the frame and removed the picture of King George.
The young Schnozzle O’Shea had grown up believing that the late king of England was the father he had never known. It was a strange fantasy for a boy from the slums of the Shambles. A dangerous fantasy too, for such an idea might be construed as a denial of the men of 1916 and could get you kneecapped, or worse. But Schnozzle’s childish loyalty to the House of Windsor was based on the evidence before him. Throughout his youth, the face of the old King had stared down on him with bovine resignation from the dresser. His Majesty formed the central panel of a royal triptych, his picture flanked by sepia lithographs featuring the youthful princesses, his dumpy queen and his haughty mother. No other house on the Shambles would dare display the portrait of the British monarch, tempting as it did summary court martial at the hands of the forces of the Republic. But old Mrs O’Shea was acknowledged by one and all to be several coppers short of the full shilling. There were few visitors to her house, and fewer still who needed to be ushered into the parlour where these strange icons held pride of place.
The pictures were a memento, the only memento, of his real father, who had taken the mailboat to England the day before he was born and had never returned. They had arrived together in the post the morning of his birth, a concertina of perforated postcards, bearing no forwarding address. Where other children grew up believing in Santa Claus, Schnozzle O’Shea grew up believing that the man in the beard would one day arrive on the doorstep and claim him. He would have done better with Santa. Even round the Shambles, Santa was good for a Bramley apple, a tangerine, and a Roy Rogers sixshooter in the stocking. When George the Sixth died, shunning the Shambles to the end, Schnozzle’s hopes died too. When he had grown old enough to stand on tiptoe and see himself in the mirror he realized that not even the Battenbergs could have bequeathed him a nose like the one he saw reflected there. He set aside his dream and turned to the cultivation of his vocation, knowing now that he was on his own.
But our childhood dreams never fade completely. A resonance lingers. His mother died before he was ordained. When he cleared the house the only souvenirs he took back to Maynooth were the faded postcards from the dresser. And now it looked as if the hand of God had intervened, and that the old monarch had a purpose after all.
‘Let’s send your daddy a postcard,’ he told the girl. ‘To stop him worrying.’
‘Mister Magee too,’ she said. ‘He’s worse than my da!’
‘You can set his mind at rest while you’re at it. What could be more appropriate than one of His Majesty? The Christian Brothers will see that it’s delivered first thing on Boxing Day.’
Then he rang for Immaculata McGillicuddy.
Frank Feely had been on his way home when he found the kitchen door bolted against him. He rattled it a few times, knowing it for a door that stuck easily in the damp weather. But when Sister Immaculata appeared at the noise, took him firmly by the ear and led him without another word back inside, he realized that something was up and knew better than to start asking questions. All day and all evening he sat in the scullery, listening to the muffled sounds of the house, the frantic scurrying of feet and the far-off ringing of the telephone. As it grew dark Major-domo MacBride appeared, looking flustered and ill at ease.
‘My mother will be worried if I don’t get home,’ Frank told him.
‘There’s nothing to be done about it! She’ll just have to fret like the rest of them.’
‘Any idea what’s up?’
Mister MacBride looked at him. ‘Nobody tells the likes of us anything. But there’s a three line whip out. No one in and no one out till his nibs gives the order. If you take my advice you’ll lie low till whatever it is blows over.’
It was as well he got on with the major-domo for Snotters was a petulant wee man, inflated by notions of his own importance, who could have made his life a misery. He had served the old Cardinal and his humble needs for forty years, supervising the kitchen and the cellar, checking the linen when it returned from the convent laundry, cuffing the young servants into line. He liked the title ‘Major-domo’ and the quasi-clerical soutane that went with the job. The permanent candlestick of red eczema hanging from his nose and the hint of a hare lip had earned him the nickname Snotters round the Shambles, but they never used it to his face, for the major-domo was touchy to a fault. Frank always gave him his title, even in the Patriot’s of an evening when he called to collect his bike and answer Eugene’s gentle interrogation.
The major-domo had belted him round the ear often enough in the first months, when Frank was still cack-handed and awkward with the clumsy kitchen implements, cutting himself as he peeled the sprouts or scalding himself as he teemed the potatoes. But he learned fast, and in the slack periods after breakfast, the major-domo would sit him down and make him learn his declensions, over and over till he was word perfect. ‘Do you want to be a skivvy all your life?’ he would shout, if Frank hesitated over the dative or the ablative. ‘Book learning is the only way a lad like you will ever make anything of yourself. Your father, God rest him, would have wanted more from you.’
He had begun to grow during his time in the kitchen. The food that came daily from the college farm was nothing but the best, floury red King Edwards, a churn of buttermilk for the soda farls, yellow butter and long root vegetables. They killed their pigs in the autumn and salted the carcases for the rest of the year. There were chickens and boiling fowl for holy days of obligation, salmon from the Blackwater and Warrenpoint herrings for Friday abstinence. But Schnozzle was a picky eater. He would turn up his nose at everything, pushing away his plate half-eaten, to the despair of the major-domo. ‘You’re a growing boy,’ Mr MacBride said as yet another plate of bacon and cabbage returned untouched from the master’s study. ‘Waste not, want not,’ he said, beckoning the boy to the kitchen table. Frank rarely needed a second invitation.
Not all his time was spent in the scullery. Sometimes, if Schnozzle rang for a sherry late at night, the major-domo would send him to the drawing-room with the fresh decanter, spitting on his hair and smoothing it down before he let him out of his sight, and reminding him every step of the way to mind his manners, not to speak till he was spoken to, and not for the love of the suffering Jesus to drop anything. In the corner of the study the machines kept up their endless chatter, ticker tape and telex and telephone, monitoring the moral pulse of the nation. From every parish in the land the information poured in round the clock. The Archbishop sat humped over the computer screen, a silent spider at the centre of a web of information. Frank would slip unobtrusively into the room, set the sherry down on the occasional table and try to slip out again. But Schnozzle would call to him to stop, order him to stand against the light, scrutinizing his profile for the features of his father Joe. He knew the details of Frank’s upbringing. How as a boy he had been dragged through every parish in the land as Joe searched for a cure for his affliction. He knew too that his speech and his understanding had been miraculously restored by the intervention of the Silent Madonna herself. And though the boy was still gauche and ill at ease, Schnozzle could recognize in him a certain quality that made him both excited and uneasy.
‘How old are you now, boy?’
‘Fifteen, Your Grace.’
‘Have you cultivated a special devotion to Our Blessed Lady?’
‘Yes, Your Grace.’
‘Do you practise the virtue of Holy Purity?’
‘Yes, Your Grace.’
‘You’re attentive in your spiritual duties?’
‘Yes,
