Redemption - Leon Uris [147]
Thus, the Viscount of Coleraine went into the Coleraines as a subaltern and would stay there until he agreed to take a wife. Jeremy, fearing his father’s tirades less all the time, showed little interest in rising above subaltern or anything other than amusing himself and making his forays into Dublin. Because of Lord Roger’s influence in the Rifles, Jeremy was kept in meaningless positions, lest he become an embarrassment.
Enter Christopher, his brother’s keeper. When Chris joined the Coleraines, Roger and Colonel Brodhead, an old Ulster hand, connived to allow Christopher to keep an eye on Jeremy.
Roger feared that Jeremy might bring some sort of humiliation to the earldom in one of his drunken stupors. Not that he cared for Jeremy very much, but Roger feared that if anything happened to Jeremy, Caroline and Freddie would take him out of the Belfast industries forever.
This charming family had splintered into a human patchwork of who was speaking to whom, how loudly, who was speaking behind whose back, and who was wishing whom well or unwell.
There was an absurd molecule in the family mix as Caroline and Freddie aligned against Roger and Christopher, with Jeremy dangling in limbo.
From the very beginning, Sir Frederick and Lord Roger were cemented together to defeat Irish Home Rule, each anchoring a geographical corner of the province. With all the splintering of family fortunes, the two were still cemented together on the Home Rule issue and remained bedfellows in illegally importing tens of thousands of weapons to the Ulster Militia.
Roger saw himself eased out of the Weed Ship & Iron as Sir Frederick made a remarkable recovery from his stroke and tutored his daughter on the company’s future. One always finds bits of undercurrents in Ulster. Everyone seems to get mixed up with everyone somehow—a Catholic midwife assists in the birth of an aristocrat, a Methodist deacon sits elbow-to-elbow at the pub with the paddies—so many signs of normalcy.
No matter who does what to whom, all good Protestants are utterly united on two matters: allegiance to the Crown and the belief that all good Catholics are republicans.
So Roger and Freddie, despite the crumbling of their houses, treated one another as blood brothers in Militia and Unionist party matters.
Roger was not blind to the way Caroline was taking dead aim at the helm of Weed Ship & Iron. Despite Jeremy’s watery obedience to his father, Roger could not shake the young man into a new marriage. It was as though Jeremy was caught up in some sort of Irish faerie’s web and could not let go of it. The echoed sound of “Molly” came to him twenty times a day. Sometimes it faded on its own. Sometimes it had to be cast out by drink. Whatever this last defiance be, Roger could not crack it, so Jeremy stayed out of everyone’s way in the Coleraine Rifles.
Lieutenant Christopher Hubble, amenable to all things good for the earldom, took one step, front and center, and set forth, forthrightly, on a short but sweeping courtship of Hester Glyn Gobbins, daughter of Baron and Baroness Hugh Gobbins. Roger was delighted.
Brother Jeremy, on exemplary behavior, whipped the saber from his scabbard to lead an archway of swords for the couple to sweep through on their way to the altar.
Chris and Hester were extremely close replicas of a fine English aristocratic pair and Gweedloe House’s hedges were as clipped, its roses aburst, bannered, and butlered, the show was as close to perfect as it would have been across the sea on the main island.
On the receiving line, Christopher’s lips parted and teeth revealed a kind smile as Hester offered her cheek to be bussed and said a sincere, “Mmmmugh” to all who kissed her. “Mmmmugh”…“mmmmugh.” The “mmmm” came on contact and the “ugh” on the break…“mmmmugh.”
Because Weed and Roger continued to appear often in public there was very little prattle about Caroline’s departure from Londonderry. Since neither lover nor mistress