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The Secret of Drumshee Castle
Grace Barry climbed the grey stone steps leading up to the three-hundred-year-old castle of Drumshee. The steps were high and she was small for her age, so she climbed slowly, hating the long, stiff, tight-waited dress which clung around her legs. She wished she was wearing her old petticoat. She wished she was back in the only real home she had known in all her seven years – her foster-home, at the little cottage beside Lough Fergus. Above all, she wished she was with Bridget. Bridget was her foster-mother, soft, warm and kind. If only she could come here with me, thought Grace. I wouldn’t mind this place so much. She stood at the top of the steps and looked all around her. She found it hard to understand that all this was now hers. The huge stone castle, the big circular enclosure with the high wall around it, the massive iron gates, the stables; and beyond, the fields, the River Fergus, the woods, the little hills and the peat bogs. What was it that her foster-brother Enda had said? Grace tried to remember the number he had used: it did not mean much to her, but in her mind she could still hear his voice vibrating with excitement. ‘Four thousand acres, Grace!’ he had said. ‘You’re the mistress of four thousand acres and a castle too. You’re the richest person in the neighbourhood.’ She did not care. She did not even care that his father and mother had died only a week before, she had never really known them, and she did not know whether she would have loved them if they were still alive. What she did know was that she hated her father’s sister, Mary Fitzgerald and Mary’s husband, John Fitzgerald. They had been staying at the castle when Grace’s father and mother had died, and they had stayed on to be her guardians. She hated them more than anyone she had known in her life. Sighing deeply, Grace pushed open the heavy oak door, stepped inside and opened the door to the Great Hall. The Great Hall at Drumshee was magnificent: the stone ceiling was high and arched and walls were covered with woven tapestries and painted leather hangings. Down the middle of the room ran a huge oak table and at the far side a fire burned in the great fireplace. Beside the fire sat a woman – a middle-aged woman with icy blue eyes, iron-grey hair and long hands with talon-like nails. Grace went towards her aunt, slowly and reluctantly, her feet dragging through the rushes which covered the flag stoned floor. ‘Where have you been?’ asked the harsh voice from the fireside. Grace did not reply. She was desperately summoning up her courage to beg, to plead, to promise anything if she could only get away from all this cold splendour and back to the cosy little cottage by Lough Fergus. She struggled to find the right words but in the end she could only say: ‘I want to go home, Aunt.’ ‘This is your home,’ said her aunt, ‘Your father had no son, no other relations – except me, of course – so this is yours now.’ A wave of anger swept over Grace. ‘I want to go home!’ she yelled, deliberately losing her temper. This usually worked well with Bridget, but Mary Fitzgerald rose from her place by the fire and towering over Grace, slapped her across the face with all her strength. Grace gasped. The blow had almost knocked her off her feet, and she clung to the corner of the table. For a moment she felt sick and giddy; then a torrent of rage flooded through her. ‘You horrible woman!’ she screamed. ‘I hate you! I hate you! I’m not going to stay here. I’m going straight back to Bridget!’ ‘You’ll never see Bridget again,’ said Mary Fitzgerald venomously. ‘You had better mind your manners, or you will be whipped.’ But Grace did not care. She was carried away by the worst temper tantrum of her life. ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!’ she cried. Then, seeing that her aunt did not really care, she added spitefully; ‘they were talking about you both in the kitchen last night and they said that Mary Fitzgerald would murder her own mother for a fistful of silver and that John Fitzgerald was a wastrel and a gambler.’ There was silence for a moment. Grace began to grow frightened. There was a look in Mary Fitzgerald’s eyes which she had never seen before. The angry red drained out of Grace’s face and it became as white as her aunt’s. The two stared at each other for a few long minutes; and then Grace gave a little whimper of fear. The sound broke the tension which held them both. Grace’s aunt seized the ivory-topped cane which stood by the fireplace and began beating her with a cold ferocity which knew no mercy. Grace found and screamed and kicked, but it was no use. The more she fought, the more she was beaten, until finally she lay limp on the floor. She barely felt her aunt drag her to the small cold bedroom at the top of the castle. She was flung onto the bed; then she heard the key turn in the lock and her aunt’s footsteps going down the spiral staircase. Grace pulled the rough bedcovers over her head, curled up like a small wounded animal, and fell asleep. It was dark when she woke up. For a moment she did not know where she was; then the pain of her stiffening bruises and the icy chill of the air around her reminded her. She heard the key in the door turn cautiously. She sat up, stiff with fear that her aunt had come back to beat her again, but the face in the candlelight was not Mary Fitzgerald’s. It was Deirdre, the cook, and she was carrying a plate of something which smelt good. Grace realised that she was very hungry. It must be quite late, she thought. ‘I’ve brought you a sup of soup, my love,’ whispered the cook. ‘Did she hurt you bad?’ Grace nodded, the tears starting to her eyes. She resolutely blinked them back. I won’t think of my aunt now, she thought. I’ll think about her later. Now I’ll just enjoy the soup and the bread, and go back to sleep, and tomorrow I’ll think of some way to get back to Bridget’s cottage. ‘How many miles is to Lough Fergus?’ she asked. ‘How long would it take me to walk it, Deirdre?’ ‘Oh, don’t be thinking like that,’ said Deirdre alarmed. ‘She’ll kill you if you do anything like that. She’s sent a message over to Bridget to tell her that she mustn’t come to the castle and you mustn’t see her again.’ The tears welled up again in Grace’s eyes. She shook her head angrily and blinked them away. ‘What am I going to do then, then?’ she said petulantly. ‘I must see Bridget and Enda. I’ll die anyway if I live in this place. I hate it. It’s so cold in this room.’ Deirdre looked at her uncomfortably. ‘It’s the worst room in the place that she’s given you,’ she said, feeling the bedcovers with a worried air. ‘It’s terribly damp. I’ll see if we can get a brazier in here.’ ‘What’s a brazier?’ asked Grace. She did not really care, but it was nice to have Deirdre in there talking to her and being kind to her. ‘A brazier is a sort of iron basket that you stand on the floor. You put in some sods of turf and light them and it warms the room.’ Bridget’s cottage is always warm,’ said Grace sadly. ‘She always keeps a fire burning, winter and summer. I helped Enda and Bridget to get the turf last year. We brought it back on the cart and piled it up against the wall of the house.’ She clenched her hands to stop the tears coming back and quickly swallowed some soup to ease the ache in her throat. ‘I’ll tell you what you can do,’ said Deirdre. ‘You finish up that soup and then I’ll sneak you down to the kitchen. I’ll lock the door behind us. She won’t bother looking in at you. She and her husband and that new governess they’ve got for you are all having dinner. You come down and have a good warm-up by the kitchen fire.’ ‘Is she all right?’ whispered Joe, the stableman, as Grace tiptoed into the kitchen sheltering behind Deirdre’s bulk. ‘She’s half killed,’ Deirdre whispered back. ‘You wouldn’t treat a horse the way that woman treated the poor child.’ Joe said nothing, but he lifted Grace up in his arms and sat her on his knee. He took off the stiff leather shoes which she hated so much and warmed her cold feet at the fire. ‘What happened?’ he said after a while. ‘Why did she beat you like that?’ ‘I wanted to go back to Bridget and live with her again,’ said Grace. She did not like to tell him that she had repeated the conversation between himself and Deirdre and that that was what had thrown Mary Fitzgerald into such a passion. She snuggled in against Joe’s shoulder. She knew him well. He had always been the one who brought messages and presents from the castle to her; and during the last week, since she had come to the castle, her only comfort had been help in the stables. Grace loved horses; her foster-brother Enda had taught her to ride almost as soon as she could walk. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ advised Joe. ‘Don’t say another word about Bridget. Let her think you’ve forgotten Bridget. Then, when she and her husband go off for the day to Galway or out driving, you can easily slip across. It’s only about an hour’s walk. Grace nodded. Her head was drooping and her eyelids kept falling down. She slept warmly and securely in Joe’s arms, but from time to time words drifted in to her through the thick cloud of sleepiness: money – inheritance- murder – danger for the child – danger, danger, danger – She was being shaken awake by Deirdre. ‘Grace, wake up. We must get you back to your bed. They’ve finished their dinner. Come on, I’ll take you up.’ Suddenly wide-awake and carrying her shoes in her hand, Grace followed Deirdre out of the kitchen and into the little room beside the Great Hall , at the bottom of the staircase. Deirdre put her finger t her lips and inclined her ear towards the door, then gave a satisfied nod. John Fitzgerald’s hoarse rasping voice could be heard plainly from within, followed by the flat, monotonous tones of his wife. Deirdre placed one foot on the first stair, but suddenly they heard a door being pushed open, somewhere above them and a flicker of candlelight lit up the dark walls. ‘Deirdre,’ said the shrill voice of Joan Butler, Grace’s new governess. ‘Deirdre, the warming pan in my bed is almost cold Take it down to the kitchen and put some hot sods in it.’ Grace slipped like a little shadow behind the velvet curtains which screened the door to the Great Hall from draughts. She would be quite hidden there, and she could hear her aunt and uncle quite plainly, if there was any danger of them coming to the door, she would be able to slip quickly down to the kitchen again. She could hear Deirdre pounding up the stairs to collect the warming pan. It would take her a while, she would have to take the burnt sods out of the great brass dish, carefully select some new ones, make sure that they were smouldering, but not burning, and then take the pan back up to the governess. All in all, Grace reckoned that it would take Deirdre a good five minute to attend to the governess, so out of boredom she began to listen to her aunt and uncle’s conversation. ‘It’s a pit the child didn’t go to,’ said her uncle’s voice. Go? thought Grace. Go where? She was puzzled, but her aunt’s next word drove the puzzle out of her head. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Mary Fitzgerald said, softly, but so distinctly that the sound came clearly to the listening ears of the child behind the door. ‘Don’t worry. After al, we are her guardians until she’s eighteen. We will have complete control over all her money until then – and who knows what might happen during the next eleven years? She may look pink-cheeked and plump now, but children die easily. And when she does, the castle and the lands of Drumshee will all be mine. Back to Drumshee Timeline Series booklist
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