Legacy of Secrets (2 page)

They sent me there expecting me to emerge a “young lady,” but nobody was surprised when it didn’t happen.
Mammie said I was an individual, and she had never encouraged me to be anything but myself. I was bright and lively and full of fun, with my flaming red curls and a funny little face and the Molyneux blue eyes. And I was just seventeen and immensely popular with a ton of friends. Then I came home and I had to be a debutante. Can you imagine me, fluffed up in white tulle with feathers in my hair like an overblown cockatoo?

When I was in my twenties all I thought about were horses and men. In that order. Except in Paris, and then it was the other way around: men first and then horses. Now,
you
know I was never beautiful, but they said I was amusing because I had an endless flow of chat and this soaring laugh I’d inherited from Mammie that made people want to join in.

“There’s no side to Maudie Molyneux,” people used to say. “She’s nice to everyone regardless.” But I have to admit I enjoyed a good gossip almost as much as a good hard ride across the fields on a misty autumn day. I also adored Paris and clothes and I would hate, even now, to tell you how much money I squandered on hats. Especially those little cocktail hats we wore in the thirties. There was one woman on the Faubourg St. Honoré, what was her name? Oh, yes, Madame Simonetta, who did these little wisps of spotted net and feathers that cost an absolute fortune. But they were divine, worth every penny. I have them upstairs still, along with all the rest of the stuff.

Who dreamed, in those carefree days, what was to happen next? I always say I had ten good years, and then all we silly young things had to grow up. And come 1939, too many of them had to die.

My friends were scattered throughout Europe as well as England and Ireland. Some were even fighting on the other side. It bewildered us all: one minute we were all romancing and partying, the next we were supposed to hate each other. But I suppose that’s what wars are all about, the infamous evil few leading the good and the brave into battle, to serve their own ends.

My special young man was one of the first to go. Archie Herbert. The freckle counter.

Oh, Archie was so good-looking. Tall, black-haired, very aristocratic with a little dark mustache and soulful brown eyes. And he looked so divinely handsome in his khaki uniform with all those burnished brown leather straps and belts and polished gold buttons. Of course, I was madly in love with him. He was a professional army officer on a mission to Paris when war was declared and he stayed to see what he could do. He was taken prisoner and sent to Germany—his family was quite high up, you see, so it was a feather in the Nazis’ cap to take him.

I had one letter from him, if you could call it that … a few lines, half of them crossed out by the censor. And then nothing more. I continued to write to him, hoping he was still there and that maybe he was getting my letters. And then, after the war, they traced him. He had died in the POW camp in 1942. They had starved that fine, handsome young man to death. I don’t think I ever got over that.

Of course, we all did our bit in the war. I joined the navy, the Wrens, mostly because they had the smartest uniform. I would have liked to join the cavalry but they didn’t take women, and anyway, they didn’t use horses anymore. The Wrens made me an officer, not for my grand education, for God knows I never had one. But I did have three languages. I never saw a ship the entire war, but I had the time of my life driving the officers around London. Then they transferred me to the Admiralty, shifting those little models of submarines and destroyers around on big relief maps of the oceans of the world.

Oh, my dears, war was a very flirtatious time. God knows we had little enough of the mortal pleasures in London: no silk stockings, no perfume, no clothes—and damned little food. Though you could still get a decent drink at the Cafe de Paris before it got bombed. And the good hotels, Claridges and the Savoy, did their best with what they had, to put on a decent lunch for a few shillings. The nightclubs kept on going, and the pubs. There was music and we
danced and laughed a lot—and cried a lot too. And then the end of the war came, and when the euphoria wore off we saw how few of our friends came home. The young men we had laughed and joked with, the boys we had played tennis with and danced with. And made love with. Our world was never to be the same again.

After the war I came home to Ardnavarna. Mammie was still here, tending her chickens and her sheep and her cows. Mammie had become quite the little farmer. It wasn’t until later that I understood why. She had had to become more self-sufficient. Money wasn’t anything any of us ever thought about much. When you had it you spent it, and when you didn’t, you just made do. But the Molyneuxes had always had money and we weren’t grand spenders—no yachts and gambling away fortunes in Monte Carlo or wild extravagances on famous mistresses or fabulous jewels. The money had always been there, for centuries. Only now it wasn’t. Or at least, not that much of it.

You know how the eldest sons always inherit the houses and the money, well, my father was the second son, so he hadn’t inherited anything much. All he had had was a little money from his grandmother, but I suppose we had gone through most of it by then. Mammie’s fortune had been invested overseas, in German steel and in now-defunct shipping lines and bankrupt rubber plantations—all the wrong stuff.

Half from the shock of it, I got married. He was an Irishman. A nice enough fella whom I’d known all my life. But after Archie, I couldn’t settle. He bored me silly, so within a year I upped and left him. And then I met another man. Remet him, I should say. A naval officer I’d known from the Admiralty. I used to drive him around a bit in the official car in my early days in the Wrens. I’d liked him then and I liked him now.

Of course there was a problem because I was still married, so we just lived together at Ardnavarna. No one minded that. It was when I was going to get a divorce and marry him that the trouble started. Oh, it was all right to
live with a fella, they could turn a blind eye to that. But to divorce? In those days? God forbid. And he did, via the bishop himself.

So it was either get the divorce and marry the man and live in exile, or stay home, at Ardnavarna. I chose Ardnavarna and I’ve never regretted my decision, though in any case, the first husband died a couple of years later and I was a free woman again. I became the Merry Widow Molyneux—because like all the Molyneux women, I didn’t take my husband’s name. By the way, it’s pronounced
Molynoo,
just so we get it straight.

Life went on. I had a ton of friends scattered across continents, and I finally came into my grandfather Molyneux’s trust money, so I could visit them as often as I pleased. I had my horses, Paris was back swinging again with American jazz and fashionable people … oh, I had myself a wild old time.

Then I went on a trip to India with Pa and Mammie. Pa took a bad fall from a polo pony and a few days later he developed tetanus. He was dead within a week and I had to bring Mammie home. She was devastated without him, and of course I was too.

Mammie stayed quietly at Ardnavarna, tending her gardens—oh, they were a picture in those days, you can be sure, and after a while I picked up my old ways again, flitting from London to Paris to Dublin like a butterfly. But I always returned to Ardnavarna for the hunt season. Our stables were among the best in the country, our dalmatians the best of the breed, fine descendants of the notorious Lily’s own dogs, and our gardens the most beautiful in Connemara.

And then, when Mammie finally died, I came home to Ardnavarna for good.

But I’m talking about myself again, the way Faithless Brigid always says I do, and all the while I meant to tell you about what happened just yesterday, about all the excitement, and my unexpected guests.

I
T HAD RAINED
that morning, and the dogs were tired because we had already been for our usual ride along the strand. That is, they run and I ride. On my fine bay hunter, Kessidy, or on mad Malachy, the chestnut who can go like the wind and often does, whether you want him to or not. He’s a tricky old beast and you have to be trickier and let him know who’s boss, and then he’ll give you a grand ride. Fearless and fast and built like an ox, that’s Malachy.

Most days we go through the bridle paths in the woods and down to the strand and we race along the edge of the water, with me hollerin’ and laughin’ like a mad creature, I’m enjoying myself so much. And the dogs running hell-for-leather alongside, barking their heads off from the sheer joy of it.
That’s
the best part of my day. The wind whistling in my ears, the surf pounding hard as my heart and the horse fairly singing with speed beneath me. It’s the next best thing to making love, I can tell you. Ah, and there I go, spilling my secrets again like wine from an overfull glass. “That’s enough of yourself,” as my mammie, God love her, would say to me when I talked indiscreetly. And you can see she was right.

Have you never been to Connemara? Well then, you have a treat coming, because to see Connemara for the first time is like having God’s own country revealed to you in a dream. Every few miles the landscape changes; one minute it’s all bleak and desolate, with bare blue-green
mountains and maybe a rushing crystal stream carving a passage from on high down to a fast-flowing brown river. Then you’ll leave the sparse, rocky landscape behind and there’s miles of peat bogs the color of bitter chocolate, and mysterious, reedy silver lakes encircled by trees. Where the land dips toward the ocean you will see tiny, rugged whitewashed stone cottages with their thatch roped down against the harsh winter gales.

The Connemara sky brings artists from all corners of the world. It’s the color of moonstones and opals and sometimes it’s exactly the same mother-of-pearl gray of the sea, and it makes me wish I could paint. As you go, you’ll maybe see a lone caramel-colored cow sitting on a rocky outcrop, placidly chewing its cud, watching you. And maybe a little Connemara pony will trot past you along the road, unattended, with its tiny foal, white with a curling wind-tossed mane and a plumed tail like a pony in a fairy tale, clip-clopping at its side. Some say it’s lonely scenery, but to me it’s just about as peaceful as you are going to find anywhere in this tired old world.

Anyhow, the afternoon was sunny and warm. I was mounted on Kessidy, but for once the dogs did not come with me. I left the lazy creatures behind, sleeping on the front steps, and trotted for a change, out of the grounds and down the leafy lane. After a while I saw this little Fiat nudging its way down the boreen toward the Big House with a young redheaded girl driving it.

Now, it’s not easy to find the House; the old signpost was run over years ago but it was never much of a thing anyhow, just a hand-lettered weatherworn bit of wood, and now it tilts drunkenly toward the ground as though no one would ever need to know the way to Ardnavarna. It’s a quick little turn off a secondary road, and with the broken signpost and all, it’s easily missed. So I knew right away this was no ordinary tourist, lost and bewildered and looking for the entrance to the national park. This redheaded young woman was a person with a purpose.

Curiosity is another of my failings, so of course I followed
her, only I went the easier way through the trees because over the years that lane has become little more than a rutted track that’s almost impossible to traverse when it’s raining and muddy. Long gone are the days when the carriage road led to Ardnavarna, maintained in perfect order by the Molyneux family. I felt sorry for her, jolting along for more than a mile until she stopped at the crumbling stone gateposts of the Big House, with a couple of lions atop holding our heraldic shield in their paws. The ornate iron gates are permanently wedged back with heavy rocks, and what’s left of the once famous drive is just weeds and more ruts, and now the beech trees have grown so big they block out the light. It looks gloomy and oppressive, even on a sunny day.

She turned into the drive and jolted on toward the house and I walked Kessidy along behind her, lurking in the trees so she wouldn’t see me. That drive is a mile long and it curves through the trees, offering tantalizing little glimpses of gray stone turrets and driving you mad with impatience to see the place. And as you emerge from the leaves there it is, silhouetted in front of you, the afternoon sun at its back, looking for all the world as though it were still lived in.

The girl climbed from the car and put her hands in the pockets of her jeans, staring at it, and I saw her shoulders sag with disappointment. Because it’s nothing but a blackened shell. The roof has fallen in in a dozen places and there’s ivy climbing through the gaping window sockets. Of course, there are still vestiges of its former grandeur: the imposing portico with its four Corinthian pillars and the huge front door, wide enough to ride a horse through, which it’s said my great-grandfather took delight in doing every New Year’s Eve, sitting on the horse’s back in the stone-flagged great hall, quaffing a glass of champagne. “To bring the Molyneuxes luck,” he said. In which case the man was sadly mistaken.