The Laughing Laundress

by JAMES REYNOLDS

A GUSTY, rain-wet wind raced up the valley one late January evening. Straight off the dull, gray Atlantic, it whistled over the oily ground-swell at the mouth of Bantry Bay. The fickle wind tore at the half-frozen ivy tendrils on the walls of old Ballylicky Castle; it set them rattling, for all the world like a gypsy’s tambourine. Then having roared its way up the Bandon River Pass, it wakened all the dogs in Carlone Kennels. The kennels seethed with unrest. Nervous terriers yelped and sprang madly against the wire walls of their runs.

Only on the nights when the ghost of long-dead Kilty Carlone sits in front of the cold hearth in the small chamber, paneled in aromatic lime wood, are the dogs restless. If the windows are open, as they sometimes are, there can be heard the slap—slap slap of playing cards as Kitty deals the cards to an unseen opponent. It may be one of a number of people whom Kitty befriended and housed, only to find them devious and corrupt, to the point of cheating her at cards and rifling her privy purse.

The thing which troubled Kitty Carlone most of all was the fact that she, a widow, who prided herself on her prowess at the card table, her prophetic “card sense,” should have been cheated so ignominiously at her own table and plundered of all she possessed — her house, her money, and her jewels, and even, at the last, her most cherished treasure, the fabulous ruby and diamond necklace given her (when she married Rob Cassillis) by Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland.

For years she had won prodigiously, by the fairest, means. Then Desmond Ronan appeared on the scene. Kitty Carlone had welcomed him to her house, her card table, and her bed. He fouled them all. She said of him later, as the bailiffs were closing her door behind her for the last time, “Where I made my gra ve mistake in the measure of Desmond was, I looked only into those gay blue eyes of his. I should have looked at his ears. For they are pointed.”

For all the friends who played Kitty Carlone false, there were some who so genuinely loved her that afterwards they tried in many ways to reach her. But a number of them were in England, people she had met while in the employ of Lady Castlemaine (as Barbara Villiers was known when Kitty first went to launder for her); and so completely did Kitty Carlone hide herself away that no one was ever able to trace her. She even changed her name to Mrs. Mount.

All the years that she spent in obscurity, hidden from the world she had known, in a pitifully small and dirty almshouse near Carriekmacross, she had puzzled how the cheating had been managed. It preyed on her mind, apparently, to such an extent that after she died she often reappeared at night at Carlone House, sitting in the same room where she had met her guests after dinner to play the endless games of chance with which she occupied herself.

Old Jockser Duggan, the kennel man at Carlone Kennels, always knew when the ghost of Kitty Carlone visited her former house at night. He would stand at a window watching her puzzle oxer her hand of cards, a frown upon her face. Jockser would shake his grizzled red head. “Ochone, she never laughs now. It was a mortally long time ago when all ihis cheating happened. I hope the poor creature finds out what she wants so desperately to know, for only then will her spirit rest, at all.

Jockser would walk to the door to quiet the restless dogs, prowling up and down and snapping at each other in the runs. “Whist now, the lot of ye. It’s only Kitty Carlone, trying out some new hand or other. Ye’d be used to her be now, if ever.” Sitting hunched over the small table, Kilty would deal out cards until dawn. Then her wearv ghost. her unsmiling ghost, would fade away.

2

ON a hot August afternoon in the year 1635 Barbara Villiers, the Countess ol Casllemaine, decided she was hot to the point of prostration, bored to the point of tears, and weary beyond any point she could conceive of. She pulled the bell rope hanging beside her in the dusty coach, giving the rope a series of sharp tugs, clattering the bell in the ear oi Tobias, the coachman. He pulled up, clambered down from his high seat in front, and consulted her Ladyship. In short order she informed him that, expected or not expected, she would not continue this tortuous journey to her brother’s house at Lanshanna, not in this sweltering heat. She would lie at the Fountain and Feathers Tavern at Dungannon tonight. Tomorrow she would proceed to Lanshanna.

The yellow road-coach drew up in front of the entrance of the Fountain and Feathers. Lady Castlemaine alighted and was just about to proceed to the rooms which Tobias had secured for her, when she was arrested in motion, as her foot touched the first stair. A laugh had rung out. a laugh so clear, so ringing, that in spite of her disgruntled state of mind, Lady Casllemaine smiled herself.

Calling the landlord to her she asked, “Who is the owner of the most lilting and downright infectious laugh I have ever heard?”

The landlord twisted his apron and said, “Your Ladyship, it is nobody. I mean it is just a young laundress we do lie having at the fountain here. I hope it did not disturb yer worship.”

Lady Cast lemaine said, “Let this girl oome to my room. I’ve some laces, fragile ones, I want washed and sewn on my gown.

A few minutes later the door of Lady Castlemaine.s bedchamber opened; hesitatingly, a young girl stepped into the room. She was about eighteen vears old, of medium height, with a slender figure. What one noticed most was her hair a mass ol dark red silky coils and her wide-spaced gray eyes. Barbara Casllemaine regarded the girl for a moment. Here was “beauty on the bough, and no mistake. What a sensation she would be in London. “What is vour name, my child?” asked Lady Castlemaine.

“Kitty Carlone, mam,” the girl answered, sweeping a low curtsey.

“Superb,” said Lady Castlemaine. “The most lovely laugh I ever beard, and a name to match it. A name to set to music.”

The advent of Irish Kitty, as many called her, was thunderous in jaded London. Kilty ( arlone accompanied Ladx Casllemaine to England as personal maid and Laundress extraordinary, as one Court wit had it. Not long after her arrival. The Castlemaine asked the King to visit her at Comdex House where she lodged in the Strand, awaiting completion of her far finer house on the Thames.

The King was overjoyed to see The Castlemaine, and told her so. She had slaved in Ireland much too long. As a present of arrival, he created her Countess of Limerick and Baroness Nonesuch. The lands attached to these patents were considerable. For a time Barbara did not allow Kitty Carlone to appear when the King was present. She wished her protegee to acquire a smoothing off of some of the rough edges of her country ways, a slight veneer of sophistication, but only a slight one, for nothing must hide the distractingly lovely and essential Kitty Carlone from Dungannon.

True to her boast of “There’s not another hand than me own that can whiten a lace flounce, and stiffen it gracefully, to suit her Ladyship,”Kitty coni inued to launder the laces of Lady Limerick.

Then one day she came face to face with King Charles II. In his usual bantering way, be told her a scandalous story of a king and a dairymaid, to see how quick she was at “Parallels.” a game very fashionable at Court. Kitty laughed long and joyfully oxer this story. Later Charles said to The Limerick (he always prefixed a “The” to whatever title Barbara Yilliers bore), “Kitty Carlone is a positive menace. No telling to what lengths men will go to bear that laugh, and as for the rest of her, it s sheer wonder. Better marry her off, and out of all this.

But Kitty stayed on, and it was not until after she had been in London nine years and Barbara was now Countess of Southampton, that the Laughing Laundress (one of her many nicknames at Court) gave a thought to leaving her adored friend. Then one day appeared a tall Scottish soldier. Bob Cassillis. He was third son of the Karl of Craigenny, and had to make a life for himself in the Guards. Lady Southampton smiled on the match, which is more than can be said for Bob’s father. However, a word from the King, who bad championed Kitty Carlone since the first day he saw her at Gormley House, soon put matters right.

On Christmas Eve, a year after she met Rob for the first time, they were married in the Chapel of the King’s House in Biohmond Croat Park. The world shone frosty while. Snow was piled in the hedgerows. Kitty Carlone sparkled along with the frost, for Hob had managed to come by a Few Cassillis diamonds which had belonged to his mother. King Charles; lavish as always, hung a diamond pendant, bearing his cipher in sapphires, around proud Kitty s neck. Most staggering of all to Kitty Cassillis was the Duchess of Cleveland’s wedding present. It was not given at the same time as the others, nor displayed before Charles. About it hangs a curious story, which will bear repeating here.

This story was told to Kitty Carlone by a woman who was at the card party given in the King’s rooms at Hampton Court Palace, It was written down by Kitty in a “Journal of London” which she kept. The Journal is now in a private collection in Ireland. I have seen this Journal, and read many of the letters written by the Duchess of Cleveland to Kitty after she retired to Ireland.

According to Lady Bastable a group of people were seated about the fireplace in a room hung with tapestries of the chase, at Hampton Court. Jt was the King’s birthday. No one seemed in the mood for cards. Lady Southampton, very splendid in emerald satin, striped in claret-colored velvet, sat across from the King.

Out of a capacious pocket Charles took, in one hand, a necklace which flashed fire in the light of the flames. Everyone gasped at the sight of this loop of jewels. It was a necklace out of fable, Clustered rose diamonds and huge pigeon-blood rubies alternated. The clasp was a carved emerald rose. The rose had belonged to Elizabeth Tudor. It could be worn separately. In the other hand, the King grasped a rolled parchment. From this dangled a heavy gold seal. Lady Southampton sat a little forward in her chair as the King held these two objects high above his head. Her eyes sparkled, her lips were a little parted in excitement. Lying lazily back in his chair the King said, “Lady Sout hampfon, which of these do you want most — this necklace or this Royal Patent, signed and sealed? It creates you Duchess of Cleveland.”

Barbara swept the room with her haughty eves. “Am I to understand I may have one or the other — not both?”

Narrowing his eyes, Charles replied, “One or the other, Madam. Not both.”

Barbara was silent, her gilt slipper beat a nervous tattoo on the fender. She smiled wanly and sighed behind her fan.

The King wondered, “Sighs, do I hear sighs? You should be in raptures.”

Barbara replied, “I am. I was just thinking how beautiful the necklace will look on the bosom of the Duchess of Cleveland.”

This had happened a few months before Kitty Carlone and Rob Cassillis were married. She remembered vividly how she had waited until nearly dawn for Lady Southampton to come to her bedchamber. She seemed tired, a shade listless, which was unlike her, even after a night’s rout. Her vitality was proverbial. It was one of her chief accomplishments in the eyes of her royal lover. As Kitty had started to remove the necklace, Ladv Southampton said, I wonder, my dear Kitty, if it was wise of me to be so openly greedy. I don’t want the necklace particularly. Or if I do I could have it at any time. I did it simply to show my power over the King. It will never bring me luck, so I shall never wear it. The clasp has the evil eye. Like all of Elizabeth’s jewels. And now off to bed with you. In the morning you may waken the Duchess of Cleveland.”

True to her word, the duchess never again wore the rose diamond and ruin necklace. On the morning of Kitty’s wedding she had handed her a dark velvet case. In it was the unwanted necklace.

3

KITTY and Rob had little happiness together. A year after their wedding Rob was sent with his regiment to t he war in the Low Countries. A few weeks after his departure Kitty received word that he had perished in a storm off the Hook of Holland.

Kitty forthwith dropped the name of Cassillis and never used it again. She returned for a time to the household of the Duchess of Cleveland, who had just given birth to a boy. The child was christened Charles and given the title of Duke of St. Albans. 1 hus the wish of The Cleyeland was gratified by the King, as were so many others.

After a time a great longing to see Ireland came over Kitty. When she said to the duchess, “The great longing’s on me, I’ll never be able to cast it off,” she was advised by her good friend to return to Ireland, find a house in one of the south counties, and create a new life for herself.

The duchess had paid Kitty bountiful wages for years and she had had her keep on what amounted to royal bounty. She had saved a considerable sum of money with which to start a new life. Added to this were the jewels the King had so generouslv given her at her marriage and a small annuity left her by Rob.

As far as worldly goods were concerned Kitty felt herself very well off. Most cherished and valuable of all her possessions, of course, was the rose diamond necklace. It was worth a fortune. Only a woman like The Cleveland, who was as extravagant with her possessions as she was with her affections, would have given a laundress, no matter how lovely her laugh, so valuable a present. But that had always been Barbara Villiers’s way. Kitty had Watched her rise in position at Court, and in the chancy affections of King Charles If, from an obscure Irish peeress to exalted Duchess of Cleveland. It had been, in a way, a “triumphal progress.” It always pleasured Kitty to remember how she had shared this brilliant temperamental journey with the best friend she had ever had.

Carlone House pleased Kitty from the first moment she saw it. She bought the house forthwith mid settled herself in. One of the first things Kit tv did to improve her newly acquired propert was to build a fair-sized kennel in the back of the paddocks. Dogs had always been a passion with Kitty, not the sleek, vitiated little King Charles Spaniels that were always under foot at Hampton Court and Gormley House, but sporty young terriers. Kitty loved to roam the hill-meadows and race along the river with a pack of assorted terriers of her own rearing. She bred the finest type of Kerry (Irish Rust) Terrier and the workmanlike retriever Water Spaniel in all Ireland. Alter she had made her Carlone Kennels a paying concern, Kitty turned her mind to entertaining her new-made friends at Carlone House. It would have been a far, far better thing if she had not.

From the first, Kitty attracted all who came under the spell of her flashing gray eyes and her enchanting laugh. Hospitality as practiced at farlone became a byword throughout Ireland. Impecunious voling rakes were forever whining at her skirts to be helped out of this or that imbroglio. Second and third sons of impoverished peers came to her for aid and advice. Kitty is reported to have once said to a destitute third son whose purse was constantly empty and whose prospects were nil, “Surely, me bucko, it’s meself that knows all about the tribulations of third sons of noble lords. Didn t I marry one, and he the pick oi the bunch?”

It was not long before rumors of vastly high play at cards in the paneled sitting room at Carlone House circulated as far as Dublin and, in those days, remote Galway. The sharpers, the well-dressed, soft-spoken rag, tag, and bobtail of Irish ne’er-dowells, began to climb the hill to Kitty Carlone’s inviting door. That she never turned anyone away who sought her help was so well known that if caused a rhymster in Dublin to write a qualrain about her. It began as follows:

One black day, Kitty’s luck ran out. The knocker was lifted on her front door; h fell against the resounding wood. Its reverberations never stopped until a drab, gray-haired woman who went by the name of Mrs. Mount died in a drafty almshouse where the bread was maggot-ridden and the damp sheets on her hard bed chapped the once lovely body of Kitty Carlone.

The knocker was lifted and dropped by as handsome and plausible a fellow as ever trod a woefully crooked path. Desmond Ronan was his name. Horn into a shopkeeper’s family in Waterford, his schooling was the race course, the brothel, the rocking-mains, and any gambling rooms or cubby he could find. He was devious, and a past master oi fraud. That his hand was quicker than the eye, particularly in the manipulation of a playing card, was, at the last, borne in on Kitty Carlone’s consciousness. Alas for her, it took a tragically long time for her to realize it.

At the time of Desmond Ronan’s arrival at Carlone, Kitty was in her forty-sixth year. Desmond was thirty. From the first he set out to win the desirable widow. Kitty was infatuated with Desmond — she never denied it. When at last he had cheated her dry, she never prosecuted him. Knowing he would lie, cheat, and humiliate her in the witness box, if ever brought to trial, Kitty, angry and embittered, locked herself inside the walls of Carlone and licked her wounds.

A few weeks passed. Creditors in unholy numbers assailed her. She liquidated everything she could lay hands on for immediate cash. To an English friend, a man who had long been in love with her, she sold the wondrous rose diamond necklace—sold it for a quarter its value, which was all the man could pay. The kennels and ihe growing litters of terriers Kitty gave to a friend. Then, one morning the bailiffs came to lock the doors of Carlone House — to lock the doors with Kitty Carlone on the outside, penniless and alone. The Duchess of Cleveland had died in London the year before. It is doubtful if Kitty would have sought her aid even if she had been alive. Kitty Carlone was proud.

As the bailiffs closed and locked the door behind her, one of the men asked Kitty where she was going. Where could he reach her if the need arose? Kilty turned towards the house and looked for a long time at the garlanded vines of climbing roses that she had planted when she first came to Carlone. “I will let you know,” she answered vaguely. “At present I do not know myself.”

But she did not let anyone know where she went — ever. What transpired in the years before Kitty entered the almshouse at Carrickmacross will never be known. A Mrs. Mount asked for admission one day at the hostel. She had no means of support. The annuity left her by Rob Cassillis had ceased long ago. “Lack of funds” had been the curt answer to repeated letters to Hob s solicitors. When, a few years after the admittance of Mrs. Mount to the almshouse, she died of a fever, a faded letter was found pinned to her shift. It was then discovered that the woman’s real name was Kitty Carlone.

Carlone House passed through many hands during the three hundred years that bring us to the cold, wet, windy night of the opening of this story. During all these years, in one way and another the Carlone Kennels have endured. Sometimes, as in the present case, the owner docs not live at Carlone House. Sir Michael Noland owns the kennels, but, save for one room on the first floor at the back of the house, overlooking the kennels, the house is empty. This is the room where Jockscr Duggan sleeps. It is next to the room where Kitty Carlone, ever watchful, deals her cards at night. Perhaps if she perseveres long enough, Kitty may discover the trick played upon her by shifty Desmond Honan, the trick of cheating that caused her to lose her illusions and her house.