The Midnight Spinners

by JAMES REYNOLDS

DURING the summer of 1740 old Lord Clonrea was entertaining a visitor from Italy at Mount Pagan in the County Roscommon. Rich Roscommon the Irish call this county, to distinguish it, perhaps, from Poverty Cavan, a sparse, rock-strewn stretch of land. “God’s own reason for blasphemy, the like ave thim Cavan roads,”a Kerry man once told me, and his cart in a ditch with a broken axle. Actually Roscommon is rich because it is a prosperous farming region. The pastures well watered by gently flowing streams. There are a number of particularly handsome country houses in Roscommon. To my taste the finest by far is Palladian Rathcroaghan House.

Mount Pagan today is a fairly small building. It is long and wandering in line. Three or four periods of architecture are represented in what is left standing, for it suffered a punishing fire in 1860. Situated on a bold spur of rock, jutting out into Lough Garra, the house, even in its half-ruined state, has tremendous character. Once seen, the rose-red brick, with white-sashed windows, quoin stone trim, and delicately pillared Regency porch, is catalogued in one’s mind and pleasantly remembered.

The Italian Renaissance wing, which was struck by lightning, stands today a charred tracery in stone festooned with scarlet juniper vine, Masses of purple and pink fuchsia cascade out of the yawning windows. It impresses the beholder as ruins in the grand manner, as do the paintings of ancient imperial Rome by Claude Lorrain.

The Italian stopping at Mount Pagan was an architect named Pietro Favianni. He had come to Ireland a few years before in the company of Richard Castle, the architect from Saxony who built so many houses in the Palladian taste for the Irish gentry. Favianni acted as assistant to Castle, and when his work on the elevations for Leinster House, Carton, and Russborough were finished, he treated himself to an extended tour through the Irish counties. During his visit to Mount Pagan the Italian became deeply attached to Lord Clonrea’s daughter Aileen. Although the girl was fifteen years his junior, Favianni courted her with the wellknown Italian ardor. Aileen Lydon and Pietro Favianni were married and settled down in the then comparatively new Renaissance wing at Mount Pagan. Later they planned a journey to Pistoia in Tuscany, Favianni’s birthplace. But for a while all thought and energy must be centered on building a suitable house of their own.

One day when Pietro and Aileen were riding through the larch woods above Lough Garra, the horse that Pietro was riding turned sharply into a path which ended in a clearing. The riders sat. spellbound. A lovely panorama spread before them: that unbeatable trinity of Nature — sky, undulating countryside, and shimmering water.

On his return to Mount Pagan that evening, Pietro set about sketching ideas for a wondrous house to be built on the spot they had come upon by surprise, the clearing in the wood above the lough. Favianni was enthusiastic and on his mettle, for the house must not only be worthy of its setting but must impress his father-in-law. The bare thought of that was a gauntlet cast in an architect’s path. For weeks Favianni worked at top speed on his elevations and floor plans. At last they were finished. The house was to be called Rathcroaghan, for near Mount Pagan was a moss-covered Gaelic cross, set in a mound of stones. Stemming from antiquity, the cross was called Rath Croaghan Rest.

The day dawned when, accompanied by workmen with digging gear, Pietro paced off the length for an imposing frontage for his great house, to face the shining lough. All seemed to go well fora time; then the law raised one of its hydra heads. But even one ugly head was quite enough to thwart all of Favianni’s plans. It appeared that more than half of the many acres of land bordering Lough Garra, which Lord Clonrea had given his daughter as a wedding present, belonged, by an ancienl grant, to a colony of linen weavers and spinners. This land had been granted “in perpetunity" to a group of two hundred people by Lord Clonrea’s grandfather eighty years before. The weavers lived in coteens which comprised the village of Rallyaghadereen on the opposite shore of the lough. These people grew their own flax and spun the finest linen in the county. Cloths made from this linen were sent as far abroad as Rome to be used as altar cloths in the Vatican.

When Aileen Favianni appealed to her father, he told her that the flax growers’ claim was valid. He said he had forgotlen it had happened so long ago. Lord Clonrea offered to buy back the land at a fair price. No amount of money would shake the resolve of the weavers.

The elevations, so beautifully drawn by an inspired Pietro, were carefully laid away. The Faviannis divided their time between living at Mount Pagan and journeys to Italy.

Shortly after the miscarriage of the plans to build Rat hcroaghan. Lord Clonrea died. There was talk of tearing down Mount Pagan and erecting Ratheroaghan on its foundations, but nothing overcame of this plan. Five years later, while on a vbit to Pistoia, Pietro contracted a form of lingering swamp fever from which he never fully recovered. When he could travel he and Aileen returned to Ireland. During the following winter, which was particularly damp and bitter cold, the two were shut away from the outside world within the walls of drafty Mount Pagan, prey to arctic winds from off the lough. Just as spring was softening the air, Pietro Favianni died.

2

A YEAR passed; then Aileen Favianni went to Dublin for a season at The Castle, where brilliant viceregal society was as distinguished as that of any court, in Europe. Later she crossed the Irish Sea to London, where she found herself the toast of Devonshire House and Carlton House Terrace.

One night when dining with the Prince of Wales at Vauxhall Gardens, Aileen met a handsome, quielmannered man named David Galloway. Although of Irish parentage, Galloway had lived all his life in Lngland, for his father was one of the absentee landlords of immense Irish estates. David Galloway did not understand the fabric of the Irish mind, whether it was the aristocracy or the wild “mountainy man from the Mourne Mountains.

In this very lack of understanding, in his very boast that he hated the Irish and could never live for long at peace with them, lay his ultimate undoing. It was not long after a swift courtship and marriage to Galloway that Aileen realized her grave mistake in marrying on such short acquaintance a man with whom she had so little in common. While of studious mind, Galloway was vastly different in temperament from gentle, visionary, ardent Pietro, for whom in her heart Aileen often longed. David soon proved a ruthless tyrant impossible to understand at any hour during the daily murid. Where her wishes were concerned David insulted Aileen with his selfishness. Where, his own desires were concerned he paid fantastic sums to gratify them. Fortunately for Aileen, her husband was an exceedingly rich man.

His rudeness, even animosity, towards aristocrat and country man alike was marked. The first real encounter between David Galloway and a proud weaver from Ballyaghadereen was disastrous. Hearing from his wife of the clearing in the larch wood, he set out with her to see it. Instantly he saw the desirability of ibis spot whereon to erect a house worthy of his residence. A long-fronted Palladinn house built on this lough-washed hill would rival Carton or Castletown. He would build it.

When Galloway was told by Aileen of the old grant given to the weavers “in perpetuity,” he laughed in her face. An old, mildewed piece of parchment, no doubt. Not even decipherable. He could, and would, spike the guns of these bogtrotters.

From that moment, he set about his plans, and a dirty business it was. He found he could buy land on three sides of the weavers’ grant. With the waters of the lough as the fourth boundary he could completely surround the disputed property. Their flax fields, without which tiny could not exist, would be useless because he could forbid right-of-way.

Notwithstanding a rising wave of protest from neighboring landowners and threats against his person from a few frantic weavers in Ballyaghadereen. Galloway went arrogantly ahead with his plans. He drove the weavers out of their flax fields and out of their village as well, by the fact of making it impossible for them to live from their fields or in the village. Aileen protested and implored her husband to stop before a tragedy occurred, but he paid her no heed. Finally, stealthily, families began to disappear from the village. A family or two at a time. Some sought the Max fields in County Down, others disappeared without trace. One morning Galloway stepped out of his doorway at Mount Pagan and walked across the terrace. He found a sentence written in red chalk across the stones. Stooping, he read: YOU HAVE TAKEN ALL WE HAD. FROM YOU WE HAVE TAKEN PEACE OF MIND. Yet these desperate, infuriated weavers had left something for their tormentor as well — unease, and the ear that listens in the night.

After David Galloway had resided at Rathcroaghan House for a year, Aileen decided to enlarge the rose garden which was part of the old demesne of Mount Pagan. One morning early, she went with a gardener to the far end of the rose allée, where climbing yellow roses grew in abundance. Two tall marble plinths set on lion-claw feet acted as finials to the allée. Suddenly Aileen stopped, clutching at her throat. There again was the chalked warning — written this time in blue, similar to the warning in red found by a gardener a year ago. Seen by David Galloway as well, but scoffed at by him as he spat and walked away. This time the words read: LISTEN FOR THE SPINNERS. THEN LOOK FOR THE SHROUD.

When Ratheroaghan House, built from plans by Pietro Favianni, was finished, the façade presented to the world was flawless in proportion and ornament. But inside the house, persons trod warily when house doors were closed at night and candles were snuffed in the high-ceilinged rooms. When the household prepared for sleep, unease stalked the corridors. For the writing on the stones was remembered. Sleep was often slow in visiting inhabitants of this house. Tardy sleepers lay watchful, wondering. Will the spinners spin tonight?

3

MARIE ELENA GALLOWAY was nineteen years old in the summer of 1768. In two days she was to be married and leave Lough Garra. The ceremony was to be performed in a bower of yellow roses erected on a trellis under the larch trees where one looked off and away across the lough. Marie Elena was keyed to high excitement, for all day boxes had been arriving from Dublin and Paris via the Galway packet boat. The wedding was set for Thursday. On this Tuesday night the persons in the house were the Galloway family of three and a young girl cousin of Aileen’s from Dublin. The servants slept in a detached building adjoining the stables. Around eleven o’clock all retired for the night. Soon the house was quiet.

A little past midnight Aileen Galloway was awakened by a whirring sound. Loud at first, it seemed to rise and fall in volume. As Aileen sat up in bed, listening, she thought the sound was like innumerable birds rising from or settling on water, when the vibration of movement and sound claws at the nerves. Suddenly the sound died away to a hushed whirr, then ceased altogether. Aileen rose from her bed and went into the hallway. She stopped short — for there, standing rigid in the doorway of her bedroom, was Marie Elena. On her face was a look of slaring-eyed fear. She rushed towards her mother. The two women listened. There — the whirring rose and fell in cadences. But now it had an angry sound, finally rising to great intensity, then dying away to what sounded strangely like sobbing.

All the next day, during the confusion of arriving wedding guests, the minds of mother and daughter were dark pools of foreboding, each one remembering all too surely the words of warning which had been twice chalked on the marble plinths years ago. Just before teatime one of her friends suggested to Marie Elena that all the women would like to see her wonderful trousseau. It was a fine topic of gossip in the countryside that David Galloway had been prodigal in his outlay for the wedding, for Marie Elena was the apple of his eye. Aileen bade her daughter take her friends upstairs and show them her lovely dresses, which were laid on tables and chairs. On the bed, spread out in shimmering folds, lay her satin wedding gown.

As Marie Elena entered the room, she smelled above the scent of lavender from her linen a subtle but penetrating odor of decay damp, musty, sickening to the nostrils. Marie Elena stopped beside the bed. One of her friends put a hand on her arm. “Marie Elena, what is that, for the love of God, there on your wedding dress?” Folded, uncreased, looking as if freshly woven, lay a linen shroud. It gleamed even whiter than the billows of satin which formed the skirt of the dress. Slowly Marie Elena lifted the shroud from her bridal dress and stroked the rough linen, as if fascinated. At that minute Aileen appeared at the door. She came quickly to her daughter’s side, snatching the shroud out of her hand. Everyone in the room was staring, speechless, at the dreadful garment, which seemed to have a life of its own. Then Aileen fainted; the shroud fell from her hand to the floor and lay stiffly, assuming, almost, the silhouette of a corpse laid out for burial. As one of the women present dashed water from a pitcher over Aileen’s face, Marie Elena stood trembling. Her lips moved, forming the words, “I heard the spinners; now I’ve found the shroud.”

Before dinner that night unrest rode the wind at Ratheroaghan House with a vengeance. Wedding guests gathered in whispering groups. An eavesdropper would have heard snatches ol conversation : “ What does it all mean?" — “Where did that horrible shroud come from?” — “Something dreadful is bound to happen in this house, I think I shall leave.”

When everyone was gathered in the drawing room, Barstow announced dinner. Marie Elena left her room and came hurriedly along the upper gallery. As she started to descend the stairs the heel of her slipper caught in the runner of carpet laid on the stairs. With a terrified shriek, she pitched headlong down the long flight of steps. Her father was the first to reach her. Tenderly he gathered his daughter in his arms. Her head lolled slackly on her broken neck, for Marie Elena was dead.

Later that night a snarled skein of dried flax threads was found crowded near the baseboard on the top stair. Listen for the spinners. Then look for the shroud!

After the tragic death of his daughter the day before her wedding, David Galloway was a changed man. He became a recluse, withdrawn and morose. Shut away in his study, he saw no one. A valet looked after his needs. This man reported belowstairs that his master was “near demented” and sat up all night before a window looking away across the lough. During these long nights David listened, listened — dozing fitfully, but always aware, listening. At times he would curse and rage against remorseless fate. Gradually his mind seemed easier.

The night before the first anniversary of Marie Elena’s death, Aileen returned from Dublin, where she had been on a visit to relatives. She and her husband dined together for the first time in many months. They discussed the flowers to be gathered from the garden for a little ceremony which they had planned for the next day. Aileen retired to her room early and David sought the quiet of his study. The house was closed and darkened for the night.

Softly at first hardly distinguishable — the whirring sound commenced. The sound of ghostly spinning. Many spinners there were tonight, Wave upon wave of sound. Louder it whined. Spinning — spinners — spin. Then on a crescendo of demoniac sound the whirring rose, until pandemonium reigned within the walls of Ratheroaghan House.

David ran from the library into the hall. As he did so, he tripped over something white, stretched out on the floor in front of the drawing-room door. As David fell to his knees he groped in the darkness. His shivering hand clutched a damp linen shroud. Even in the warm night the linen was clammy and reeked of decay. Throwing the ghastly cloth aside, David dashed up the stairs to his wife’s room. The room was empty, but the window over the front terrace was standing wide open, Crumpled grotesquely on the stones of the terrace lay the body of Aileen Galloway.

For twenty-five years Rathcroaghan House stood lonely, shuttered, despised by its owner and shunned by men. In a paroxysm of rage and grief, abetted by the ever-present fear for his own life, David Galloway had remained in the house facing the lough only long enough to bury his wife in the family plot behind the rose garden. He had the marble plinths, which reminded him of the spinners’ curse written in chalk, torn down and thrown into the lough. Then he shuttered the house, leaving it a prey to rats, decay, and the vagaries of the elements.

Galloway swore to heaven he would never put his feet inside the lintel of his hated house as long as he lived. For many years he lived in self-imposed exile. At first, he ranged restlessly through Austria, Germany, and France. For a few years he lived, recluse, in a huge drafty villa in the Roman campagna. One may see it today, Villa Marie Elena, a high, square, bare-faced structure blankly facing the Alban Hills.

One afternoon in early autumn a heavy traveling coach rumbled in at the gates of Rathcroaghan House. Swinging up the leaf-choked driveway the coachman braked to a halt in front of the pillared porch of the silent house. Crouched back into the shadows of the coach was an old man, ill and wretched. Knowing he had not long to live, David Galloway had broken his oath and come back, after two decades of wandering, to visit the graves of his wife and daughter. As the footman helped him to alight, David bade him unlock the front door and then wait for him; he wished to fetch a few books from the library, then he would go to visit the two graves near the rose garden. Once in the gloom of the dust-rimed library David searched for the books he wanted. Had he not been deaf he might have heard the whirr and whine of a spinning wheel eddying through the stillness of his house. The desired books located, David let himself out of a side door and drawing his traveling cloak snugly around his shoulders, against the rising wind from off the lough, he walked along the paths of the tangled garden towards the burial plot.

For a long time the coachman waited in the bitter wind, but his master did not return. Setting out along the path to the rose garden the man muttered that he must get the master back into the house and light a fire, this perishing cold was not good for a sick old man. Then — at the end of the rose walk the coachman found David Galloway. He lay dead beside the grave of his daughter. There were livid purple marks on his throat, and across his shoulders was flung a freshly woven shroud.

Rathcroaghan House has been reclaimed. In 1900 a member of the Tarby family restored the house to its original, and present, state.

The grateful house presents an unscarred face to the changing moods of Lough Garra. Friendliness and pleasant activity surround the demesne. Cheerful country murmurs, the like of whispering larches, the song of harvesters, and bird song in the brake. But no one hears the whirr of spinning any more. With David Galloway’s death the ghostly spinners folded their wheels, pocketed their linen reels, and departed. The curse was broken.

In a locked cupboard in the library of Rathcroaghan House, carefully folded and shriven white, lie three heavy linen shrouds.