Fools of Fortune

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It is 1983. In Dorset the great house at Woodcombe Park bustles with life. In Ireland the more modest Kilneagh is as quiet as a grave.

To inspect the splendours of Woodcombe Park and to stroll about its gardens, visitors pay fifty pence at the turnstiles, children twenty-five. The descendants of the family who built the house at the end of the sixteenth century still occupy it and are determined to sustain it. They do not care for the visitors, the car parks they have had to make, the litter left behind. But naturally they do not say so.

Near by, the small town of Woodcombe—to which the family gave their name and where, traditionally, military ribbons and puttees are manufactured—is famous for the delicacy of its mullioned windows. After an inspection of the manor showpiece the visitors like to linger there, consuming in the Copper Kettle and Deborah’s Pantry the butter-scones and shortbread for which the town is famous also in 1983. They do not know that nearly a hundred and sixty years ago an Anna Woodcombe, then a girl of seventeen, married an Irishman called William Quinton who took her to live in Go. Cork, in the house called Kilneagh, not far from the village of Lough, not far in turn from the town of Fermoy. They do not know that two generations later an army colonel who was a poor relation of the Woodcombes of Woodcombe Park found himself stationed with his regiment in Fermoy; his daughter, too, married a Quinton and became mistress of Kilneagh. His second daughter married an English curate, a fortunate marriage for the young man, since the Woodcombes of the manor had in their gift the living of the town.

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