Legacy of Secrets (67 page)

“Don’t hold it against me,” he said, laughing. “And anyhow, I’m not half as eligible as you. I’m only a second son, with no inheritance and the army as a career.”

“Thank God,” she said, relenting. And she asked him out to Ardnavarna that weekend.

He arrived laden with flowers, champagne, chocolates, and books like a summer Santa Claus, putting the sparkle back in her eyes and a new lightness in her heart. He was so different from Finn she soon forgot to make comparisons.

It was a quick romance and she married Jack at a quiet ceremony in Dublin a few months later. One of the conditions of her father’s will was that her husband must agree to take on the Molyneux name. So Jack became John Howard Allerdyce Molyneux. He swept her off for an extended honeymoon in France and when they returned they threw an enormous reception at the house in Fitzwilliam Square for all their friends. The friends smiled, satisfied, seeing that they doted on each other and that they were always laughing. “The perfect couple,” they said.

They were based at Ardnavarna but Jack was an army man and Ciel followed happily wherever he was posted; to India, Borneo, or Hong Kong. She threw herself into whatever new environment they were currently in, making friends and enjoying life because, as she told Jack, with him she would be happy in a jungle or a desert and anything in between.

“It doesn’t matter, as long as I’m with you,” she said, coping gamely with servants who spoke only Hindi or Urdu, or Cantonese or Malay. She swatted away mosquitoes
the size of dragonflies and swept away cockroaches the size of mice, and shot rats the size of rabbits, and screamed at spiders as big as her hand. And she prayed she would never come face-to-face with a snake because it was the one thing she knew she couldn’t cope with. “I’ll simply go all to pieces,” she told Jack, so he bought her a pair of mongooses who became so devoted to her they refused to leave her side and had to be forcibly restrained from climbing onto the bed with them at night.

“You see, everybody loves you,” Jack said, laughing at her as he shoved the little mongooses out onto the veranda where they belonged.

The only trouble was that the years were passing and there were still no children. “Maybe it’s the hot climate,” Jack said, because he knew she was worrying about it. And maybe he was right, because the minute they found themselves back in England, where Jack was given a desk job at the War Office, Ciel became pregnant.

They had been married for eight years when Maudie was born. “Another rousing redhead,” Jack said with a grin, enchanted to have a second little imp to brighten up his household.

Whenever she looked at her little girl, Ciel thought wistfully about Lily. She remembered trailing devotedly after her elder sister and she desperately wanted little Maudie to have a sister of her own to keep her company, but no matter how hard they tried, it was not to be.

Ciel took Maudie to Ardnavarna for the summer months and Jack joined her as often as he could get away, but she was alone when Finn returned to his homeland.

She noticed the maids with their heads together, gossiping excitedly and thinking maybe there was to be more “trouble,” she asked what was happening.

“It’s Finn O’Keeffe. Padraig O’Keeffe’s son,” they added, as though the name had not been indelibly imprinted on the brain of every Molyneux. “He’s come home to visit the old country. And with a million dollars in his pocket, so they say. And lookin’ it also.”

Ciel’s heart sank to her boots. She had put Finn out of her mind and out of her life, and that was all very well as long as she never saw him again. Now he was here, she wasn’t so sure. She told herself that he would never dare come to see her. But she was wrong.

The excited maids let him in and the dalmatians charged toward him, barking their heads off, wagging their tails as though he were an old friend. Walking slowly down the great sweeping staircase toward him, Ciel thought if they had any sense they would have bitten his head off.

She walked past him into the uncomfortable little anteroom off the great hall. He followed her and she sat down on a hard little upright chair because she did not trust her wobbly knees. She did not offer him a seat. He looked just the same, handsome, well dressed, rich. Only he was older, his nose was crooked now as though it had been broken, and there were more lines on his face.

“I heard you had been in the village, throwing your money around,” she said coldly.

He shrugged. “I wanted to do something for my old friends. Is there anything wrong with that?”

“Why are you here? What right have you to come to my house?”

“Would you believe me if I said I had come to apologize?”

“I don’t want to hear it. I’m a married woman now.”

“I heard. I’m glad you’re happy, Ciel.”

She glared at him and he said, “But there’s another reason I’ve come to see you. I want to buy Ardnavarna.”

“Ardnavarna is not for sale,” she said. “And if it were I would never sell it to you.”

She strode past him into the hall and he followed her. “I’ll pay any sum you ask. Just name it.”

Ciel walked up the stairs, not looking at him. She said, “Go back to New York, Finn, where you belong. Because you have never belonged at the Big House and you never will.”

She went to the nursery and told the nanny to pack little
Maudie’s trunks, they were returning to London for the rest of the summer.

She thought the long journey by train and ferry and then train again would never end. She was in such a fever to see Jack again, and when she finally saw him pacing the train station, eagerly searching the row of carriages for her, her heart filled with love for him and she breathed a huge sigh of relief. She had just proven to herself that Finn did not matter one bit to her anymore. It was Jack she loved, and she put Finn out of her mind and out of her life at last.

W
E WENT FOR A LONG WALK,
Brigid and I, two old women clumping over the hills in ancient Wellington boots, wrapped in dark-green shooting jackets with a dozen different pockets meant to hold everything from a brace of pheasant to pipe and tobacco. They used to belong to my own pa, about 1930, and they still keep out the thin drifting Irish rain and the wind. Brigid wore one of those Sherlock Holmes style tweed hats with the little earflaps and I had my old black felt; and with one of us as big and round as a butterball and the other as little and skinny as a jackrabbit, we made as odd a pair as you are ever likely to see tramping Connemara’s lanes, mismatched as an Irish wolfhound and a Jack Russell terrier.

Brigid knew I was upset, telling the tale of my own mammie’s unhappiness. “Don’t y’go dwelling on it again,” she warned me,
giving
me a hand over a treacherous bit of loose rocks and rubble. “Ye know there’s no point in upset-tin’ yerself. It’s all over and done with long ago, and there’s precious little ye can do about it now.”

“I know, I know.” I sighed. “It’s just that I always think up to this point in the story I can forgive Lily anything, because after all, what happened was not really her fault. She just never got over that first terrible mistake. But y’see, Brigid, I believe that Finn really fell for my mammie. Not
lock, stock, and barrel maybe, the way he had fallen for Lily, with all the mad passion of youth and first love. But he really liked Mammie; they made each other laugh, they enjoyed being together.”

“She wasn’t sexy like Lily,” Brigid said, striding ahead, her tiny feet twinkling so fast through the springy grass I had almost to run to keep up with her.

It was true, I know. Even when she was only seventeen and too young and ignorant of what it was all about, Lily had lured men. And that was what had got her into trouble in the first place, with Dermot Hathaway, and it was what had continued to cause trouble throughout her life, with Finn and Dan and Ned. And even, in a way, with her own son, though I’ll tell you what I mean by that a bit later.

“Don’t be frettin’ about yer mammie,” Brigid cautioned again as we stood at the top of the rise, gazing through the gray, misty landscape, smelling the sea on the air and listening to the silence. There wasn’t even a bird cry and when it’s like this I always think the land must have looked exactly this way for centuries. Nothing has changed and nothing ever will. Ireland is like that.

We walked slowly back down the hill with the dogs dashing ahead of us, and on an impulse I suggested we walk into the village. It’s nothing but a straggle of low cottages, washed in the same bright greens and yellows that my grandfather had painted them, and which I saw to it were repainted every year. The gardens are not fit to be called such because the Irish in these parts are not much for flowers, except those like myself, of course, with big estates and a passion for it. But the hydrangeas grow wild in a riot of blues and pinks and the wild fuschia form fine colorful hedgerows as you walk through, and with all the brightness around you might almost think you were in India or the tropics, if it were not for the gray, misty skies overhead. There are two saloons, O’Flaherty’s and Burke’s, good Connacht names both, one at each end of the street and loyalty is divided fairly between them. Burke’s is also the
general store, serving flour and eggs and soap along with the foaming black Guinness pulled by the pint.

We stopped in and I ordered a couple of jars while Brigid puttered about, prodding tomatoes and peaches with a discriminating forefinger that left little bruises on them, picking out the best for our suppers tonight; and the dalmatians curried favor with Moura Burke who had seen the movie
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
some years ago and who has been a pushover for their big-eyed wiles ever since. I pretended I didn’t see the surreptitious biscuit she slipped to each of them while I sipped my Guinness and passed the time of day with the other customers. You know there’s something convivial about combining a shop and a bar, and maybe it takes away a woman’s guilt at having a Guinness midmorning instead of a cup of tea.

“Sure and it’ll take the mist out of yer lungs,” Moura said cheerfully, while the dogs hovered hopefully around her. “And how’re your young guests? The girleen was in yesterday, buying postcards, and the young fella bought himself one of Dessie O’Flaherty’s finest hazelwood walking canes. He asked where he could find a bit of poteen and I said to him, “Yer asking me when y’ve the finest source right there in yer own house?”

I grinned knowingly. “Sure and I don’t know what you’re talking about Moura,” I said, for poteen is one of the great secrets of Ireland. It can be good—strong enough to knock your socks off—or it can be lethal. It’s an illegal hooch made from a mixture of sugar, yeast, barley, and water and boiled over a peat fire, but anyhow the Gardai will be after me if I tell you more.

“If he’s after poteen, he’d better be careful,” I said.

“Sure and didn’t I tell him that meself.” Moura grinned back at me. She’s half my age and a fine-looking woman, black-haired and pink-cheeked with flashing dark eyes, and I’ve known her since she was born, the way I have most of Ardnavarna’s villagers, except for the oldies like me and Brigid, and there are not too many of us left anymore.

Brigid finished her shopping and the dogs their begging
and we all finished our Guinness and off we strolled back along the lane. We climbed over a broken bit of wall and took the shortcut through the old parklands of the Big House and, thinking of Mammie, we made a little detour to the family chapel. We went in and said a little prayer for her, and for Pa and all the rest of them, including Lily, while the dogs curled like faithful hounds at the foot of the statues of a recumbent knight and his lady. After that little communication with God and my loved ones, somehow I felt better, and I stepped briskly out on the path to home, looking forward to a snooze by the fire and the return of my “grandchildren,” as I like to call them, this evening.

They came back bearing presents: a magnificent brightly colored silk scarf for Brigid and one of those photographs of themselves, taken in a photo booth, that they had had put in a silver frame for me. Brigid blushed a fiery red to match her scarf, she was so pleased and embarrassed, and I saw from the glitter in her eyes she was touched almost to tears by their unexpected gift. My own present could not have been a more perfect memento. I inspected it eagerly again. Eddie had his arm around Shannon and their faces were pressed close together and they were both laughing. The tiny silver frame enclosed the moment for me forever and I kissed them both warmly. “I shall put it on my night table,” I told them, “where I can see your happy faces first thing when I wake.”

They had even bought chocolates for the girls who help in the house, and doggie treats for the “boys,” so no one was left out, and it felt almost like Christmas as we quaffed a bottle of good red wine and ate hearty platefuls of Irish stew while they, for a change, since it’s usually myself who does all the talking, chattered nonstop and flirted.

I could see how matters were progressing between them and I smiled with satisfaction. Now to be sure, it’s none of my doing. I may be a busybody and a pushy old woman, but romance takes its own course, as you will have noticed from this story. And as I said before, Ardnavarna is conducive to romance.