Legacy of Secrets (26 page)

I sighed, pitying her, as I pushed off the dogs and stood up, shaking out my crumpled chiffon skirt. “Bedtime, my darlings,” I called. “And tomorrow, after dinner, I shall tell you what happened next.”

I
WORE SAPPHIRE-BLUE
Dior the next night, flirtatiously short to the knee, daringly décolleté with a flutter of marabou feathers flung over my shoulders, hiding my bony chest. I wore Mammie’s huge sapphires dangling from my ears and I was astonished when Eddie assured me that if I were to sell them I could live out the rest of my life in grand style on what they would fetch! And Shannon told me what true
style
I had, and how pretty my legs still were and that my perfume seemed hauntingly familiar.

“L’Heure Bleue—Guerlain, dearest child,” I told her when she asked. “It was all the rage when I was a gel. And Jicky and Shalimar. But L’Heure Bleue—such a naughty name—was always my favorite. Maybe because I enjoyed what it meant rather too often than was good for me.”

Eddie laughed. “Tell us what it meant, Maudie,” he encouraged me.

“Well, of course it was the wicked Frenchmen who gave it that name. It’s supposed to mean the blue twilit evening hour when men were entertained by their mistresses after leaving the office and before going home to their wives. I don’t suppose the French were the only ones to think of it, but they were certainly the only ones to name a perfume for it.”

“I feel so plain next to you, Maudie,” Shannon complained, “in my little black dress.”

“And Lily’s diamond necklace,” I said.

“Dad said it was ‘by way of being a family heirloom.’” She quoted his words exactly. “And that I should treasure it.”

“Of course you should, dear girl,” I said. “It’s a vital clue.” I tried to look mysterious and Edward smiled at me, pouring glasses of champagne.

“I know, I know.” He laughed. “But we shall have to wait to find out why.”

“Oh, dear, I’m afraid you’ve got my number, as you dear Americans would say.” I sipped the champagne, heaving a small satisfied sigh. “Dear boy, pour a glass for Brigid, will you? She loves a tipple and she knows the good stuff from the mediocre. Many’s the glass of champagne we’ve shared together after a party. I can’t thank you enough, dear Edward, for such a treat.
And
you had to drive all the way into Galway to find it.”

“My pleasure, ma’am.”

I turned to Shannon. “I’m not just keeping you on tenterhooks,” I told her. “You just have to know the whole story, all the many secret layers of it, for it to make sense. Though I’m not sure myself, dear girl, how it is going to help you find out who killed your father. But it’s my belief that truth is always hidden under a dozen different veils of secrecy, and you must lift each one in turn to find it. So after dinner we shall continue with Lily, and the past.”

Brigid, round and neat as a new pin in her best black with her white ankle socks and little trotty-heeled boots, blushed as Edward made a toast to her. “To Brigid, the best cook this side of the Atlantic. Queen of her kitchen and without whom Ardnavarna would not be the same.”

“Hear, hear,” I agreed. “To me darlin’ Brigid, without whom I should never be the same silly old woman I am.”

“I can drink to that,” she said wickedly, tossing back her champagne in a single long gulp.

“Mind your manners, woman, will you,” I chided her.
“You’re supposed to sip the golden nectar and take your time about it.”

“Not with my lobsters ready for the pot, I don’t,” she snorted, heading for the kitchen.

“Mind you don’t go falling now, on those silly high heels. You are too old for them,” I yelled after her, ignoring the fact that I myself was wearing my silver stilettos. “The poor old dear never had a head for drink,” I added, “but I daresay the lobsters will be none the worse for it.

“Throw another log on the fire, Edward my boy, and Shannon, put a record on the gramophone. I’ll just mix the doggies their dinners and we shall all be ready for our own home-smoked salmon, and then the lobsters …”

“And then Lily for dessert,” Edward finished for me, and I laughed.

Shannon was sifting through a pile of dusty old 78 rpm records. She put one on the ancient gramophone and the strains of a Brahms violin concerto floated through the lamp-lit room. She looked suddenly sad and forlorn and Eddie went to stand next to her. He took her hand and squeezed it sympathetically.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Just how much my father would have enjoyed meeting you both,” she said. “And how much I would have loved him to see Ardnavarna.”

“Oh, but your father knew Ardnavarna, all right,” I blurted out. “I was going to tell you
all in good time,
but I thought it might comfort you to know he was here and that he knew the old place. But you’ll have to wait for the full story later, at the right time.”

Stunned, Shannon sank into a chair alongside a dalmatian who grumblingly moved over to give her room.

I looked worriedly at her pale, pretty face. Maybe I was an old fool to have said what I did, but the poor girl was grieving so, I’d just had to let her know her father had been here. I told her quickly that I had met him myself, just that once, and that he was a fine man. There was an integrity about him, and a strength. And that’s why I had believed
her without question when she told me her story. “A man like that gets on with life no matter what it brings,” I said firmly. “I think all of us here in this room are agreed your father did not kill himself. And I think all of us”—I included Edward in my glance—“are agreed to find out who did.”

After dinner, we adjourned as usual to the drawing room. Eddie poked the fire into a cheerful blaze and I settled myself in my favorite sofa. One of the dogs squashed comfortably in beside me and I propped my sparrow-boned ankles on a tapestry stool, and began the next episode of my story.

“Aunt Mallow in Cork City was a brisk, unquestioning woman,” I said. “A poor relation summoned occasionally to the Big House for the Christmas and Easter festivities; the sort who sat in the chair farthest from the fireside, keeping to her knitting and remaining discreetly just outside the family circle. She knew her place and she knew what was expected of her. If she guessed why Lily was sent to her to be put on the S.S.
Hibernia
sailing for Boston on that very evening’s tide, she knew better than to ask her question out loud. Or to let her pity show, as she said good-bye with a brief kiss on the cheek and watched the child walk slowly up the gangway to board the steamship.”

L
ILY’S FACE WAS BLEAK
as she walked to the rail, searching for her aunt in the milling crowd below. But the woman had already disappeared from sight, hurrying back to the small comforts of her own rooms in a genteel guest house paid for by her dear cousin Lord Molyneux out of the charity of his heart.

The old six-masted iron steamship was carrying a cargo of Cork’s best butter and bacon and Irish whiskey, as well as a hold full of ragged immigrants. Lily lay on her narrow berth wedged against the varnished timbers in her stuffy little cabin with its single brass-rimmed porthole, as the rickety vessel slid from Cobh and lumbered through the choppy green waves of the notorious St. George’s Channel.
The next day they were hit by the full force of an Atlantic gale. Lily was too sick even to think about what had happened to her, but after a couple of days she got used to the bouncing rhythm and sat up in her little berth and took stock of her surroundings.

Huge gray-green waves slid past her porthole, but she did not feel frightened. She put on her old navy fisherman’s jersey and breeches, pushed her long hair under a velvet cap and ventured out onto the deck. There was a little place near the prow where she could tuck herself away from view, and in between the worst of the storms she spent hours alone there, watching the green waves sliding by, listening to the cries of the seabirds and to the rigging tapping and jangling in the wind, trying not to think about her future or her past. Only about
now,
the very moment of time that she was living. Because that was all she could bear.

High up in her aerie, she could not hear the frightened cries of the unfortunate Irish immigrants crammed like cattle in the hold, heading for the new world and the riches and success they all dreamed were waiting for them. She could not hear the men in the hold shouting for help with the sick, and for food and water, and the women crying and the children wailing. Nor could she know that beneath them all, in the hot gritty bowels of the ship, Finn and Daniel O’Keeffe were shoveling great heaps of coal into the yawning fiery jaws of the boilers, working their way to America. Half naked and black as miners, they alternately cursed and prayed either to live or die, as the never-ending storms threatened to capsize them.

There were a few other passengers, but because Lily kept to her cabin and spoke to no one, she immediately became the talk of the ship. Gossip rippled through the decks about the mysterious, aloof young aristocrat who never joined her fellow passengers, even for dinner. The talk filtered down even to the steerage where, amidst filth and disease, they condemned her to hell for her title, for her rumored haughty ways, and for her rich family. The
talk went even deeper, down to the blistering engine room where Daniel heard, stunned, about the beautiful and mysterious Lady Lily Molyneux.

He managed to keep his mouth shut when he was told, but afterward alone in the engine room he cried out angrily, “Faith and she’s chasing us! She’ll haunt us for the rest of our lives.” In the back of his mind Dan hid the private memories of Lily that he treasured: of her beguiling smiles, of her sapphire eyes, of the exquisite curve of her slender young neck, and of the warm lingering glances for which he had secretly yearned.

Of course she cared nothing for him. Finn and Lily had been thick as thieves since they were youngsters and it was only natural that, when they were grown, Finn would fall in love with her. Because simple love like his did not recognize the high walls and boundaries that set them apart. Only Lily’s sort knew the rules and how to sidestep them when they wanted.

Still, Dan knew the child she was carrying was not his brother’s and he bent his massive shoulders to the mountain of coal, heaving shovelful after shovelful into the fiery furnace, wiping the sweat from his brow with a blackened hand, wondering at the circumstance that had placed Lily on this very boat, as though destiny itself were taking a hand. He thought of Finn asleep in the dark cubbyhole that was their “quarters,” unaware that the cause of all his trouble was only yards away from him. He guessed the family had sent Lily off to America to have the baby and decided quickly that it was best his brother knew nothing about it. Because if he did, he would surely kill her.

He kept Finn hard at work and away from the other stokers and sailors. It wasn’t difficult because Finn was no longer his usual convivial, talkative self. He worked silently, his face set in bitter lines, his red-rimmed eyes staring blankly from his coal-blackened face.

They were never permitted on deck and as Finn rarely conversed with anyone, it was easy to keep the gossip about Lily away from him. The voyage progressed slowly,
each day inexorably following the next in a routine of heat-blasted filthy labor and exhausted dream-ridden sleep.

They were forty miles off Nantucket when the gales really began to blow. The captain consulted his barometer anxiously. He was a man with fifty years seafaring experience and he knew exactly what was coming. Ordering the first officer to tell the passengers they were confined to quarters and could expect rough weather, he battened down the hatches, locked the steerage passengers into their hold, and sent men down to secure the crates of Cork butter and bacon and whiskey so that the cargo would not shift dangerously under the new pounding they were about to endure.

Lily stared out of her porthole at the mountainous gray waves. The little
Hibernia
shuddered and shimmied under their impact, its timbers creaked fit to burst and her trunks slid from side to side across the cabin floor as though they possessed of a life of their own. The ship wallowed sullenly in a trough, and then a great blast of wind flung it toward the next wall of water. The
Hibernia
climbed and climbed until she seemed to be standing on her end and Lily clung desperately to the edge of her bunk, watching, terrified, as her trunks crashed against the cabin wall. The huge wave broke over them, forcing the
Hibernia
down and a sudden torrent of icy water roared down the companionways, flooding the ship.

Lily stared, fascinated, at the water flowing under her door. She began to pray. She didn’t know whether she was praying to live or die but if she were going to die, then she did not want to die alone in her cabin.

She waded down the flooded corridors to the companionway leading up to the deck, peering, terrified, at the huge waves; angry, powerful watery monsters ready to drag her to her doom. She pictured herself drifting downward through a greenish miasma, her long black hair floating behind her, her dead eyes staring forever into nothingness as the water filled her lungs. And from the emptiness in
her heart, she knew she did not care. She did not care about anything anymore.