Redemption - Leon Uris [58]
Caroline swept into his shop. The game is most exciting when both players have a great capacity to show outwardly that no game is really being played, but then to perform a polite, subtle fiction filled with double meanings and all of it done with perfect demeanor, even indifference.
Conor let her know that he knew she was seeking him out as the scrapings of the pot after a decade and a half of frustration with all those European masters and Oxford dons. Having pleasantly established a bit of comeuppance, he justified it by letting her know that the great screen was not that much of a mystery to him. Andrew and Enid had issued fair warning. The paddy was a stunning specimen, eloquent of speech and wit and sure of his ground. A composite of a quintessential Irishman.
From Conor’s view, she had aged lovely. So long as his heart remained free there was no harm in the mystical feelings he bore her. Only Conor’s pal, Seamus, knew the whole gut-wrenching fantsy beginning when they were kids. Conor had spotted her now and again at the opera house and never failed to catch a thrill from it.
When their stifled panting played out, they focused on the screen. Conor’s office was too small to hold the both of them so he brought several books and rolled up drawings and blueprints and they repaired to a back booth in Nick Blaney’s public house.
The schanachie’s tale, widely accepted until the Countess sought out scholars, was that an original screen had been destroyed during the Cromwell conquest of Ireland. In a later war, which established Protestant rule, King William of Orange, now the British monarch, wished to thank the Earl of Foyle for his loyalty in arms.
Jean Tijou, a French Protestant, had come to the court of William and Mary and executed a number of outstanding works in England. Tijou, so the legend goes, was dispatched by the King to Ulster to build a new screen as his gift to the third Earl of Foyle. Alas, over the generations and centuries the screen became mangled and partly ruined by fire and insurrection. A bit more than a third of the original screen remained.
When Caroline Hubble redid the manor, she assembled the best historians on the various periods and commissioned research papers at Oxford. On the matter of the great screen, the principal study declared that the Jean Tijou myth was no more than that, a myth. Tijou, although a favorite of King William and Queen Mary, had never traveled to Ireland, they contended, and the original portions of the screen were probably constructed seventy years before Tijou was born. Its creator was a mystery. Years of patchwork on the screen set down a crooked trail, impossible to follow.
To Caroline’s surprise, Conor Larkin was familiar with all her research and dismissed it out of hand as academic claptrap, theories created in faraway places by men totally in love with their own conclusions.
It was now up to Conor to prove them wrong and substantiate his own beliefs. The two quit their flirting and went into a professional posture as Conor began to sway her with his dazzling reconstruction of history. She was both enthralled and bemused and cautioned herself to be on the alert for vast amounts of blarney from this incredibly charming paddy.
Rogue or brilliant scholar? Caroline sharpened her mind as he unfolded his story.
The first area of proof was never discovered by her researchers and most convincing: namely, the parish record books of St. Columba’s Church of Ballyutogue, which dated back to the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Entries dealing with the great screen were in Gaelic and had been translated by Conor years before. The years between 1697 and 1701 described the arrival of “the Frenchman” and the construction of “grand ironwork at Castle Hubble. “ The men from the village who worked on it at various times were listed and included the ancestors of his dear friend and neighbor, Seamus O’Neill. There were intimate tidbits of daily life that could only be known