In my estimation, “Ultor De Lacy” is among the best, most enigmatic, and most terrifying of Le Fanu’s quick fiction, standing comfortably alongside “Schalken the Painter” and “Unusual Disturbances in Aungier Road.” It’s with unhappiness, then, that in my analysis I famous that it accrued little or no essential consideration certainly (outdoors of a positive essay by Ann Cahill).
The reason being a puzzle, for of Le Fanu’s Faustian tales (Sir Robert Ardagh, Ultor De Lacy, The Haunted Baronet, The Lifeless Sexton, and many others.), “Ultor De Lacy” has one of the efficient makes use of of terror, one of many least plodding, most participating plots (all of his Faustian tales appear to tug within the third act), and indubitably essentially the most insidious, nauseating villain within the type of the leering, sensual ghost of Roderic O’Donnell.
This specter is outstanding for his vampiric look, and for a claret-mark (deep purple birthmark) that stains a lot of his face. It is sort of a blood stain that factors to the guilt of the De Lacy household – guilt bought in an act of betrayal throughout the Battle of Kinsale (“the last word battle in England’s conquest of Gaelic Eire”).
The complete story is redolent with betrayals, treasons, and insurrection which underscore its theme of treachery: the unique Walter De Lacy betrays his nation by being loyal to his queen; later the Whigs commit treason in opposition to the Stuarts within the Superb Revolution, dethroning them and bringing within the Dutch King William – an act of betrayal opposed by the De Lacy’s, however since they had been on the dropping facet, they turned the traitors.
Later nonetheless, when the Hanoverians took the throne, Ultor De Lacy remained loyal to the Stuarts within the 1745 rebellion, however as a result of the invasion failed, his loyalty was as soon as extra seen as treason, and he was stripped of what little his household had on the planet.
As we’ll later talk about, the pro-British, Protestant Le Fanu would see a lot of his personal loyalties/betrayals within the woes of the Jacobites, and this story could have extra to do together with his anxieties as a loyal Briton/treacherous Irishman than making a mere bogey story.
I offers you yet one more piece of data that will assist steer you in deciphering this thick parable: the phrase “ultor” will not be a standard identify – it sounds just like the character’s nice grandfather’s identify, Walter (pronounced OOL-tur, or AWL-tur), however it’s Latin for “Avenger”– Ultor is to revive, or avenge, the household fortunes.
After studying this story, that will appear odd contemplating the course of the plot, however Ultor and his identify have the best significance on this story of elaborate, extreme revenge which exhibits no mercy, takes no quarter, and – in Le Fanu’s heartless universe – is fully justified, and totally unchallenged.
The writer relates how – as a baby rising up in Eire – he consumed an everyday food plan of supernatural tales and atmospheric locales. One, nonetheless, stood out to him. It was set at a lonely, ruined citadel overlooking the heavily-wooded glen of Cappercullen – within the Slieve-Felim Mountains the place the counties of Limerick and Tipperary meet. The rugged citadel is distant – positioned many miles away from any village – and has been spared from demolition and salvaging due to its awkward location.
The break was the hereditary seat of the extinct home of De Lacy, the final patriarch died with out an inheritor within the 18th century. When he was a baby, his dying father – an exiled Jacobite officer dwelling in France – made him promise to attend to marry till he turned thirty – to forestall him from being distracted from managing the household monetary and enterprise obligations – after which went on to point out him a terrifying portrait of an odd man – a portrait which each his father and the household priest insist that he memorize even though “the kid [turned from it] with shrieks.”
Earlier than dying, his father deposited the portrait (together with a doc explaining its provenance) “within the palms of the priest, in belief, until his boy, Ultor, ought to have attained an age to grasp their worth, and to maintain them securely.”
Younger Ultor was cared for by the priest, and when he got here of age, returned to Eire to say his property. Since he hadn’t been a Jacobite insurgent, he had no hassle reclaiming the property at Cappercullen, and stored his phrase to his father: marrying simply previous thirty years previous to a lady who withered away within the “isolation and gloom” of her husband’s lonely territory, dying younger, however not earlier than giving start to 2 lovely daughters.
In the course of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, Ultor de Lacy couldn’t resist his hereditary rebelliousness: he joined the Scots and have become one of many few Irishmen who was charged with treason for collaborating of their rebellion. He fled Eire for France, leaving his two lovely daughters alone at his remoted manor, not sure of his destiny. Ultimately, the Crown seized his lands and funds, forcing his daughters to desert their citadel and lay off their workers, though the dismal little Cappercullen property remained unused, deserted, and undesirable.
A number of years later, the native youngsters had been at first terrified after they noticed the desolate constructing with “gentle streaming redly from the slim window … throughout the glen, already dim within the shadows of the deepening evening,” and by the sight of two ghostly maidens standing on the turret window of their white clothes, imagining them to be phantoms or fairies.
It was the De Lacy sisters who had quietly returned, in these much less political instances, to seek out refuge in one of many towers at Cappercullen – one which was precariously perched on the sting of a cliff whereas the remainder of the citadel remained shut up and falling into break. Sustained by a small stipend from their mom’s inheritance, they had been simply barely capable of stave off full poverty, however nonetheless languished in threadbare obscurity.
Like Rapunzel, they lived within the high room of the tower, remoted and hidden from sight, attended by two Jacobite servants – an previous man and an previous lady. The elder of the 2, Alice, was brunette, severe, and stoic, experiencing her exile like a cloistered nun. The youthful, Una, was blonde, fanciful, and romantic, imagining herself as a fairy princess in a nursey story.
Because the politics of the day cooled down, the federal government turned much less invested in punishing Jacobites, and whereas de Lacy knew that he couldn’t brazenly return to Eire, his daughters had been largely secure from harassment so long as they stayed quiet and faraway from society – a activity made all the better by the haunted fame of their citadel, which was solely ever visited by a Jacobite-allied priest who secretly got here to sometimes maintain Mass with the inmates at evening.
This priest – buddy although he was to the household – was the primary to sense supernatural exercise at their home within the type of sinister visions of a lifeless man’s face, antagonistic confusion which causes him to turn into inexplicably misplaced on the acquainted property, and warped impressions of actuality, reminiscent of mistaking the citadel for a cloud. Consequently, he refuses to go to after dusk, and – not desirous to be caught going there by the authorities – his Lots largely stop, and the women had been disadvantaged of his religious route.
Quickly after his ministering slowed to a halt, the male servant, Laurence, started noticing unusual sights. It started with a sinister, purple gentle coming from the crumbling bell tower – a closed-off, ruined turret that neglected the one which the women inhabited – which seemed like a lamp shifting backwards and forwards. The inmates are terrified that they’re being monitored by the federal government, however Laurence takes it to be worse than that: it’s a signal that Ultor has died abroad and is now watching over his daughters.
And but, after a number of appearances, he begins to suspect a pure supply and agrees to analyze the phenomenon, so he mounts the spiral staircase with a brace of pistols, however the “ill-omened glare” fades teasingly seconds earlier than he can come nose to nose with it.
He remembers that the bell tower was the location the place “the De Lacys of these evil days used to take a seat in feudal judgment upon captive adversaries” whom they had been recognized to torture and cling from its battlements, and decides that catching the perpetrator is “a hopeless enterprise.”
Certainly, the sunshine continues to gleam from the ruined tower and turns into a part of their day by day life, and a romantic joke to Una. However the joke is short-lived, as a result of the feminine servant, Peggy, quickly stories a haunting of her personal: she has seen a “thin-faced man, with an unsightly purple mark everywhere in the facet of his cheek, looking the identical window, simply at sundown.”
Not lengthy after, Laurence sees him, too, together with his legs crossed, leaning on his elbows on the tower window, his face twisted in a “sickly sneer.” Horrified, he fires two pistols on the determine, simply as Ultor De Lacy – hid in a cloak – comes up behind him.
Doubly startled, Laurence factors out the creepy eavesdropper, however his determine “by some means dissolved and broke up with out receding.” He additionally notes that the yellow and purple ivy, lichen patches, and white masonry of the bell tower wall appear to create the phantasm of the stranger’s face.
Now that the grasp had returned – with a good-looking, French Military captain, no much less – the inmates’ focus shifts to one in all merriment. De Lacy reveals to Alice that the King of France has helped him by arranging a wedding between Una and the younger officer (a poor however landed nobleman) because the elder sister plans to affix a French convent as soon as Una is taken care of. Nonetheless, he asks her to maintain it a secret, in order that headstrong Una can have the phantasm of falling in love.
That night, Alice and her father tour the citadel grounds, discussing politics and wishful hopes for his or her future, after they see the person with the purple birthmark coming in the direction of them. He’s wearing antiquated Spanish fashions – a dingy doublet, plumed hat, and laced cloak – and wordlessly walks previous them, though: “as he strode previous, he touched his cap together with his skinny, discolored fingers, and an unsightly facet look.”
De Lacy is horrified by the encounter, chasing after him together with his sword to no avail. He confesses that – though he doesn’t know the person personally, he is aware of who he’s, and curses the priest for having ceased his visits which have disadvantaged them of the Sacraments.
He raves that they need to discover a approach for the women to make their Confessions and to obtain the Eucharist as quickly as doable, and – within the meantime – begs Alice to wish fervently for cover, and offers her an amulet with a consecrated Host to put on at evening. Determined tears run down his face as he moans “the curse has fallen, certainly, on me and mine.”
Within the meantime, the girlish Una – assumed to be secure as a result of her rising attachment to the officer – “started to lose spirit and to develop pale. Her enjoyable and frolic had been fairly gone.” She started to choose solitude to singing and was “unusually reserved and chilly.” Alice assumes that she – in one in all her severe moods – has offended her gregarious sister, however over time begins to fret for her sanity:
“A few times, when her sister urged her with tears and entreaties to reveal the key of her modified spirits and manner, she appeared to hear with a kind of silent marvel and suspicion, after which she seemed for a second full upon her, and appeared on the very level of showing all. However the earnest dilated gaze stole downward to the ground, and subsided into an odd wily smile, and he or she started to whisper to herself, and the smile and the whisper had been each a thriller to Alice.”
One evening, as they lay in mattress of their tower grotto, Una says – “as if chatting with herself [as an] odd smile stole over her face like a gleam of moonlight” – “’Tis my final evening on this room – I shall sleep no extra with Alice.” Alice is distraught by this unusual pronouncement, particularly when Una explains that she merely should depart, in any other case she must die:
“Die, Una darling!–what are you able to imply?”
“Sure, candy Alice, die, certainly. We should all die a while, , or—or endure a change; and my time is close to—very close to—except I sleep aside from you.”
“Certainly, Una, sweetheart, I believe you might be unwell, however not close to demise.”
“Una is aware of what you assume, clever Alice—however she’s not mad—quite the opposite, she’s wiser than people.”
“She’s sadder and stranger too,” stated Alice, tenderly.
“Information is sorrow,” answered Una, and he or she seemed throughout the room by means of her golden hair which she was combing—and thru the window, past which lay the tops of the nice bushes, and the nonetheless foliage of the glen within the misty moonlight.
Una goes onto insist that she is going to transfer her quarters to an adjoining antechamber which is separated from Alice by two large oak doorways. Within the morning, “the change was made, and the women for the primary time since childhood lay in separate chambers.” That night, Alice suffers a horrible nightmare of the person with the birthmark on his face, and when she awakens, she thinks she will be able to hear a deep, male voice singing – “just like the melody of a person whiling away the hours over his work” – within the glen beneath the cliff.
Extra worrisome, nonetheless, she thinks she will be able to overhear Una singing in concord with the unusual voice within the subsequent room. Going to her window, she friends out at Una’s window and sees her silhouetted in opposition to it by the purple flicker of a candle.
On one other night, Alice is terrified by the sound of Una clearly conversing with a low-voiced man lengthy after bedtime, with no obvious try on their half to keep away from being overheard. Alice knocks on the door, which is opened by Una – holding a candle and carrying a nightgown – who coldly invitations her to return inside. The room is small and sparsely furnished, with no hiding locations and no man in sight.
Ultimately, Ultor returns once more, involved by his correspondence with Alice. He has warned her to not share any of those scandalous particulars with the servants, and brings the information that Una will be married to the younger Frenchman in a matter of weeks.
However this information doesn’t dampen Una’s mysterious courtship: two nights later, Alice overhears the voices once more, and this time – after confirming that Una is once more at her window with a candle – appears down into the glen beneath the cliff, the place she sees the shadow of what appears to be the person in sixteenth century Spanish garb:
“there have been the cap and mantle, the rapier, the lengthy skinny limbs and sinister angularity. It was so thrown obliquely that the palms attain to the window-sill, and the toes stretched and stretched, longer and longer … and disappeared into the final darkness.”
Along with her sense of goals and actuality severely distorted – not sure of her personal sanity and what threats are being posed to whom – she buries her head beneath the pillow and falls asleep praying.
The following day De Lacey proclaims that the priest is on his strategy to serve them with Confession and the Eucharist, however it’s not to be: that night, Una tearfully appears over at Alice with love, they usually embrace, as if for the final time. Alice thinks that her sister has returned to her, however Una out of the blue appears up on the window – attentively, as if listening to a command – then:
“she smiled an odd happy smile, after which the smile slowly pale away, leaving that sly suspicious gentle behind it which by some means scared her sister with an unsure sense of hazard.”
Misplaced in a reverie, Alice begins singing “Siuil a Run” – the well-known Irish ballad instructed from the attitude of a lady eager for her soldier-lover who has gone to battle.
Later that evening, Alice wakes as much as see Una standing over her with a understanding, sinister grin – unaware that Alice is awake – reaches beneath her pillow, as if stuffing one thing beneath it, walks over to the hearth, retrives a bit of chalk, and appears to slide it right into a sallow, skinny hand which reaches out to her by means of the door. She then smiles over her shoulder and walks towards the doorway.
Alarmed, Alice runs after her, however finds her sister asleep in mattress, however then – a second time – she is woken by the sight of her sister trying down on her, this time wearing a cloak and hood, carrying travelling footwear, and clutching a pack. She offers Alice a parting smile, unbelievably “soulless and horrible,” and turns for the door. Earlier than dawn thinks she hears a knock at her door adopted by gentle laughter.
Within the morning, after all, Una is gone, and the headboard of her mattress is inscribed – with the chalk she stole from Alice’s room – with the phrases: “ULTOR DE LACY, ULTOR O’DONNELL.” Below Alice’s pillow they discover Una’s purse with the phrases “UNA’S LOVE” embroidered on it.
De Lacy rages with blasphemies on the tardy priest whom he accuses of failing his responsibility to protect his daughter’s soul, however it’s too late: Una is barely seen in fleeting visions, however by no means in physique. Typically she is glimpses combing her hair within the window of the bell tower. She is at first frightened when she realizes that she is being watched by people, however then smiles “her slanting, crafty smile” and disappears. Within the current day, solely her melancholy singing voice is often heard singing an Irish ballad a couple of faithless lover or a hapless lass who has been spirited away by the forces of darkness.
After Ultor’s demise, Alice – who entered a convent in Dublin and shared this unhappy story with a buddy of the narrator – inherited his results, amongst which was a startling portrait of the skinny, sallow man with the birthmark on his face. Together with it was a parchment which instructed his story. In December of 1601, Walter De Lacy of Cappercullen efficiently led authorities forces in opposition to Spanish regulars and Irish rebels on the finish of the 9 Years’ Struggle (aka Tyrone’s Insurrection), probably the Battle of Kinsale. He imprisoned many captives in his dungeon, together with his cousin, Roderic O’Donnell, who passionately begged De Lacy for his life, providing to pay a large ransom. De Lacy, nonetheless – a zealous loyalist – was unmoved, and hanged his cousin for treason from the bell tower.
Earlier than his execution, Roderic swore to commit his afterlife to ruining the De Lacy household happiness. His ghost, the parchment says, was usually seen afterwards, and the portrait has been historically proven to all of the De Lacy youngsters to warn them from “being misled by him unawares.” His final mission, it warns, is to finish the De Lacy bloodline – a mission which he has seemingly achieved.
“Ultor de Lacy” blends parts from a number of of Le Fanu’s most sinister tales – particularly “Schalken,” “Laura Silver Bell,” “Baby/Fairies,” “Aungier Road,” and “Carmilla,” and the skin-crawling means by which this ghost exacts his generations-long plan for revenge has been an unmistakable affect on a few of English literature’s most sinister interpretations of the Demon Lover trope. It was actually influenced by Charles Dicken’s splendidly Lefanuvian masterwork “To Be Learn at Nightfall,” whereby a bride has recurring goals of a mustachioed villain, is hushed by her husband, is terrified when her husband befriends the sinister Signor Dellombra (“Lord of Shadows” in Italian), is additional dismissed, and is finally final seen pale and distressed in a coach with Dellombra, who spirits her away.
Though it’s little remembered at the moment, “Ultor De Lacy” has had a storied affect on numerous horror tales and authors, and three masterpieces specifically. Firstly, a decade after its publication, Le Fanu’s gifted niece, Rhoda Broughton – who, though she solely penned ten tales, took after her uncle, turning into one of many Victorians’ greatest supernaturalists – used “Ultor De Lacy”’s primary premise in “The Man With the Nostril,” a narrative similar to Dickens’, however with a grotesque nostril (reasonably than a darkish mustache, or a claret mark) being the distinguishing function. Secondly, it was an important affect on one in all E. F. Benson’s most potent and terrifying tales – “The Face” – the place a lady has had recurring goals since childhood (additionally like Laura in “Carmilla”) of being chased by means of a ruined panorama by a red-haired rapist, later acknowledges the person’s face in an previous portrait, and finally opens the door to the three-hundred-years-dead visage. And thirdly – and most attention-grabbing of all – is its profound affect on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Whereas we largely perceive that Stoker borrowed ponderously from “Carmilla” to formulate Dracula (and retooled “Aungier Road” into “The Decide’s Home”), any reader of the nice vampire novel can have observed one thing acquainted within the hide-and-seek relationship between the bright-and-gay Una and the tried-and-true Alice: it’s unmistakably like that between Lucy and Mina respectively – the pleas of the involved virgin for the imperiled libertine to reveal her secret; the nightly ramblings with a never-seen suitor; the curious innuendos, alarming references to demise, and hypnotic give up to an out of doors energy; the profoundly Draculean reference to Una’s choice of birds who selected solely to sing at evening over those that twitter within the solar; the quickly tightening coils as Una appears to be pulled additional, and additional away from her mates, household, and duties; he rejection of an off-the-cuff, aristocratic fiancé (the French noble vs. Arthur, Lord Goldalming) in favor of a supernatural seducer; the colour of the 2 ladies’s hair (Lucy’s is blonde, Mina’s brunette); and so many extra similarities.
O’Donnell’s ghost is tremendously vampiric as properly, typically in manners which recall Dracula himself: he openly seems in public at daytime, surprising the one man (De Lacy) who acknowledges him; he’s stored off (momentarily) by the non secular rites of an previous man (the priest vs. Van Helsing) who finally fails due to his inattention; he’s courtly however vulgar; his motivation is revenge and conquest, not like most ghosts who want justice or affirmation; he’s a warrior who was betrayed into the palms of his enemies by a kinsman (Vlad III was betrayed by his brother, Radu); he has telekinetic powers (deflecting the pistol shot by a yard) and energy to alter form (into ivy and lichen); and he’s much less of a specter and extra of a goblin or fairy – a corporeal visitant who claims his sufferer, spiriting her away into his tower, reasonably than a spook who merely frightens somebody to demise.
Now onto a extra detailed take a look at the story itself – aside from its relationship to the works of Stoker, Dickens, Broughton, or Benson. It’s simply one in all Le Fanu’s most merciless (the sufferer is the high-spirited daughter of his enemy’s great-great grandfather), and appears to be hinting at Le Fanu’s personal issues for his legacy as a person full of “nice zeal for his queen” – a Protestant and a Tory who had sided with the British authorities throughout the Nice Famine and clung to unpopular (and doubtlessly treasonous) politics which lots of his countrymen – his nationwide kinsmen – could have thought-about a betrayal of their time of nice want.
Le Fanu could have been questioning how far down the road his household may be cursed by his romantic constancy to Queen and Church – a constancy which (like that of the Jacobites to the Stuart line), would possibly sooner or later turn into itself an ironic treason. The nice sin of Walter de Lacy is his rejection of a kinsman in want – one who ought to have been protected and spared in accordance with the foundations of chivalry and Irish codes of hospitality. For this, his line is marked for extinction, and his home is cursed with political misfortune.
The vampiric/demonic ghost of Roderic O’Donnell is held at bay by the Mass, however when his molestation of the priest prevents him from servicing the little household who’re satirically friends in his supernatural territory (his ghost haunting, because it does, the tower whence he was hanged), he’s free to lure Una into an incestuous and unnatural union – blighting and extinguishing the household line in an act of blasphemy.
This story – chronicling because it does a sequence of two-sided loyalties and treasons – culminates in Una’s treason of her household, her advantage, and her virginity. As Ann Cahill notes, “A part of the horror for Alice and her father is not only that they lose [Una] to O’Donnell however that she is secretive, sly and gone of her personal will – though Ultor believes her to be enchanted and has a ‘solemn exorcism’ carried out to get her again”. Nonetheless, this doesn’t work. There’s a robust sense within the story that Una leaves of her personal volition.
She says at one level to her involved sister “Information is sorrow.” “Information,” after all, is a standard Victorian euphemism for “carnal data” – Una held the important thing to the household’s survival in her sexual union with the French noble, however as an alternative offers herself over to the household’s best enemy, taking her fertility, her womb, and her sexual urge for food along with her to O’Donnell’s supernatural lair. In the end, when the avenger O’Donnell has Una betray her father – wrting on the headboard “ULTOR DE LACY, ULTOR O’DONNELL,” it’s a clear message: “The Avenger of the De Lacy’s has been bested – by the Avenger of the O’Donnells.”
