hushed up with some degree of difficulty, ultimately by the means of paying the chap's passage out to America.
Other letters told of Christopher's ill conceived and subsequently failed marriage into which, given William's sexual proclivities and following his death at Gallipoli, Christopher had apparently been pushed by his parents, presumably in order for him to do his duty and what turned out to be the irony of all ironies, produce an heir; not that he ever did. Christopher had enlisted later that same year and the marriage apparently remained unconsummated, the reason for which soon became all too clear as several letters contained other far more intimate and private details.
Written for no-one's eyes except those of Maeve and her brother these letters told of their forbidden love for each other, an intense physical relationship, which evidently stretched back into the past to just before Tom had first come here to Skerries as a twelve year old orphan. Like Sybil, Tom was both horrified and revolted by what he had now learned. She saw the colour wash over his face. He raised his eyes from the letter he was reading; met Sybil's gaze.
"I never knew any of this" he said simply. "Sybil, how on earth could she? Jaysus! With her own feckin' brother!"
Where matters of a sexual nature were concerned, as Sybil knew only too well, Tom was certainly no prude but he was clearly absolutely appalled by the very thought of what the letters had disclosed.
It soon became clear that Tom's uncle, Maeve and Christopher's father, had begun to suspect something of the truth of what might actually happening here at Skerries beneath his very own roof. And then, Maeve had found herself to be expecting her brother's child. Equally clear was that Maeve's seduction of Tom had been but a stratagem to prevent her parents discovering the identity of the father of that child and, despite his youth, she had gone on to allege that it was Tom, good looking and well built for his age, who had forced himself upon her. The passing reference in the letters to his good looks, his physique and that he would doubtless "make a handsome man one day" was the only thing in this whole sorry tale of deceit and lies which brought the merest ghost of a smile to Tom's face.
Some months after Tom had been so savagely beaten by his uncle, then by his cousins and finally had run away, eventually, unable to conceal her advancing pregnancy, Maeve had been sent to stay with a distant aunt of her mother's at Dunquin House, an isolated country estate on the far west coast over beyond Dingle, there to have her baby in secret which had then been given up for adoption; her parents both convinced then and thereafter that the child, a boy, had been fathered on their daughter by their orphaned nephew, Tom.
Mayhap Tom's uncle and aunt eventually learned the truth of what had actually happened, but if they did, Maeve and Christopher never themselves disabused them of their mistaken belief. After all how could they, without revealing the dreadful truth about their incestuous passion? Far better to let the by now long absent Tom be forever held the scapegoat for what had come to pass.
At first, it seemed that sheer chance had led to the child's adoption by the Ryans, but from oblique references scattered here and there throughout the letters, although the exact details remained sketchy, it appeared that in this regard all might not be that straightforward. Whatever the truth in this, there was no mistaking the fact that the boy, named Fergal, had grown up to be the splitting image of Christopher and who, along with Tom and his natural father, shared the same blue eyes, fair hair and lop sided grin, a distinctive Branson family trait; something to which Sybil herself could well attest. The facial resemblance between Tom and Christopher was quite startling but the proof of it was there for anyone who cared enough to look for it, in the photograph taken of Tom and his cousins standing on the front steps of Skerries House.
It appeared that at least until August 1918, when with Christopher's death on the Marne the letters perforce came to an end, Maeve had refrained from telling Fergal that she was his mother, though with her father and brothers now dead and her own mother not long for this world whether this would continue to be the case remained to be seen.
As to whether Grace, Christopher's wife, also ever learned the truth about his relationship with his sister that too remained unclear but Grace, the elder sister of the childish, and vacuous Millie, left her husband and went home to England shortly before Christopher sailed for France.
And so now Maeve's otherwise seemingly inexplicable interest in the dim-witted Millie became clear: Maeve thus being able to keep an ear to the ground as to whether Grace had been less than circumspect in any of her comments as to why her brief marriage to Maeve's brother Christopher had failed.
Not that it seemed likely: it transpired that Grace Branson, Grace Anstruther as she had once been, was now confined in an asylum in Surrey.
While Tom had continued to read through the remainder of Christopher's letters, in the quiet of their lamp lit bedroom, Sybil saw quietly to snuggling Danny down in his cot for the night and then returned and sat with Tom, her arm about his hunched shoulders. From time to time, she got up from the bed, tiptoed to the small hearth in the room and mended the fire whenever it burned low; by the time Tom had finished, she had replenished the coals in the cast iron grate no less than three times, while outside the rain continued to drive hard against the window, the sound muffled somewhat by the thickness of the curtains.
At last, laying aside the last of the letters, Tom shook his head in disbelief, ran his fingers through his hair.
"Jaysus! I can't believe it!"
Sybil stood before him her hands laced together and resting protectively over her swollen belly.
"I'm not surprised". She nodded now in the direction of the diary still lying beside him on the bed. "I should warn you that Maeve has a few choice words to say about me in that". Don't worry, darling. I may not have your broad shoulders but I'm remarkably thick skinned!" Sybil laughed a hollow laugh.
Tom looked appalled. Picking up the diary, he skimmed through the later pages, reading at random some of the entries. For the second time that evening, Sybil saw the colour wash over his face.
"How could she think such things of you, let alone write them?" Tom found he couldn't read any more; threw the diary aside in disgust, drew Sybil to him.
He then fell silent, but only for a moment.
"What… what I found there… in the chapel, now begins to make some kind of sense".
"The chapel? What chapel?" Sybil sat down beside him, rested her head comfortably on his shoulder while Tom told her about the chapel and the memorial to Christopher. When he had ended his tale, Tom fell silent while they sat together gazing at the flickering flames of the fire.
"Almost a shrine then, to his memory" Sybil said at length.
"Yes, I suppose it is" he said softly. "Would you ever do the same for me?" He chuckled.
"Tom, don't joke about such things" she chided. "But, since you ask me, no. I much prefer to commune with the living; not the dead".
"I'm so very relieved to hear it!"
She kissed him lightly on the cheek.
"Tom, darling, there's something else. This morning, while I was in Kinsale, I saw someone… someone we both know…" When Sybil had related who it was she had seen, she sat quietly, her hands resting in her lap, waiting for Tom's considered response.
"So that bastard's back here in Ireland, is he? I find myself asking if he ever really left in the first place! That he's serving with those thugs in Percival's lot down there in Kinsale, that doesn't surprise me at all for sure. As for knowing Maeve, if there's some form of understanding between the two of them, given what we both now know, why then he's welcome to her. They deserve each other those two! In any case, I don't see that it makes very much difference; at least not to us".
"Yes, I suppose you're right".
"Indubitably, milady!" Tom grinned. Then it was his turn to grow serious.
"When… when she and I parted… out there on the terrace… before I knew any of this…I told Maeve never to come here again".
Sybil nodded.
"Do you think she'll pay any heed to that?"
Tom shrugged.
"I do rather hope she does. After all of this…" He spread his hands expansively. "I don't ever want to have to see her again". At that, now holding Sybil close, he fell silent, while save for the sound of Danny's soft breathing, the quiet in the room drew down about them.
"Tom, my darling. There was something else, up there". So saying Sybil rose and went to the chest which stood at the foot of the bed. She returned with the photograph which had been standing by the bed in the attic room.
"It was all covered in dust. When I saw who… Any way, I've cleaned it up. Remembering what you once said, I thought… I thought you would want to have it again". She handed Tom the photograph. When he saw who it was of, Tom began gently to trace the faces of his parents with his forefinger and then promptly burst into tears, while Sybil cradled him tightly to her in her arms.
Later, that same night, long after they had gone to bed, well after the rain had finally stopped, Sybil lay awake watching over Tom as he slept, facing each other, his hands enfolded in her own. It was clearly not a dreamless sleep, for he was undeniably restless; from time to time said something wholly unintelligible. However when that happened, Sybil gently caressed his face, kissed him lightly, soothed his fears, seeking to exorcise once and for all whatever demons still haunted his sleeping hours. This man with whom she had fallen so passionately in love; himself so deeply loving, so gentle and now at last shown innocent of the harm of which he thought he himself might once have been guilty.
About the same time that Sybil was calming Tom's night time fears, but a few miles away, at the military barracks down in Kinsale, given the appalling weather and the lateness of the hour, Captain Miles Stathum was most surprised to receive an unexpected visitor to his quarters.
He stood up, with his hand indicated the chair opposite him by the side of the fireplace. His offer was refused by an almost imperceptible shake of the head.
"I didn't expect to see you again quite so soon".
"Indeed, but matters need to be progressed and the quicker the better. I came here tonight to tell you that I accept your terms" she said, taking off her hat and coat. She dropped them both on the chair, the use of which she had just spurned.
"Shouldn't you be sure that you first know precisely what my terms are?" he asked with an amused grin.
She watched impassively as he closed the short distance between them, placed his hands firmly upon her shoulders. A moment later and his hands slipped lower, cupping her breasts through the filminess of the fabric of her blouse. Typical of his kind, she thought. So bloody cocksure of himself.
"I know exactly what they are; unconditional surrender, but in exchange I want your assurance that Tom Bran..."
He closed his mouth on hers.
Author's Note:
Dunquin, which lies at the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula, is the most westerly settlement in Ireland. Some scenes from David Lean's famous film "Ryan's Daughter" set in Ireland in 1916, were shot nearby at Coumineole Beach and Ceathrú.