Redemption - Leon Uris [35]
Roger played the role of woeful wounded husband opening the bills, but Caroline’s seduction kept his sexual appetite always hungry enough for the marriage to work. Fortunately, when the bills came due, Caroline had an enormously wealthy daddy and funds of her own.
The place for any great event…Caruso singing, a world collection of scholars, the Queen’s state visit…was always the Long Hall, which could house almost a thousand people at a seated dinner and more for a concert.
Having been repaired, remodeled, rebuilt, and added on with nonstop activity for a decade, Hubble Manor was transformed from a seedy weed-covered haunted house to a palace of legendary grandeur, the epitome of what the ultimate colonizer could do with his imperial appetite.
Another ultimate was Lord Hubble’s shirt factory. Conditions within were filthy, numbing cold by winter, darkness, suffocating heat by summer, a void of human facilities, and a page-long list of miseries that were direct leftovers from the blackest days of the Industrial Revolution.
With all the new liberalism in the air, Roger Hubble became uneasy that industrial and labor reform might find its way into Londonderry and, particularly, his shirt factory, which was the chief supporter of Lady Caroline’s excesses. To make matters worse, a Catholic peasants’ and workers’ rights solicitor had won the seat in Commons.
Having redone everything redoable, Caroline turned to the final great project, restoration of the great screen in the Long Hall. It was forty feet wide and forty feet high, forming a majestic entrance gate. It might have well been a copy of the gates of heaven, inspired by the Almighty.
Tradition had it that the screen was the work of Jean Tijou, a great French ironmaster who had been brought to England centuries earlier during the reign of William and Mary. Much of its history, as well as its twisted agony, remained hidden by legend.
Obviously, Lady Hubble searched out the foremost living ironmaster, one Joaquim Schmidt, the German. For two years Schmidt worked on what had become an enigma. As a good German would, Herr Schmidt believed things would happen if he commanded and hollered. His shouting dimmed to a disoriented mumble and he departed.
Then Caroline brought in the Italian, Tustini. At first he made some progress but he became torn emotionally between the screen and a number of the upstairs and downstairs maids. Ulster weather sent him into long depressions, followed by too much vino, and he sobbed all the way to Cork to catch his ship back to Italy.
Her failure gnawed at her every time an event was held in the Long Hall, as the great screen remained limp and disoriented.
14
1895
Lady Atty Brooke Royce-Moore, the Baroness of Lough Clara, burst on the scene of the Gaelic revival as though she and Dublin had been waiting for one another for a century.
Her first act, which endeared her to the native Dubliners, was to dehyphenate and degentrify her name and titles to a simple Miss Atty Moore.
Atty’s generous per annum allowance enabled her to purchase a four-story Georgian row house at 34 Garville Avenue in the suburb of Rathgar. It was neither an aristocrat’s home nor a poor man’s dwelling. A spacious drawing room hosted most of those who identified with and spearheaded the Gaelic revival. Spicy conversation rang from writers, journalists, pamphleteers, leafleteers, republicans, actors, playwrights, and new-breed politicians.
Atty’s basic identification was with Arthur Griffith, whose newspaper the United Irishman was a growing force. Griffith had also formed a new political party, Sinn Fein, whose translation meant “Ourselves Alone.” Sinn Fein was born to replace the Irish Party, whose spirit had died with the death of Parnell. Once a determined force, the Irish Party members became lackeys in the British Parliament, incapable