Dallas Sweetman Read online

  Sebastian Barry

  Dallas Sweetman

  For Jean Kennedy Smith,

  with friendship and love

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Characters

  Act One

  Act Two

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Characters

  Dallas Sweetman

  Mrs Reddan

  Lucinda

  Lucius

  Sister

  Belinda

  Servant

  Elizabeth I

  Princess of Brazil

  Mountifort Longfield

  This volume went to press before the end of rehearsals so the text may differ slightly from the play as performed

  DALLAS SWEETMAN

  Act One

  We hear the name ‘Dallas Sweetman, Dallas Sweetman’ called.

  A man enters as if throwing off sleep.

  He brings certain shadows with him unbeknownst, the shape of Mrs Reddan. The other characters of the play stir behind him, as if, when he moves, he pulls on a common web.

  He is elderly enough, but spry, a servant of some standing in an Irish family, dressed in the grave-marked clothes of the 1600s.

  Dallas Who calls me? I am that man, Dallas Sweetman.

  No one, nothing, nil, forgotten.

  He seems fearful, unsure.

  I have lain three hundred years and more in that broken precinct of the yard, where no one goes. I am a little dusty from my grave. Forgive me. I would not choose to appear before you so. I have no brush to brush my jacket, no stone to rub my trews.

  He looks out at the audience.

  Was it ye called me? For what purpose? My name came floating on the air. As when in vanished years my father called me, and in I hurried from the stubbled fields, or my master, in those lost, loved days that indifferent time removed.

  I greet you.

  An Irish person of no account. Mere servant.

  I do remember this particular, special place. I stood here with my good master, Lucius Lysaght, years beyond counting, on pilgrimage from Ireland. And when I was an old, old man, I came back here again, when all I knew were dead, hardly knowing why, to shrive myself and make my peace with God, and died impromptu on these stones, and was indifferently buried by the priests. Like a stain or morsel tidied away. No stone or marker given, only a dusty hole, and I was placed therein, and covered over.

  And lay there like a story interrupted. Lacking a resolution and an ending.

  Which is a type of sorrow to a soul.

  Why have you called me now? Is there some rumour still of me, and of my life? I must doubt that. Is it God calls me, in God’s great house?

  Many sins lie on me, I know. Are they to devour me now, so late?

  This is a place for soul trials, certainly.

  The silence narrows my heart a little, it weighs on it.

  Out of the shadows steps Mrs Reddan. Dallas is not happy to see her.

  This is not God or person, but foulness. Mrs Reddan. How does she come here?

  Mrs Reddan Perjurer, attacker, liar, murderer, you.

  Thus say I, Mrs Reddan, out of Clare, that married Lucius Lysaght in his dotage.

  I accuse you here, Dallas Sweetman, mere servant of the house, that you put death on my husband, first killing his hopes and then robbing his very wits.

  That you, without a proper doubt, hurt his daughter, Lucinda, a woman you professed to love.

  By first attacking her, and secondly, murdering her husband, Mountifort Longfield.

  And most grievous to your soul, turned your coat, spitting on the old faith to take the new.

  Dallas Sweetman, creeping, devious, darkened man. I accuse you.

  Dallas This is not so. No murderer, I. I saw murder, but did not commit such crimes. How will I speak to it? I did not kill. I loved, and had no love returned, and served and wandered, but I did not kill.

  (Looking out.) Are you then my judges? Not friend, not foe, but cold jurymen and women?

  I have an accuser. Is there one appointed to defend me? Your silence tells me not. Then I must speak for myself, although, my little judges, you may say, how can we believe him?

  And what have I in my defence?

  A morsel, a story.

  Only a story, and not even quite my own. For my life was lived in the shadow of another’s, the person that I loved, Lucinda Lysaght, whom now I am accused of wronging with great evil.

  Oh, hear me, hear me, so that my soul be not sucked down.

  My one great love – I was nothing in her eyes. But she contained my reason to draw breath, to think the human thoughts of those that live, the daily half-discounted poetries of mere life. For her I lived and live, even in tasteless death.

  And do long to see her.

  Her ages and stations were curiously my own, and by her stations I measured my own life, and in their haunted mirrors I saw my looking face.

  I loved her. Like a stag his mountain, the badger his muddy cave, the rabbit his own stupidity, the creeping fox his secret self, the robin his wife and ground, the wren his little size. Like a rook loves his storming tree, and ice seizes on the droplets of the rain and makes a cloth of snow, I loved her.

  (Loudly enough.) Lucinda.

  In this story is my defence, I know. I did and do not lie, I did not sully, I did not kill. As for coat-turning, I fear that is a strange, sad sport, in Ireland …

  Some light now for Lucinda Lysaght.

  Mrs Reddan Already he lies. He loved no one.

  Now Lucinda appears.

  And not this ruined girl. He gave her only madness.

  Dallas Lucinda. Shining girl. But true Lucinda, or a shadow, or a thing of light? Can she hear me? See me?

  Lucinda A wolf watching me, in the margin of the trees. It is a dark memory. Almost black. It was a great, grey, shaggy creature, and one paw snaked out on the damp grasses, where the sunlight was, itself quite civil and nice, and its red eyes stared into my own eyes. It was the first terror I remember. I could hear the wolf’s heart beating, I thought, or else it was my own. The upper sky shrugged with thunder, like an enormous sleeper in a bed. I put out my hand to halt it, turning my palm to the creature; it is not a childish memory, but a woman’s, a young woman’s memory in the fire of the Irish summer.

  And what can I, Lucinda Lysaght, bear witness to of happiness? Much, much. For I loved my brother Matthew, my very twin, and loved my father. My mother had been soon to go, but she left her light burning in the eyes of my father, like an afterglow in the evening sky above our hills. Most evenings we stood there in one especial place, beside our old stone house, my father, my brother and I, silent, watching the sun being quenched in the further ocean, beyond Sherkin Island and Cape Clear, and though we were silent, we knew he was thinking of her, my mother. It was our contentment.

  At the heart of that contentment was a bud of fear.

  As the sea and sky and the two islands trembled, I also trembled, a little girl in an embroidered dress, with a pattern of tiny roses, holding two hands, one large, one small as my own.

  Perhaps even then the dark wolf lurked at the edge of all, in the black shadow of the Irish wilderness.

  Dallas Now I am moved to truth. Her very presence warms my senses, and memory becomes all present moment. As I think, as I remember, I begin to see, and am there again.

  I will strive to make you see.

  My judges.

  My story, my defence, my song of life, begins in Ireland, in an old stone house in the county of Cork, on the margins of the sea, just as she describes. I was servant to the Lysaghts, people of the old faith. Old English they were, not of the Gaelic lords, but pledge
d to withstand the floodwaters of Protestant desire. And loyal, loyal to a fault.

  Lucinda’s father was Lucius, my master.

  Light now for Lucius, and the scene of the birth revealed. Lucius is near Dallas, at the ‘door’.

  Her mother, the famed Belinda, looked upon her twins only a few moments. Two perfect children she had carried into the world, for Lucinda was born in the same tumult with her brother Matthew.

  I was the manservant hovering in the door, to be called and cursed at to fetch whatever women want for births – torn cloths and water, sugar sticks and beer.

  I could see three candles in an ancient sconce. They threw down poor light on anguished features, the mother’s eyes like something cooking in the kitchens, a sweat as cold as January floods rinsing her arms and breast.

  In that far district we had but one beer-stewed crone, to be taking babies out.

  In this instance, aided by the sister of Lucius.

  Now the grubby midwife laboured over my mistress. Her arms were all windmills.

  Lucius Sister, the child is delivered. Why still the straining?

  Sister There is another baby hiding within.

  Lucius Oh, my good Lord.

  Sister We will have it out.

  Lucius Oh, gently, gently, gently.

  Dallas I saw in my mind’s eye the cold figure of the sheelagh-na-gig, fastened to the church wall in the yard of the old house, as a warning to any girl who was carrying a babe to widen her human bones, or find death. For the child would be trapped in the mother, the mother trapped in the act of birth. A carved crone it was, roughly made with starved chest, the hands down at her opening, widening the lips.

  That was our country medicine in that place.

  In a deeper darker corner now, the crying boy was being wrapped, and warmed into delicate life, by his aunt, a woman who would later seek to be his murderer, in league with Mrs –

  Mrs Reddan That is a lie. Oh, he speaks well enough. You are thinking, let us be friend to this man. Trust not in his speaking. The easy tone, the friendly tune. Judas was found hanging in the Potter’s Field, for all his famous bonhomie.

  Dallas The little girl appeared, coming out through the gate of life like a dancer, and was put on her mother for warmth.

  The mother sang a whittled song to the storm-bird on her breast.

  It was in the Irish tongue, for though she was Old English, they had spoke Irish also in their echoing rooms.

  Belinda (singing) ‘Seothίn seo, ullaloo …’

  Lucius Ah, these are wonders worth witnessing, are they not, Dallas?

  Dallas Yes, good master Lucius. (To us.) And Lucius stepped forward and touched the little fingers, marvelling at their size. He counted them, one by one. But beautiful Belinda Lysaght looked upon her daughter only a few moments.

  She sang her honeyed song, and died.

  Light away the scene.

  (After a little, to us.) This man, Lucius Lysaght, was a little man, that is, in height. But in heart, his will was strong.

  As I was his closest servant he often said, in secret in his room, that the Irish church must be spruced and rinsed.

  The marriages of priests among the Gaelic chiefs enraged him.

  Lucius Black scallywags –

  Dallas – he called them.

  He knew the history of Rome was poor. He thought our old local saint, with his box of salty bones in the seaside church, a curse, and a temptation to the superstitions of the poor. He had read old Erasmus and his treatise on Canterbury.

  Lucius (with a book now, close to Dallas) Popes should not have armies, unless they are armies of prayers, nor seek to rule the temporal world.

  And yet, whatever Pope sits there in Rome, is come down from Peter, and such is how things are, and we must strive for better. I cannot call a cankered, lusting King my All of All, nor such a king’s daughter.

  Dallas These things he whispered, and my ears were homes for all such things.

  He and I together, master and servant, sequestered in private colloquy. Our faces looking such and such, nodding and honest.

  He buried his wife with words so sweet and clear that foul beggars, waiting at the grave for the alms of grief, wept like children. Even such rubbed-out men felt the sorrow of the man, his mind so robed in Latin texts he spoke like a book.

  Their thoughts were Gaelic and their curses too. But sorrow is in the pulsing of the words, it shows in the periods and spaces of speech. Those wretches wept.

  And other princes of those far Cork lands, as fierce as Lucius to keep that Catholic world, looked drained of face, like slaughtered creatures hung up to bleed. And it was said, the beauty of his dame Belinda had disturbed the dreams of many another man in easier days.

  Now, Belinda, for all her fame and vivid beauty, was no more, could not be ravished or wooed, but only mourned, and touched in sinful dreams.

  She was buried. Now, a woman was required to raise the twins, and Mrs Reddan made her entrance.

  And so she does – Mrs Reddan appears.

  She was the kinswoman of my master and his sister, as thin as a half-seen spectre, and as malign.

  She had the temperature of winter, and when I passed her in the hall, it was as if I had brushed against snow.

  The sister it was who sent for Mrs Reddan. To what true end I did not immediately understand.

  A chilling, dulling, heart-ruined creature was that woman.

  Though in those first days, I must allow, she put herself faithful and fierce to her tasks. So much shitting, calling, crying and hunger there is in twins, a catastrophe of need.

  Mrs Reddan holding the twins.

  And Lucius saw that and trusted her.

  Lucius appears.

  Being a merchant in the main, he was bound to journey, and off he would go on missions to cajole and barter, in ports of Spain and Portugal. He burst through tempests, he carried wine and salt to Cork, then came the dusty, withering miles to Baltimore, where his mansion was, with two fine babies, and an empty bed.

  It was easy to put his trust in what he did not know.

  Lucius touches Mrs Reddan’s hand a moment, and goes.

  One terrible day, when he was far away, I saw a sight that frightens me to this day.

  The Sister and Mrs Reddan have brought in a sort of framework, and are hanging the babies from it by their feet, so they are upside down.

  The babes were about six months old, but they were not thriving. Both were measly, mewling, out of sorts. Wet nurse there being none just at that time, they were fed with good cow’s milk, from our splendid herd. But whatever it was, the milk would not satisfy them. At first they often screamed and then, it seemed, submitted in some horrifying way, and merely cried like chicks. Lucius put his faith in Mrs Reddan that she could rectify them. Poor Lucius, innocent man.

  I heard them, the sister and she, whispering in their room, and was not afraid to put my ear to the keyhole.

  Mrs Reddan Your brother is trusting.

  Sister Terrible ailments befall the young. He will not know.

  Mrs Reddan We will do all carefully. Inch by inch, always watching behind. There are eyes not friendly to us, ears that would gather ill against us.

  Sister Beware that creeping Dallas Sweetman, he is spy in chief.

  Mrs Reddan A mere dog to be drowned.

  Sister We can go around him. Furthermore, dear cousin, when the babes are gone, I will have everything after Lucius. And you will share in that.

  Mrs Reddan Will you swear to that and sign it in a deed?

  Sister I will write it in my blood.

  Mrs Reddan Then I will do anything. The natural affection that we feel for these soft leanbhs, the sharp sting in the breast, must be put aside in this time of Irish tumult.

  Dallas in desperation makes a stamping on the floor.

  Hush, what is that? Take down these suffering babes.

  They do so.

  I read in a curious book that to invert a childish brain brings a storm
of killing blood. Would it might do so more swiftly.

  They each take a child.

  We may continue to starve them, sup by sup. All must be natural, inconspicuous.

  They see Dallas, and rock the babies in their arms.

  Dallas Perhaps this promise of inheritance corrupted them, as it might a saint. Some parts of any history are dark, even to the teller. I do not know how it was, that Mrs Reddan, though kin to Lucius, had such a bile of evil in her.

  Mrs Reddan Bile of evil. Easy it is to make me a puppet in his fairy tale. An old wives’ tale of impossible cruelty. Anyone who believed him would be a staring fool. His course is a drunkard’s, weaving and spilling and falling through the dark lanes of lies.

  Dallas She was a good-faced woman but too small. Of course I never measured her, but if I could have stood near her, and dropped a cord from her crown, I think only some five brief feet would have been measured. And her arms were scant and loathsome I recall.

  Mrs Reddan Oh!

  She goes.

  Dallas And she smelled of some foreign, fishy oil she liked to rub into her skin, which peeled off on the surface in the winter winds. Her husband, poor Mr Reddan, we were told, had died of terror, we knew not how. His heart had bursted.

  She was to herself, I think, a kind of queen, imperial and chill. A Catholic woman with the disdain of ancient blood. Her mother’s family were FitzGeralds, whose lands were forfeit and their chief men killed.

  She in her own mind was quite so high that her crown touched Heaven daily. Her prayers went straight to God, her farts were perfume.

  No farthing had she, no field, no house. It is a powerful cause.

  Now, Lucius kept a simple world, a mere five hundred souls toiled in his fields. He had four hundred thousand acres, though mostly mountain and marsh. But even so, full twenty thousand acres groaned with wheat and beeves and barleys and the like. His merchant ways brought fortune also. And though he cursed his luck that kept him in Cork, the parliament never calling him, when he might have been a powerful governing man in Dublin, still he flourished.