Legacy of Secrets (59 page)

But he still could not forgive her. He put the letter he had written on the bedside table. In it, he told her that he was going away for a while and that when she was well enough he wanted her to leave his house with her child.
“The baby’s father came here to claim him and no doubt you will both go to join him,”
he had written finally.

He walked over to look at the dark-haired infant sleeping as soundly as his mother in the crib beside the bed, and he sighed a bitter, regretful sigh that it was not his. When a son had been born he had counted it the highest of his achievements, of more value to him than all his learned theses and rare manuscripts, because his son was a living part of himself.

He walked back downstairs again and shut himself in the library. He sat for a long time, thinking of the happiness Lily had brought him and he counted himself a lucky man ever to have called her his own. She had given him more companionship and pleasure the past few years than he remembered having in his whole life. And now it was over.

His hand trembled as he poured himself another glass of port, and as he sipped it the pain in his heart spread through his chest and along his left arm. His throat tightened and he felt as though he were choking. The glass dropped from his hand, spilling the wine and staining the beautiful pale rug a deep red. As he gasped for air he thought of Lily sleeping upstairs and he struggled to his feet. He wanted to take the letter back, he wanted to keep her at all costs. He just couldn’t bear to lose her, no matter what she had done. The pain gripped harder and blackness was all around him and he fell to the floor, unconscious.

The maid discovered him the next morning when she went in to clean. She screamed when she saw him lying on the floor and at first she thought the stain on the rug was blood. The other servants came running and they sent for the doctor. When he arrived he confirmed that Mr. Adams
had died of a heart attack and that he had been dead for several hours.

Lily had woken earlier and read John’s letter telling her that Finn had been to see his son and that he expected her to leave his house. Now John was dead and she knew, because he had told her so years ago, that he had left everything he owned, including the house, to her. She cried bitter, guilty tears for him and she cried for herself. John had been a good, gentle man; he had been her anchor, her security, her lifeline. And now, because of her, he was dead.

All of Boston turned out for John Porter Adams’s funeral. All those who had refused to receive him and his wife when he was alive paid their respects to him now he was dead—though they studiously ignored the veiled, aloof widow, who did not even bother to look their way. And rumors ran rife about the reason for his sudden death, especially with a son and heir just born. The servants had gossiped about Lily’s absences in New York and many of those at the funeral put two and two together, though they did not know who “the other man” could be. And Lily was twice condemned by the ladies of Boston.

D
AN
O’K
EEFFE WAS ONE OF THE YOUNGEST CONGRESSMEN
in Washington. Grover Cleveland was in the White House for the second time, and he was still embroiled in an ongoing fight with the powerful Tammany Hall Democrats. Cleveland’s independent streak was turning his own party against him, but Dan O’Keeffe was also an individual who spoke his own mind and nobody else’s; a man who fought not only for the Irish, but for all the downtrodden immigrants’ rights, and a man as against graft and excessive tariff protection as Cleveland was himself. The president had taken a shine to him and he was often invited to dinners at the White House, both official and unofficial.

Dan thought the White House the most sublime edifice ever built. He was not born in America, so he knew he could never be President O’Keeffe and master of all its splendor, but he nurtured the hope that maybe, one day, when he got married and had children, his son might.

Congress sat for only four or five months of the year, and when the summer’s heat struck Washington like a blow, Dan went back to Boston to take care of his constituents and his business. It was growing almost faster than he could keep track of. He demanded two things from his employees: honesty and loyalty. “A few brains wouldn’t go amiss either,” he would tell his shop managers, and he could tell the men with get-up-and-go by the eagerness in
their eyes, the proud way they’d carried themselves, and the determination not to take “no” for an answer.

He paid them well and expected them to work hard and those who shirked their duties or attempted to unburden their load onto another were promptly fired, even though it meant hardening his heart to their pleas that they had a wife and nine children to support. “Maybe you’ll think of that next time somebody gives you a good job,” he would say coldly.

Dan’s philosophy was that if a man was only ninety-nine percent on his side, then he could not be counted on for his support. One hundred percent was his yardstick, both for his employees and his friends, though it was different in politics, where points and friends were traded over the carved desks and brass spittoons on the House floor as easily as gossip.

Thanks to his brains and his own hard work he now had stores in forty large cities from the East Coast to the West. Wherever there were Irish immigrants there was also a Daniel’s store. He gave the rich uptown areas employing Irish servants and cooks the same smart claret-colored uptown stores as Beacon Hill, and in the poorer areas he offered shamrock-green grottos filled with bargain goods at bargain prices, counting on mass-marketing methods to make him his profits.

He had it going both ways and he thought himself a pretty smart fellow who had come a long way from peddling watches at county fairs, though he always wore the red suspenders that had become his trademark. Any picture of him in the newspapers, or any political cartoon, inevitably showed big Dan O’Keeffe with his thumbs hooked through his suspenders and his derby hat on the back of his head and a confident grin on his face.

There had been no time in his life to find a wife and no time even to buy himself a house. He still called the two rooms over the Beacon Hill shop his residence, and like most of the other congressmen, for the few months he was in Washington he took a room at a boardinghouse. He had
a substantial sum of money in the bank, his business was turning over a small fortune, and his political career was well established. And in all his life he had never had a place he could properly call his home.

As a congressman from Boston, Dan read all the Massachusetts newspapers every day and it was impossible to miss the coverage on the sudden death of one of Boston’s most eminent scholars, who also happened to be a member of one of Boston’s best families. He read enviously of John Porter Adams’s academic achievements, of his degrees from Harvard and Oxford and the tributes from his colleagues, because the one thing that always plagued him was his own lack of education.

He read about the funeral in the
Boston Herald
and he saw that the widow, Mrs. Lily Adams, headed the list of mourners, and that the famous actor Ned Sheridan had been there to support her. And later he read in one of the tabloids that Mrs. Adams, who had given birth to a son just a few days before her husband’s death, was the former Lily Molyneux from Ireland, and that she was also his former housekeeper. And that she had inherited the vast Adams fortune.

Dan pushed back his battered leather chair, propped his feet on the desk, pushed his derby to the back of his head, and stared thoughtfully in front of him.
So. Lily Molyneux has come back to haunt me again, has she?
He picked up the newspaper and read again about her fine home on Mount Vernon Street and the fact that her late husband was sixty years old when he died, and that his son had been born just a few days before.

He remembered Finn’s house was just around the corner from Mount Vernon Street and he pondered the coincidence. Surely his brother could not have been so near to Lily and failed to see her? Yet he had never mentioned her. Finn lived his own busy life in New York. As far as Dan knew there were a succession of fancy ladies keeping him occupied, and Lily’s name had not passed his lips in years. He didn’t know whether the flame of love had
turned to hate and then gone out, but one thing he did know.
He
was going to see Lily.

N
O MATTER HOW
L
LLY FILLED THE BIG SILENT HOUSE
on Mount Vernon Street with flowers and kept bright fires burning in the grates, when she ate her supper alone by candlelight in the dining room it still felt like a shrine to all the dead Adamses, and not like a cheerful home for the new son and heir who would carry on their name. And, as Finn had so succinctly put it when he had reduced her life to zero again, there was no way to prove the child was not her husband’s. And, as much as she had not wanted her first son, she adored her second. Sometimes, as the long lonely days dragged endlessly by, she thought that if it were not for her baby, she would have nothing to live for.

She had named her son Liam, the Irish version of her brother William’s name, and John for her husband. She was getting back at the Boston Brahmins by giving the son of one of their grandest families an Irish name. She knew they would think it a great comedown in the world, while she, proudly, thought it was a leg up.
Those poor lily-livered prissy old dames could do with a bit of good Irish blood roaring in their veins,
she told herself over her untouched supper, talking to herself as she often did nowadays because there was no one else to talk to. Except the baby, and right now all he needed her for was nourishment. His nurse was an uppity woman from Philadelphia who thought herself better than her notorious employer. Lily would have sacked her but she was good with the baby, and Liam was her prime concern.

Liam was her stake in the future. She had someone else to think of now besides herself. She would take her time with him, plan his life out carefully: his schools, his college, his career, and his social life, though how he was ever going to have one with her for a mother, she didn’t know. Unless she achieved a miracle between now and then.

But that was all in the future. She put it to the back of
her mind and pushed away her uneaten plate of food and took her glass of wine with her into the library.

She sat opposite John’s old chair with her feet on a little embroidered footstool that reminded her of her mother, sipping her wine and staring into the flames, listening to the silence and thinking how different it would have been with John sitting opposite her, planning their son’s life.

She leapt to her feet at the sound of the doorbell. “Whoever can that be?” she asked out loud, because no one, unless it was the doctor, ever called at her house. She listened to the maid’s footsteps crossing the hall. She heard the door open and a man’s voice, and the maid asking him to step inside. She heard her cross the hall and tap on the library door.

If it is Finn,
Lily told herself bitterly,
I’ll kill him.
The parlormaid offered her a silver tray with the calling card of Representative Daniel O’Keeffe.

Astonished, Lily stared at the maid. “He is here to see me?”

“Yes, ma’am. He’s waiting out in the hall.”

“Ask him to come in.” Lily patted her hair into place and nervously smoothed her skirt. She told herself that if Dan had come to plead for Finn’s forgiveness she would tell him exactly what she thought of his unscrupulous brother. She would tell him that her father had been right, that all the O’Keeffes were nothing but a bunch of blarney-mouthed blackguards. With her temper rising she waited for the maid to escort Dan into the library.

He seemed to fill the room with his presence as he walked toward her, both hands outstretched and an expression that was a mixture of sympathy and delight on his handsome red-bearded face. She had forgotten how tall he was, and how big: massive-shouldered and powerful-looking. With his red hair and his beard and his commanding presence, he was as handsome as his brother, in a different way.

“Lady Lily, Mrs. Adams … forgive me for calling so late, and without writing or telephoning first,” he said as
though they had seen each other just the other day. “But I read about your sad loss in the
Herald
and I felt compelled to seek you out again and convey my sympathy.”

“Spoken like a true politician, Dan,” she said, reluctantly offering him her hand. He bowed over it with such social aplomb that she laughed. “The last time I saw you, you were covered in coal dust. You looked like a gargoyle on a cathedral parapet.”

He smiled reminiscently. “I haven’t forgotten. And you looked like a waif. A lost, lonely girl. You were only a child yourself then, Lady Lily.”

“Seventeen. Old enough to know better,” she said bitterly.

“Not the way you were brought up. Sheltered from the world and real life as most of us knew it, by your family’s position and wealth. Bad things just didn’t happen to girls like you.”

She eyed him warily. “Was it your silver tongue that got you to be a congressman?”