Castle Richmond | Page 3

knew nothing
of the navvy's spade, or even of the engineer's theodolite.
Castle Richmond was at this period the abode of Sir Thomas Fitzgerald,
who resided there, ever and always, with his wife, Lady Fitzgerald, his
two daughters, Mary and Emmeline Fitzgerald, and, as often as
purposes of education and pleasure suited, with his son Herbert
Fitzgerald. Neither Sir Thomas nor Sir Thomas's house had about them
any of those interesting picturesque faults which are so generally
attributed to Irish landlords, and Irish castles. He was not out of elbows,
nor was he an absentee Castle Richmond had no appearance of having
been thrown out of its own windows. It was a good, substantial,
modern family residence, built not more than thirty years since by the
late baronet, with a lawn sloping down to the river, with kitchen

gardens and walls for fruit, with ample stables, and a clock over the
entrance to the stable yard. It stood in a well timbered park duly
stocked with deer,--and with foxes also, which are agricultural animals
much more valuable in an Irish county than deer. So that as regards its
appearance Castle Richmond might have been in Hampshire or Essex,
and as regards his property, Sir Thomas Fitzgerald might have been a
Leicestershire baronet.
Here, at Castle Richmond, lived Sir Thomas with his wife and
daughters, and here, taking the period of our story as being exactly
thirteen years since, his son Herbert was staying also in those hard
winter months, his Oxford degree having been taken, and his English
pursuits admitting of a temporary sojourn in Ireland.
But Sir Thomas Fitzgerald was not the great man of that part of the
country--at least, not the greatest man; nor was Lady Fitzgerald by any
means the greatest lady. As this greatest lady, and the greatest man also,
will, with their belongings, be among the most prominent of our
dramatis personae, it may be well that I should not even say a word of
them.
All the world must have heard of Desmond Court. It is the largest
inhabited residence known in that part of the world, where rumours are
afloat of how it covers ten acres of ground; how in hewing the stones
for it a whole mountain was cut away; how it should have cost
hundreds of thousands of pounds, only that the money was never paid
by the rapacious, wicked, bloodthirsty old earl who caused it to be
erected;--and how the cement was thickened with human blood. So
goes rumour with the more romantic of the Celtic tale-bearers.
It is a huge place--huge, ungainly, and uselessly extensive; built at a
time when, at any rate in Ireland, men considered neither beauty,
aptitude, nor economy. It is three stories high, and stands round a
quadrangle, in which there are two entrances opposite to each other.
Nothing can be well uglier than that great paved court, in which there is
not a spot of anything green, except where the damp has produced an
unwholesome growth upon the stones; nothing can well be more
desolate. And on the outside of the building matters are not much better.
There are no gardens close up to the house, no flower-beds in the nooks
and corners, no sweet shrubs peeping in at the square windows.
Gardens there are, but they are away, half a mile off; and the great hall

door opens out upon a flat, bleak park, with hardly a scrap around it
which courtesy can call a lawn.
Here, at this period of ours, lived Clara, Countess of Desmond, widow
of Patrick, once Earl of Desmond, and father of Patrick, now Earl of
Desmond. These Desmonds had once been mighty men in their country,
ruling the people around them as serfs, and ruling them with hot iron
rods. But those days were now long gone, and tradition told little of
them that was true. How it had truly fared either with the earl, or with
their serfs, men did not well know; but stories were ever being told of
walls built with human blood, and of the devil bearing off upon his
shoulder a certain earl who was in any other way quite unbearable, and
depositing some small unburnt portion of his remains fathoms deep
below the soil in an old burying ground near Kanturk. And there had
been a good earl, as is always the case with such families; but even his
virtues, according to tradition, had been of a useless namby-pamby sort.
He had walked to the shrine of St. Finbar, up in the little island of the
Gougane Barra, with unboiled peas in his shoes; had forgiven his
tenants five years' rent all round, and never drank wine or washed
himself after the death of his lady wife.
At the present moment the