The Kingsboroughs were the largest landowners in all of Ireland, English overlords who’d stolen Irish land for the Crown, and been rewarded for it. After a long, incommodious journey from London, I found myself in a carriage hugging the northern slopes of the Galtee Mountains. It was better than the Ireland of my imagination, a landscape of peaks and valleys, preternaturally green, drunk with water, birch and whitethorn trees. The road took us over a hill, opening onto a vast plain bounded to the south by the Knockmealdown Mountains, thick with evergreens, and in the middle of it, Mitchelstown Castle, surrounded by a twelve-foot wall.

It was a large Palladian thing with wings, but two towers carefully preserved from the old castle, I guessed, as a reminder that it was once a fortress. The house looked to be trying very hard to impress, with classical gardens, terraces with statues, a conservatory, and even vineyards, as if it had been plucked out of Renaissance Italy. But entering its gates felt like going into the Bastille. We passed the hovels of tenant farmers, where dirty-faced children in tattered clothes, even the littlest ones, worked outside in the cold.

We turned onto a long road leading to the grand entrance, and I felt the unhappiness even of the yews lining the way, trained and upright, not as a wild yew grows, with curling, reaching arms. This whole place was the opposite of Nature, and everything I hated.

“Where’s the village?” I asked the driver, when I disembarked.

“Oh, Lord Kingsborough didn’t like the view.”

“So, obscured by trees?”

“No, miss. Took the whole village down, board to nail, and moved it over there”—he pointed over a far hill—“where he don’t have to see it at all.”

A butler, one of eighty people (I soon learned) in their service, led me into the great foyer, more like the entrance to a museum than a house. I looked up at the cupolaed ceiling, painted with the Rape of Proserpine—the fleshy daughter of the earth goddess, breasts pressed against Pluto’s hairy chest, hanging her head in dread and disgust. We continued to the upstairs drawing room, where I was greeted first by a half dozen of Lady Kingsborough’s constant companions—not her children but her yapping dogs—followed by Lady K herself, examining me as if with a quizzing glass. I thought high society in Bath would have taught me what to expect, but was ill prepared for the ghastly chalk of her face and heavily rouged cheeks, the tower of frizzed hair atop her head (I wondered if mice might have taken up residence). She wore gondola-like protuberances beneath her taffeta skirts containing enough fabric to curtain an entire room. She could pass through doors only by turning sideways, though she didn’t walk so much as sashay.