Legacy of Secrets (3 page)

I dismounted and walked a few steps toward her. “Come to view the old ruin, have you?” I called.

She swung around. “It’s meself I’ll be referrin’ to, not the house, of course,” I said, exploding with laughter at my little joke. “And who might you be, that’s trespassin’ on my land?”

“Your
land?”

“Well, o’ course it’s mine,” I retorted impatiently. “Everybody knows that. I expect you’ll be a foreigner though. Nobody around here would even want to look at the old pile.”

She stared speechlessly at me and I could see from her amazed look she was taking in my age and my girlish red curls with the battered black felt hat crammed on top, and my faded hunting pink, my ancient baggy fawn jodhpurs, and my smartly polished boots.

“If you were looking for Ardnavarna Castle, this is it,” I said cheerily. “Or rather, what’s left of it. It was a rabbit warren, fifty-two rooms, one for every week of the year. Cold as hell frozen over—even colder than Moscow in winter, my mother always said. And that with forty fireplaces going full blast—they never let ’em go out, even when the family was away. Heating that house was like fueling a ship and it cost ten times as much to run.

“But you’ll be wantin’ to know what happened. Nineteen twenty-two, it was, when we Irish had ‘the Troubles,’ and
the boys
paid us a little visit. They were local lads, I knew them all despite their masks. They said they were
very, very
sorry but they had instructions to burn it. ‘Go ahead,’ says I angrily. ‘It’s the first time since it’s built the damned place will be warm.’

“I was only twelve years old and I was alone, but for the stupid governess, who had run to hide in the greenhouses. The servants all knew what was to happen, of course, and they had disappeared like leprechauns at dawn.
The boys
gave me fifteen minutes to take what I wanted and I thought quickly. There were the Rubenses, the Vandykes, the family portraits, and the silver.
And
my mother’s pearls … all priceless, all irreplaceable.

“In the end of course, I ran into the stables and got the
horses out and the dogs. I turned the chickens free and shooed ’em away, but the rest all went up in smoke, and I never regretted my decision for a single minute.” I laughed, remembering Mammie’s face when I’d told her. “But my mother never forgave me for the pearls.”

The girl just looked at me, shy and big-eyed, not knowing whether to say she was sorry for me or glad, and I switched my riding crop impatiently against my thigh, waiting for her to introduce herself.

“Well?” I demanded. “So who are you?”

She straightened up, the way she might have done in front of the school headmistress, self-consciously smoothing her crumpled white cotton shirt. She had wildly curling copper-red hair and cool gray dark-lashed eyes, and she had freckles like my own. I softened toward her immediately. And then she said, “I’m Shannon Keeffe.”

“An O’Keeffe, are ya?” She couldn’t have told me anything more surprising and I laughed again, vastly amused this time. “Well, well,” I said. “I always wondered when one of Lily’s bastards would show up.”

She blushed a fiery red with confusion. “But that’s partly why I’m here,” she exclaimed. “To find out about Lily.
Who
was she?”

“Who
was Lily? Why, Lily was notorious. ‘
Wicked
Lily’ they called her around here, and maybe they were right. Lily had the kind of beauty that trails legends in its wake; she dangled men from her fingertips and caused havoc wherever she went. She divided families, and brothers, sisters, lovers, and husbands and wives. Even children. And if you’re wondering how I know all this, Shannon Keeffe, it’s because my mother, Ciel Molyneux, was Lily’s younger sister.”

Her eyes widened with interest. “Oh,” she said, sounding thrilled, “then you can tell me all about her?”

“That depends on why you want to know,” I replied smartly. After all, I wasn’t about to unveil the skeletons in the family cupboard to a total stranger. I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled and Kessidy trotted through the
trees toward me. “But I’ll tell you this,” I added, leaping agilely astride the mare, “you’re not the first to be on Lily’s trail.” As I cantered off down the driveway, I called, “Follow me, Shannon Keeffe, down the boreen.”

She maneuvered the Fiat behind me down the lane to the left of the driveway. It was little more than a horse trail, so narrow that the brambles threatened to take the paint from the car and the fronds of bracken almost closed over it. Then suddenly the trees thinned out and the bracken parted and we were looking at Ardnavarna.

Sunlight glittered on the tall sash windows, pungent peat smoke drifted from the chimneys, and the dalmatians sprawled picturesquely on the steps. The door stood wide open, as usual, and in the green hills behind, the young stablelad was playing a plaintive little tune on his reed pipes, sounding exactly like a nightingale.

Scenting a stranger, the dogs lifted their heads, then they rose as one and bounded toward us. I dismounted and gave Kessidy a slap on the rump that sent her ambling toward the stables where the lad would take care of her, then I pushed the dogs back down again with a wave of my hand. “Down, you damned creatures,” I yelled angrily at them, and they subsided, sitting on their haunches wagging their silly tails knowing I didn’t mean a word of it. “Blitherin’ idiots,” I said to Shannon Keeffe, “but I’m dashed fond of ’em all the same. Truth is I couldn’t live without ’em.”

The girl was staring at the house with that rapt expression on her face that meant she had fallen in love, and I smiled, pleased. “Let’s have tea,” I said hospitably waving her inside. Her lovely eyes were wide with pleasure as she stared around the cluttered hall and the dusty old rooms, breathing in the scent of it. And I knew then that I liked her.

“It’s the most enchanting house I’ve ever been in,” she said in a soft, trembling little voice as if she were quite overcome by it. “It’s as though it were alive.” She laughed. “You can almost hear it breathing.”

“ ’tis true,” I agreed modestly, sweeping her in front of
me to the kitchen, for there’s nothing nicer than a bit of flattery when it’s about something close to your heart.

Now, Faithless Brigid is as plump and big-boned as I am delicate and sparrowlike. She has a round face with three chins and her gray hair is parted straight down the middle and anchored just above each ear with a white plastic hair band. Her pink overall is usually hiked up three inches shorter at the back, showing the underside of her plump knees, and when she’s working in the kitchen she always wears a pair of old green Wellington boots on her impossibly tiny feet. “For comfort,” she says, with no thought for how it looks.

“That’s Faithless Brigid,” I said, sweeping layers of newspapers and books and a couple of sleeping orange cats to the far end of the table. “I’ve brought Shannon Keeffe to take tea with us, Brigid,” I added loudly. The old girl has become a bit deaf these last few years.

“Then it’s as well I’ve just brought out a batch of scones,” she retorted tartly. “Next time,
madam,
if you’ll be invitin’ a person to take tea, will you be lettin’ me know sooner, so I can prepare properly.” With that she took a giant plate of fresh scones and banged it down on the table. She trotted over to the cupboard and brought out a huge pot of jam.

“Fresh raspberries, I picked ’em myself,” I whispered conspiratorially as Brigid slammed the pot of jam onto the table in front of us. Then she took a blue pottery bowl of cream and slammed it onto the table next to the jam.

“The brack’s not yet cooled, so you’ll have to be makin’ do with that,” she grumbled, trotting back to her stove.

Knowing how to rile her, I told Shannon the story of how she came to be called “Faithless.” She flung me a furious glare, and I grinned.

Jostling the dalmatians from the chairs where they sat like expectant-looking statues awaiting tidbits, I poured strong black tea into delicate Spode cups. “Here’s yours, Faithless Brigid,” I called mockingly, knowing exactly what her answer would be.

“Ah, and y’know I’m always takin’ mine from yer fayther’s old shavin’ mug,” she grumbled, trotting quickly over to the table. She’s a creature of habit, my Brigid.

As long as I’ve known her, and
you
know that’s a lot of years, Brigid has seemed to be in perpetual motion—just as I always seem to be in perpetual mid-sentence—trotting here and there, as light on her feet as a bantamweight boxer, despite her bulk and her old Wellingtons.

I said to Shannon, my mouth full of scone, “Brigid’s older than me, of course. She used to look after me when I was just a wee slip of a girl. She must be over a hundred by now.”

“I niver did,” Brigid retorted heatedly, brandishing a bread knife in the air over the sticky, rich brack. “We’re the same age and you know it. It’s just you niver admit to it.”

I fed the encroaching ginger cats and the dalmatians bits of scone and winked at the girl. “You’ll be after forgivin’ Brigid,” I said loftily. “The old woman niver did know her place.”

Brigid scowled but said nothing, and I smiled brightly at Shannon, thinking it was time I found out her story. I peered closely at her. I could see she was a beauty, though she had yet to grow into it. She had the magnificent copper hair I used to have myself, though mine was never half as luxuriant. And those divine gray eyes, so cool and clear, I knew one day they would drive men wild. That is, if they hadn’t already.

I leaned forward, inspecting her freckles. “I’ve got this cream,” I whispered, “made up from my mother’s recipe in a village the other side of Kylemore. ’tis miraculous with the freckles. Probably from its proximity to the holy nuns over at the abbey, my mother always used to say.”

“Humph!” Brigid commented loudly from the stove.

“Ignore her,” I said, moving my chair closer, “and tell me about yourself.”

“Well,” she said hesitantly. “My father’s name is Bob Keeffe.”

Behind me, I heard Brigid turn to listen, but she said nothing. Neither did I.

“I wondered if you knew him?”

“Why should I?” I asked cagily.

She stared at me, nonplussed. “But you know the name, O’Keeffe. And you said I was one of Lily’s bastards!”

I nodded, sipping my tea, waiting to hear what she had to say before giving away the family secrets.

“It’s a long story,” she said with a huge sigh. “So I guess I had better begin at the beginning.”

“It’s as good a place as any,” I agreed, as Brigid pulled up a chair and we settled down to listen.

“I
GUESS IT
all began three months ago, on my twenty-fourth birthday,” Shannon said. “My father gave a big party that weekend, at our country house on Long Island, to celebrate my engagement as well as my birthday.” She smiled, a wry little half smile that failed to reach her lovely gray eyes. “Actually, it was my third engagement in two years. Dad asked me, ‘Will it stick this time?’ And I told him confidently, oh sure, this is for keeps. He was so relieved that I was happy, though I think Buffy, my stepmother, was just glad I was finally off her hands.

“Everybody knew ‘Big Bob’ Keeffe,” Shannon said with a proud little smile. “His story was written up in every magazine for years, even though he was reluctant to talk about himself. But when you have the kind of success he had, you somehow become public property, and there are no secrets left anymore. Or at least, that’s what I thought.

“He never talked to the media about his personal life, only about his business. He was a self-made man, a millionaire many times over, and everybody wanted to know how he had done it.

“‘Rags to riches, that’s me,’ he would tell them. But that’s all he would say.

“They said he dealt in property, but he just laughed at that. He called himself ‘a builder,’ and he always wanted to build bigger than anyone else. His skyscrapers dominate the skylines of a dozen American cities and he was building
his own dream, the one hundred and twenty-five story Keeffe Tower on Park Avenue, designed by I. M. Pei.

“People thought it was strange that he never talked about his past, they sneered at him and said it was because he was ashamed of his orphanage background. But it wasn’t true, he was never ashamed to confess he had once been poor.

“Sometimes when I saw him on television talking about his projects, it would take me by surprise how handsome he was. The media described him as ‘a burly, silver-haired, sixtyish man, who could charm the loose change from the pocket of a beggar and the clothes off any pretty woman.’” Shannon smiled wryly, remembering him. “And I guess maybe they were right. He had piercing light-blue eyes and thick silver hair that had once been as black as only the true ‘black Irish’ can have, and he was always immaculately dressed. But his hands were a workingman’s hands; big and powerful. He said it was his inheritance, and that he was descended from people used to hard labor, farming stony Irish fields for centuries.”

She sighed, remembering. “There were so many stories about him, and there were terrible rumors about his infidelities, but I’m sure there weren’t that many and I know he always tried to be discreet, for my sake. And I guess for Buffy’s. And I know for certain he’d never forgotten what it felt like to be poor and alone; he gave a lot of his money to charities, always anonymously, because he hated publicity. But fame—and notoriety—seemed to seek him out.”