Her Story in Four Centuries by Sylvia M. Webber

Author:Sylvia M. Webber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co.

Caroline

Caroline slept in a long room upstairs at Rossana, called ‘the library’, which was used as her nursery. It had bookshelves all round it full of old books. The first thing she could remember was sitting in the nursery and saying, ‘I am three years old today’. Her nurse, Hannah Boyle from Bristol, had been with them since Fanny was a baby, except for ten years when she was married. She would stay with them until she died. She was one of the old-fashioned family servants.

Caroline learnt to read when she was three years old, and Hannah taught her some spelling. She said she mainly learnt to spell by asking people how words were spelt, and picked up reading by reading over and over any books that came her way; one of them was Knox’s Elegant Extracts, a book of poetry for young people. She was put on the table to read the newspaper aloud to Mr Kelly, very much to the amusement of his friends. Hannah and she accompanied Mr Kelly every fortnight on his visits to his church in Dublin.

Caroline was a lonely child whose friend, her own age, was her cousin Freddy Hamilton, or his sister who was four years older, when their two families stayed together at Rossana. Freddy took two lumps of sugar once when they were in a shop, and when they left, Caroline told her father what he did. Mr Kelly took them back to the shop, and made Freddy return the sugar. Freddy would always ‘twit’ her thereafter for being a tell-tale, Caroline wrote.

At last the children’s grandmother died, and they witnessed death for the first time. It had a peculiarly solemnising effect as they were taken, one by one, to give her a last kiss. On the grey winter morning from upstairs they saw the black hearse, with plumes, mutes and outriders, followed by crowds of carriages, disappear among the tall trees as they ascended the avenue. The burial was at Glenealy where Mrs Tighe had built a church for her son. They mourned, wrote Bessy, but not as those without hope.

Leaving Rossana

Now they would have to leave Rossana, where the music of running water lulled them to sleep, and the shade of the chestnut bowers cooled them in the summer’s heat. Bessy wrote that they ‘ran from spot to spot to take a last look and gather a last relic of a leaf or flower from each long-loved childish haunt, sketching each peep of house and tree’ that they would no longer call their own. They would no longer mount the sides of Carrick Muriley, and joyously and hungrily return to dinner in the cottage in Glenealy woods, or spend a day on the flat ‘murrough’ of Wicklow to bathe and enjoy the sea breezes.

The sisters liked to quote from their Aunt Hamilton’s poem, written in the bow-room at Rossana the last time she inhabited it:

Friends once so dearly loved, I scarce can tell

Which of you yet survive, or where ye dwell.

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