Legacy of Secrets (39 page)

I remember those freezing drawing rooms when we went to visit. Our hostess would be sitting in her fur coat, serving whiskey with her gloves on while her husband jabbed futilely at the smoldering peat fire with a gigantic iron poker and the wind whistled down the enormous chimney with a draft that lifted the corners of the rugs and sent the heavy old brocade curtains aflutter.

“But why did they stay?” Shannon asked.

“It was simple. They had nowhere else to go. Their big houses were often mortgaged to the hilt, two or three times over, even though their bank managers did their best to keep them within the narrow confines of a budget. But of course, the very word ‘budget’ is alien to the Irish nature, and they had never been taught to live any other way, so they just carried on doing what they were doing. There were always a few good horses in the stables, and always bottles of gin and whiskey and sherry on the sideboard; there were fresh salmon from the river and trout from the loch and pheasant and snipe and rabbit from the woods and fields, so they never went hungry. The servants never asked for their wages and the local shopkeepers extended them credit the way they always had, only this time the credit lasted for years, even though the bills were presented every month. A pound or two here and there toward it kept the tradesmen happy and life went on almost as normal, with the parties and the hunt balls.”

Maybe reducing them to penury was God’s punishment on the landed gentry for the terrible things some of them did to their tenants. I sighed. Ireland has always been plagued by poverty and troubles. And by the English, I daresay.

But I’m digressing as usual, and all I started out to tell you was that though the Big House was gloomy when I was a girl, it was not for lack of money in those days. It was just that the Gothic stone hall was like a cathedral, so lofty a child’s shrill small voice echoed around it, and so cavernous there were a hundred places to hide when we played party games. Sometimes I wonder whether we ever found all the “hiders” in hide and seek, and all the “sardines” shut away in those vast cupboards. Who knows? Maybe one day we shall open a door and there will be a pair of children perfectly preserved in their party frocks, like babes in the wood.

But the old house was full of life and merriment even if it was damned cold, and however much we traveled it was always good to come home.

But as I told Shannon and Eddie, after Lily left the Big House nothing was ever the same again. First, though, you’ll be wanting to know what I was wearing that night for our after-dinner story. I think it’s important, how a woman looks. Call it vanity if you will, but as you know frocks are my passion and that night it was 1952 Chanel, a long navy silk jersey that always clung so much it was impossible to wear undergarments. But that’s another story. And in case you are wondering, yes I did wear them that night, those miraculous silk bloomers they sell in America that don’t show what they call your “panty line.” But anyhow, back in 1952 we didn’t have them.

So. This is what I told Shannon and Eddie that night.

W
HEN TEN-YEAR-OLD
C
IEL
M
OLYNEUX
watched Lily being driven from Ardnavarna in the carriage pulled by the black funeral horses she knew without a shadow of a doubt that her own life had just changed for the worse.

Her father locked himself away in his rooms and her mother took to her bed. William was away at Oxford University and nobody bothered to get Ciel a new governess, and left alone, she roamed the estate on her pony with Lily’s dogs running at her heels. Tears rolled endlessly down her face as she mourned for her sister, because it was as bad as if Lily were dead. Worse, because had she been dead Lily would have been buried lovingly at Ardnavarna.

When her father finally emerged from his solitude a few weeks later, she stared horrified at his pallid face, at his dead eyes, his graying hair and stooped shoulders. In the space of a few weeks her proud, robust father had become an old man. Ciel followed him miserably around the house the way Lily’s dogs followed her, but he rarely spoke. And when she tried to talk to him he turned his face away as though he could not even bear to look at her.

Lost, she ran to her mother for comfort and Lady Nora
attempted to rouse herself from her lethargy to attend to her younger daughter’s needs. Her
only
daughter, she reminded herself bitterly. Her husband was like a stranger now; he never smiled; he was taciturn, and flew off into a rage at the smallest thing: the coffee was not hot enough at breakfast or the wine had been decanted badly or the house was too hot or too cold and the servants slovenly. No matter how hard she tried to maintain the household as if everything were normal, she could do nothing right. Ciel watched Pa raging at her innocent mother and she did not know what to do.

When they got the terrible news of the sinking of the
Hibernia
and heard that Lily’s name was not on the list of survivors, Pa departed immediately for London. He stayed at his club instead of at their town house, playing cards and attending race-meetings with his friends. He did not wear mourning and he forbade a memorial service. Everyone thought him callous and hard-hearted, but behind the cold facade, Ciel felt sure he was hurting as badly as she and her mother.

Lady Nora took to her bed again, a broken woman, and Ciel ran for her pony and rode along the strand. She stared at the crashing green waves imagining her sister drowning beneath their icy weight and she screamed her sorrow out loud. It cannot be true, she cried, it just cannot. Any minute Lily will come riding down the path between the rocks and the dogs will run barking like mad creatures to greet her. And Finn O’Keeffe will be with her, the way he always is, racing beside her.

Her mother stayed in bed and her father stayed in London and nobody seemed to care about her anymore. Ciel wished her mother would appoint a new governess and then at least she would have someone to talk to, but Lady Nora did not emerge from her darkened room. The doctor came and went and the servants talked in hushed whispers, while Ciel wandered from room to room, or rode her pony for miles over the bogs, sometimes not returning until after dark. But there was no one to ask angrily where she had
been and why she had stayed out so long, driving them half out of their minds with worry. No one bothered that her hair was tangled and her dress grubby, and that now she ate her supper all alone in the vast icy dining room at the big table that seated thirty.

She would peek longingly in at Mammie on her way to bed and find her already sleeping from the potion the doctor had given her. And she would peek wistfully into the cozy kitchen where the maids were having their suppers, gossiping and laughing among themselves. And into the library where Pa always used to smoke his after-dinner cigar. It was cold and empty now, just the way her life was, with Lily dead.

Her mother became suddenly crippled with arthritis. She said with a sigh that the damp climate had finally penetrated her very bones and she took permanently to her bed. She no longer managed her household and dust gathered everywhere. And when her brother finally returned from Oxford for the holidays Ciel fell on him with tears of rapture and sorrow.

William held his sobbing sister close, wiping his misted spectacles, holding back his own tears. “We used to be so happy,” Ciel sobbed. “And now look at Pa. And Mammie. Look at us and tell me if we will ever be the same again?”

The months dragged tediously past. Her father never came home, William returned to Oxford, and Ciel’s only pleasure was riding by herself through the woods or up in the bleak mountains. In little more than a year the happy, mischievous little girl was reduced to a sad-faced lonely child.

The pile of letters lay on the silver salver on the round mahogany claw-foot table in the middle of the hall for months, gathering dust like everything else in the Big House, awaiting Lord Molyneux’s return. One morning Ciel was walking through the hall with the dogs at her heels, as usual, when a mouse suddenly ran across the floor. The dogs were after it in a minute, leaping onto the table and sending the salver and the letters flying across
the floor. Angrily Ciel grabbed them by their collars. The mouse disappeared under the oak wainscoting and she thought with a sigh there would be no use telling Mammie because her mother no longer seemed to care about anything except the next powerful dose of painkiller the doctor gave her.

She picked up the letters, glancing idly at each one, staring hard at the creamy envelope bearing her name. She would have known Lily’s big bold handwriting anywhere and her heart seemed to jump into her throat and then back somewhere deep in her stomach. She grabbed the letter in both hands, holding it close to her chest, hugging it as though it were her sister herself. Trembling with joy, she knew that the precious letter meant Lily was alive.

She took the stairs two at a time and sped along the corridor to her room. She locked the door and climbed into Lily’s bed with the dogs settled around her and tore open the envelope. Her hands shook as she smoothed back the folded pages and began to read.

She wrote about the shipwreck and she told her about the Sheridans and the baby. She said she had not even been able to look at it and had left it to be brought up safely by the Sheridans. She told her she was working in Boston for a Harvard professor …

Ciel read the letter a hundred times; she held it to her lips and kissed it; she offered it to Lily’s dogs so they could sniff her scent on it and they barked joyfully and wagged their tails.

She leapt from her bed and ran along the corridor to tell her mother the good news, but when she opened the door she hesitated. She remembered that this sad, silent, dark room had once been filled with flowers and light and the scent of powder and perfume, instead of the acrid odor of medicines and sickness. Drugged with the morphine that kept her terrible pain at bay, her mother would be too confused to understand that Lily was alive again. Sometimes these days she would even think Ciel was Lily, and that she was still a child, and she would scold her for tobogganing down the stairs on tea trays and tell her she must not be bowling in the long gallery. Her poor mother was permanently locked in a twilight past, so stuffing Lily’s precious letter into her pocket, Ciel stole over to her bed and dropped a sorrowful kiss on her sleeping face.

She curled up in a chair by her mother’s bed and the faithful dogs settled at her feet, snoring gently in the firelight. And she thought of the letter she would write to Lily that very afternoon.

But there was no time to write to Lily that afternoon and not for a long time after that, because as she sat there watching, her mother suddenly opened her eyes. She stared, puzzled, at Ciel. “Lily, dear,” she said weakly, “I have such a bad headache. Could you go to my little pantry where I keep the medicines and get me some of those pills? You know the ones I mean, dear, they’re white.” Pressing her hands to her temples, she groaned. “Hurry, dear child, the pain is very bad.”

Ciel peered anxiously at her. She knew that the doctor gave her mother morphine for her pain and he had warned that she must take no other pills. Suddenly Lady Nora sat up. Her back arched and she thrashed around on the bed, moaning. Then she fell back onto the pillows and lay still.

Terrified, Ciel screamed her name. Her mother’s eyes were wide open and her lovely face was twisted into a horrifying grimace. Ciel screamed again and with a last panicked glance she ran for help.

The housekeeper and the servants flocked back up the stairs behind her. They gathered around the big brass four-poster, staring at Lady Nora, drawing in horrified breaths and shaking their heads when they saw her twisted face.

“I’m afraid she has had a seizure,” the housekeeper told Ciel sympathetically. “I’ll send the lad right away for the doctor.”

The housekeeper stayed with Ciel while the other servants went back downstairs. They stood anxiously in the hall, talking softly, crossing themselves and muttering prayers for their mistress’s recovery, though seeing her, none held out much hope.

“ ’Twill be a happy release if the Lady goes,” they told each other, “for she’s niver been the same woman since wicked Lily was sent from home.”

The doctor came and he shook his head. “I’m afraid we
must expect the worst, dear girl,” he said to Ciel, patting her consolingly on the shoulder.

Messages were sent immediately to summon Lord Molyneux and William back from England. Ciel sat on the little pink velvet boudoir chair by her mother’s bed, awaiting their return, weeping over the cruel fate that had changed darling Mammie’s sweet face into a frightening mask. The subdued dalmatians lay at her feet, heads flattened between their paws and their ears nervously back, as though they sensed death approaching.