The Forgotten Holocaust

Chapter Twenty-Three

The villa’s guest annexe was on two floors, with a spiral staircase leading up to a narrow passage with the twin bedrooms off it. One of them had French windows that opened out onto a balcony. That was where Ben stood leaning on the stone balustrade and watching his cigarette smoke trail idly off into the warm night as he reflected over the things Brennan had told him. He wasn’t hungry, and hadn’t touched any of the provisions downstairs. Behind him inside the room, on the lush blue velvet cover of the antique four-poster bed, lay the volumes of Elizabeth Stamford’s journal.

He could only hope that he hadn’t come all this way on a fool’s errand. But it was late, and he had nowhere else to go right now.

He crushed out the Gauloise on the balustrade, showering the darkness with a tiny cascade of glowing embers, then flicked the dead stub into the thick of the bushes down below. Time to find out what dark secrets the journals had to tell.

‘Let’s get to it,’ he said out loud.

Sitting on the soft bed with the window drapes shut to keep out the mosquitoes and only a small bedside reading light shining over the pages, he spread the earliest volume of the journal open in front of him. The faded date of May 14th, 1841 on the opening entry confirmed what Brennan had said: that Lady Elizabeth Stamford had first begun to record her private thoughts and observations soon after marrying and moving to her new husband’s Glenfell Estate.

Carefully turning the pages as he read, Ben admired the quality of both her handwriting and her style, which was elegant without being mannered and vivid enough to make him visualise the beautiful, lonely young woman of nineteen sitting there at some dainty little bureau in the confines of Glenfell House putting these private words to paper, with no idea of who would come to be prying into them a hundred and seventy or so years later. It seemed strange to imagine that this journal he was holding in his hands had been written inside the very manor whose gutted ruin he’d been walking around only yesterday.

But as he read on and the minutes passed, he could see nothing yet that was even remotely explosive or contentious in what the journal’s author had to say. He was looking at the account of the day-to-day existence of a fairly typical aristocratic young woman of her time; and in 1841 it seemed that Lady Stamford had been leading a pretty uneventful life. In her measured prose she complained of being excluded from everything to do with her husband’s activities and the general running of the house.

‘I cannot bring myself to suppose I shall ever like that man Burrows,’ she wrote. ‘How Edgar came to choose such a vulgar, savage brute for his manservant is a mystery to me. But Peggy, my maid, is a sweet creature, and if it were not for the distraction of her company, and that of my dear, kind Padraig, I should certainly run melancholy mad.’

So there was Padraig, Ben thought. He’d have been thirty-two years of age when Lady Elizabeth joined the household. There was no indication yet why Kristen might have been so interested in learning more about the man.

Ben read on. Over the next few pages, Elizabeth described her resolve not to become bored with her new cosseted role as lady of the manor, and to fill her time instead with playing the piano and the harp, reading her beloved Miss Austen, and roaming the grounds of Glenfell House and the surrounding countryside with her lurcher, Aloysius. Riding was a passion, too, but she refused to condone the fox hunts Edgar delighted in, and expressed how sickened she felt at the fate of the poor fox: ‘Surely life is hard enough already for the wretched things, without being torn to pieces for the entertainment — for that is all it is, as I can very well see — of my dear spouse and his bloodthirsty friends.’

It was a few minutes later, in an entry dated October 1841, that Ben came across the next mention of Padraig McCrory. Elizabeth talked about him with warm affection; from her account, Ben quickly pieced together a vision of a gentle giant of a man, kind-hearted and obviously devoted to her as he was to her horses. A few pages further on, Elizabeth ventured to confess that it was from Padraig that she was secretly learning Ireland’s native Gaelic. Secretly, because the language was strongly discouraged under English rule, which even forbade the use of the prefix O’ in Irish surnames. ‘I am sure that Edgar’s fury would be immeasurable if he heard me utter but a single word of “that vile tinkers’ dialect” for which he threatens to have the Irish servants horsewhipped by his man Burrows should they dare ever to speak it in their lord and master’s presence,’ Elizabeth wrote in one of her more impassioned outbursts. ‘Well, he can d— well have me whipped along with them, for I find its music as enchanting as these hills and glens he regards merely as so much grazing land.’

Other than her contact with Peggy and Padraig, her social life at the Glenfell Estate appeared to have been severely limited. She looked forward to the visits from her cousins from England, the twins Henrietta and Cecilia Wainwright who, Ben gleaned, were about ten years older than Elizabeth, and their elder brother Stephen, who was a physician as well as a noted naturalist. She often mentioned him in glowing language as being ‘quite unlike the roaring brutes who make up the majority of Edgar’s friends. Preferring to eschew their after-dinner company as they guffaw and clamour over port and cigars with their endless, wearisome talk of money and politics, this evening he again sat with us ladies and enraptured us with his accounts of his travels to lands so exotic they seem to our limited understanding to belong to another world.’

Stephen had captured rare butterflies in Brazil; had climbed mountains in Spain; had once had the honour of meeting the great astronomer and composer William Herschel at the Royal Society. Elizabeth recounted his stories in detail and, reading between the lines, Ben got the impression that she harboured a certain liking for this Dr Wainwright that went deeper than simple friendship. But even in her private journal, such things couldn’t be said openly.

It was all very compelling and Ben found himself instinctively liking Elizabeth — but this wasn’t what he’d travelled to Madeira to read about. He was getting nowhere after more than an hour, and there was still a hell of a lot of reading to do. Thinking he should skip forwards in time and pick the account up at a later point, he set aside the book and opened one of the other volumes to find the first entry dated September, 1846, cutting forward five years.

Maybe here he’d be able to discover more about the importance of this Padraig McCrory’s role in the story. The stable hand was an enigma to Ben. What had happened to him after Elizabeth had left Ireland? Had he remained at the Glenfell Estate until its downfall in 1851?

Why did he matter?

Ben was two lines in when he heard the sudden eruption of barking outside. The dogs must have sensed something. Some nocturnal wild creature, Ben thought. Maybe an owl. He remembered the way those used to set off the guard German Shepherds at Le Val.

For a second, his focus on the journal was distracted by fond memories that inevitably led back to Brooke. It took some effort to mentally shut them out, along with the noise of barking, and go back to reading.

Seconds later, his concentration was broken again. This time, what he heard made him put the journal down with a start and turn to face the curtained balcony window.

He tensed, listened hard.

Silence outside. But he knew what he’d heard. The muffled crump of two silenced pistol reports, rapid-fire, one after the other. Each instantly followed by a brief high-pitched squeal. Then back to silence.

Someone had just shot the dogs.