After what seemed an eternity Inspector Leger found some matches. He left the winemaker’s kitchen looking as if it had been ransacked by a burglar in a hurry, drawers thrown on the floor, cupboards emptied, a whole row of saucepans tossed aside. Lady Lucy clutched his arm as they made their way down the steps, enormous shadows flickering now across the sides of the cave.
At the bottom the Inspector paused to light another match.
‘Listen, Inspector,’ said Lady Lucy suddenly, straining forwards to catch a noise. ‘Listen!’ Together they tiptoed forwards away from the bottles towards the tiers of great vats at the end.
‘It’s the Marseillaise, for God’s sake,’ said the Inspector, ‘and its coming from that great vat over there!’
‘And look,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘do you see, there’s a trickle of wine coming down the side!’
The Inspector knew what to do. One of his uncles kept a vineyard in the Loire. He raced over to the vat and pulled back the bolts on the sliding door. A torrent of wine knocked him backwards on to the floor. Lady Lucy dodged to one side. The music box was still playing. And then, very unsteadily, like a man who has been drinking for days, his clothes dripping red on to the floor, his hand still clutching his clasp knife, his face deadly pale, came the staggering figure of Lord Francis Powerscourt.
‘Lucy,’ he said, his voice thick from the fumes, ‘I’m so glad to see you.’ And with that he fainted into her arms.
15
Shortly after nine o’clock in the morning Brother Healey took Johnny Fitzgerald to meet Sean McGurk, the eighty-year-old veteran of the famine. The Christian Brother stayed for a cup of tea and then left to do his marking. McGurk was a little over five feet tall and his face was lined like a parchment map. His front room had three armchairs, a fire, a couple of bookcases and pyramids of empty bottles of John Jameson. Johnny did a quick count and reckoned that with twelve empties on the first row, ascending to the summit by eleven, ten, nine and so on to the single bottle at the top, there were seventy-eight John Jamesons in each pyramid. He wondered if the number seventy-eight held some symbolic significance for the priests of ancient Egypt or the distillers of Dublin. And there were seven pyramids stretching out from the side of the fire to the opposite wall, a total he thought to be over five hundred.
‘How long did it take you to drink that lot, Mr McGurk?’ asked Johnny Fitzgerald. There was another bottle and a jug of water on the rickety table by the old man’s chair. Pyramid builders, Johnny reckoned, must work all day.
‘One pyramid every two months or so,’ said Sean McGurk. Christ, said Johnny to himself, that’s over a bottle a day. He was amazed the old man was still alive. The medical fraternity would have said survival was impossible at those rates of consumption.
‘You’re looking well on it,’ said Johnny cheerfully. ‘It must help to keep the days at bay.’
‘It does that,’ McGurk smiled and the lines on his face grew ever deeper. ‘Now then, Brother Healey said you wanted to know about the famine here in Macroom. Is it any particular district or any particular workhouse or any particular family you’re interested in?’
Johnny explained about his book, commissioned by a rich Delaney in New York to find out about his ancestors. He almost believed the story by now.
‘There’s one thing I must ask you before we start,’ said McGurk, taking an enormous gulp of John Jameson. ‘Please don’t go asking me about my own experiences in those terrible times. I swore to God I would never talk about it again after I had three Americans here two years ago it was this August. Four days they spent here, staying in that hotel where I’m sure you are, and they wouldn’t leave me alone. “Surely there’s something else you can remember, Mr McGurk,” they started saying halfway through the second day and they carried on like that for another forty-eight hours. I got through two and a half bottles of medicine the evening they left and that’s a fact.’
‘It’s Delaneys I’m interested in, Mr McGurk,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m sure your experiences are fascinating but I’ll settle for Delaneys.’
The old man hobbled to his bookcase and brought down two blue school exercise books. ‘I’ve written up all my discoveries in these little volumes,’ he said, carrying them back to his chair. He took another draught of medicine. ‘I’ve been talking to survivors of that dreadful famine for over thirty years now. Somebody had to do it, you know, and I’ve always liked history. It was my best subject at school.’
The old man began looking through his books. ‘Daly, Davies, Davitt, Davy, that’s no good, here we are, Delaney.’ He took another swig to help his reading. For a moment there was silence in the little room. Johnny wondered what was coming.
‘I’m not sure your man is going to like this very much,’ said the old man, looking up at Johnny. ‘I don’t think he’ll like it at all.’ He carried on reading.
‘Right,’ he said at last. ‘Here goes. Are you sure you won’t be taking a drop?’ He nodded at the bottle. Johnny declined.
‘Before the famine,’ McGurk began, peering at his handwriting as if he had never seen it before, ‘there were a lot of Delaneys in these parts, mostly around Clonbeg down the road. Poor they were, terribly poor, living on the potatoes off their tiny holdings in those dreadful cabins we all lived in during those times. There were three Delaney families with over twenty children between them living in poverty and one family who had done rather better for themselves here in Macroom. They had a fair bit of land, the Brian Delaneys. When the potato crop failed the starving ones turned to their cousin for help. Brian Delaney refused. He wouldn’t give them a penny or a potato. Then the time came when they were all going to have to go into the workhouse. By this stage going to the workhouse was virtually a death sentence, the fever and the dysentery were so bad people were dropping down inside the workhouse gates. One of the poor wives managed to reach Brian Delaney in his house. They say he wouldn’t even let her through the door in case she infected his family. He gave her nothing. They all died. Or rather I think they all died.’
‘What do you mean, you think they all died?’ said Johnny, thinking that perhaps a glass of John Jameson might be rather welcome now.
‘Well, this is the strange thing,’ said the old man, pausing to pour himself a refill, ‘they managed to keep some sort of records in these parts, records of the dying, I mean. Maybe the workhouses got paid for the dead as well as the living. In some parts of the country they’ve no records of the dead at all, it’s as if the poor people had never been here at all. We know there were twenty-four Delaneys, men, women and children, brought into the workhouse. But there are only records of twenty-three of them dying. One of them managed to get away, to survive, though God knows how they did it.’
‘Do you know which one it was, Mr McGurk? Man, woman, boy, girl?’
‘That’s a very intelligent question,’ said McGurk. ‘It was a boy of about twelve years.’
‘Do we have a name?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Do you know what happened to the Brian Delaney family? The bad ones? Are their descendants still here?’
‘They’re not. I don’t know if there was bad feeling against them but they left for America a couple of years after the famine.’
‘I don’t suppose you know which part they went to?’ said Johnny.
‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ the old man replied, closing his book. ‘Are you sure you won’t have a drop to keep me company before you go?’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Johnny, wondering what size of glass the old soak would pour him. He stared in astonishment as the bottle was tipped up into a fresh tumbler. Couple of inches, standard measure in an Irish bar, four inches, double, six inches, treble, eight inches and the recipient would probably fall down. McGurk stopped just after eight. ‘I hope that’s not too small for you,’ he said. ‘I can’t see much point in a half-empty glass myself.’