Legacy of Secrets (40 page)

Lord Molyneux arrived and this time his tears flowed freely for anyone to see. He stayed devotedly at his wife’s side, sleeping on an iron cot. No one knew what he said to her in those long days and nights of waiting, but passing her door they could hear the low murmur of his voice. Ciel and William wondered bitterly if he was telling their mother it was all his fault she was dying. They knew if he had not so heartlessly sent Lily away, Lady Nora would have not become so sick. Now she had nothing to live for and so she was going to die.

A few days later, as the sun rose, Lord Molyneux looked at his wife and he thought a miracle had happened. Her twisted face had smoothed out and she looked like her old self. There was even a hint of a smile around her lips. “Nora!” he exclaimed joyfully, catching her hand in his. But he knew from its coldness that she was not there. She had crept away from life as quietly and discreetly as she had lived it.

Lady Nora’s silver-handled mahogany coffin was placed in an open cart on a carpet of moss and flowers fashioned by the tenants. The same black-plumed horses that had driven her daughter away into exile pulled her to her final resting place through the misty gray drizzle. Ciel and William walked with their father behind the coffin. They wore black mourning clothes and they carried bouquets of their mother’s favorite lilies plucked from the hothouses by the head gardener.

Pa walked slowly. He leaned heavily on his cane and the
villagers shook their heads over him as they fell into line behind them. The Molyneuxes’ many friends had arrived in droves to pay their last respects and the small family chapel was filled to overflowing, and their tenants stood outside listening to the service, crossing themselves and offering their own prayers.

When the coffin was carried into the family tomb where generations of Molyneuxes had been buried and the great creaking stone door was finally pushed back into place and locked, Ciel threw herself, wailing, to the ground. She kicked her feet and drummed her fists on the gravel until they bled, screaming for her mammie. Lord Molyneux looked helplessly down at her and William hurried to pick up his sister. He dusted her off and helped her back down the winding path through the dripping trees and damp bracken to their empty home.

L
ORD
M
OLYNEUX REMAINED
at Ardnavarna, but he was no longer the Pa that Lily would have remembered. His step was uncertain and he walked with the aid of a stick, carved specially for him out of hazelwood by one of his tenants. And he took to roaming the straggling village and the scattered farmsteads and fishermen’s cottages, poking his head inquiringly into his tenants’ doors and asking after their welfare. Suddenly paternal and philanthropic, he gave every man a pig and a cow as an Easter gift. He ordered new thatch on every roof for winter, and gave instructions for the cottages to be painted in bright, cheerful colors: coral and peacock, lemon and kelly green.

All except Padraig O’Keeffe’s cottage. It stood out like a gray sore on the newly colorful landscape and he came and looked at it, and then he ordered it pulled to the ground, stone by stone. He commanded the stones to be cast into the sea so that no man might ever use them again. He ordered the land where the O’Keeffe cottage had stood plowed under and planted with brambles and nettles and thorny things so no one would ever walk on it, or grow crops on it, or build a house on it again. He cut the
O’Keeffes savagely out of his world, blaming them for all his troubles, and the villagers knew it and they resented it.

Lord Molyneux looked bitterly into the face of his only daughter, really seeing her for the first time in many months. Her unkempt red hair straggled around her shoulders, her dress looked as though she had worn it for a week, there was dirt under her nails, and she was barelegged. He hung his head in shame that a child of his had been reduced by his neglect to such a state, and he ordered her away at once to a school he knew of in Paris where they were used to dealing with wild young children and where, he sincerely hoped, they would take the responsibility of Ciel off his hands and turn his unkempt young daughter into a lady.

Ciel cried all the way on the train from London. She cried all the way across on the ferry to Cherbourg. And she cried on the train to Paris. But as she was driven through the beautiful springtime city, she dried her eyes and sat up and took notice. The sky was blue and the chestnut trees were in blossom, the streets were bustling and there was a snatch of music in the air.

She inspected the school cautiously. It was a beautiful white building on a quiet street near the Jardin du Luxembourg. The corridors smelled of wax polish and the dormitory was lined with narrow white beds, each one containing a child’s doll. The teachers were smiling and gentle and she suddenly felt relieved. For the first time in her life she felt glad to be away from Ardnavarna.

She ate her supper of soup and bread and butter and drank hot chocolate from a wide flat cup, and she snuggled up in her own narrow white bed that night, glad of the company of the other girls. Before she went to sleep she took out Lily’s letter, crumpled from endless readings, and read it yet again. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would write to her sister and tell her all the terrible things that had happened since she left. And that Ardnavarna would never be the same again.

T
HE
J
OHN
P
ORTER
A
DAMS MANSION
was even grander than the one Lily had just left. Designed by an eminent architect, Charles Bulfinch, the beautiful bow-fronted town house occupied a commanding position on Mount Vernon Street. It had dozens of rooms filled with treasures of all sorts, because not only was Mr. Adams a member of one of Boston’s wealthiest old families, he was also professor of European literature at Harvard and a great collector. He traveled for much of the year and always returned home with paintings and books and rare manuscripts, as well as porcelain figurines and ancient statues and carvings. And with the house already full of inherited family treasures every room was bursting at the seams.

He was away on an extended visit to Europe when Lily started to work there, but the sloppy-looking young parlormaid told her that Mr. Adams was a bachelor and a “gentleman,” and that he was so wrapped up in his books and his work he rarely even noticed they were there. “It’s an easy job,” she had said, lazily running her finger through the dust on the hall table as she showed Lily around. “All you need do is give the house a quick clean before he gets back, and he’ll never know the difference.”

Lily’s room was the same as before, up in the attic, and her job was the same: scrubbing, sweeping, washing. Resentfully, she went from one task to another, though she noticed everyone else seemed to have plenty of spare time.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Hoolihan, put on her coat and hat promptly every morning at eleven. She would fling a few orders at Lily and at Emer and tell them she was going to Mass, then she would disappear for a few hours.

“It’s not Mass she’s going to,” Emer told Lily. “It’s the saloon.” And Lily was sure she was right because Mrs. Hoolihan would return later in the afternoon, red-faced and aggressive, clutching a brown paper sack.

“Gin,” Emer whispered, giggling, as the housekeeper waddled off to her room and slammed the door. In the evenings she would often be joined by the cook and they would hear the chink of glasses and muffled laughter and then Cook would begin to sing loudly.

Emer covered her ears. “She always sings when she’s drunk,” she told Lily. “And it’s always hymns.” And with no one to stop them, she and the other maids would sneak out to meet their friends, leaving Lily alone in the big house.

The first time it happened Lily sat in the kitchen listening to the ticking of the clock on the wall, watching the hands jump from second to slower second, minute to even slower minute. The silence and the loneliness stifled her. When she could bear no more she ran from the kitchen and up the stairs into the front hall. She looked around her. To her left was a vast chandeliered dining room and to her right Mr. Adams’s library. A fine sweeping staircase led to the enormous drawing room on the second floor and beyond that was the music room with a beautiful Steinway grand piano where, Emer had told her, their employer often played melancholy Chopin etudes late into the night.

But it was the library that Lily liked most. The tall windows, hung with gold damask curtains, overlooked the garden at the back and Mount Vernon at the front. Three walls were lined with shelves of leather-bound books and locked cabinets held precious medieval illuminated manuscripts. Framed drawings by Leonardo da Vinci were grouped together on a wall covered in bronze silk, and a magnificent Japanese screen stood next to a seventeenth-century
Aubusson tapestry. There were dozens of small glass cases filled with curios and treasures: a collection of tiny boxes in tortoiseshell and silver and porcelain and gold; there were ancient Roman coins; and prehistoric flint arrowheads and fossils and artifacts, and a thousand other fascinating things for Lily to wonder at.

When she stepped inside the room and closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of old leather with a hint of cigar smoke, she might have been home again in Pa’s own study at Ardnavarna. She wandered happily around inspecting her employer’s collections. She sat in his green leather chair behind his big desk, looking around the dusty room, imagining she owned the place. She pretended she was the real Lily Molyneux again and that these rich surroundings were rightfully hers, and then with a sigh she came back to earth again and the truth.

She ran from the library and up the wide sweeping stairs and flung open the great double doors leading into the magnificent drawing room. Dust lay everywhere, even on the keys of the open Steinway grand in the music room, and she cleaned it off impatiently with a corner of her apron. She ran her fingers softly over the keys but the instrument was badly out of tune, and she wondered angrily what Mr. Adams would say when he got back and found his fine house in such a state. He would probably sack all the maids, and then Mrs. Hoolihan, whose fault it was, would reign on at Mount Vernon like a drunken queen.

Lily knew how a good household was run; she had been surrounded by servants all her life; she had watched her mother giving the housekeeper orders, and listened to her arranging the week’s menus with the cook. She had accompanied her to the hothouses to direct the gardener about flowers for the house and fruits for the table, and she had seen how she kept an eagle eye on the giddy young maids. Everything at Ardnavarna had run like clockwork and it was ten times the size of Mr. Adams’s mansion.

Lily decided she would clean the library herself. She
took off her stiff black boots so she would not dirty the pale rugs. Their softness felt good beneath her bare feet and she drifted around the lovely room, pretending she owned it. She carefully dusted all the ornaments and polished the glass curio cases, smiling with pleasure as their contents seemed to spring back into sharper focus. She clambered on a chair and shook out the great curtains, and swung herself nimbly around on the mahogany library steps to dust the books.

The parlormaid laughed at her. “Why waste your time?” she demanded airily. “When just this morning Mrs. Hoolihan had a card from Mr. Adams saying he has extended his tour indefinitely, and not to expect him back for several months.” She grinned cheekily at Lily as she put on her coat and hat. “And when the boss is away the mice they do play,” she paraphrased as she swept out the door.

Mrs. Hoolihan and Cook discussed the hard-working kitchen maid over a bottle of gin that evening, and they agreed that, with himself away, it seemed a pity to be wasting good money on a pair of upstairs maids who did no work anyway, when they had Lily willing and able to do it all. “We’ll save two wages,” Mrs. Hoolihan said firmly, “and that’ll be extra money in
our
pockets, my dear.”

The upstairs maids were sent packing the very next day and Lily was promoted to parlormaid. “There’ll be two dollars a month more in it for you,” Mrs. Hoolihan told Lily grandly, “and you get to wear a good uniform. You can think yourself lucky to be an upstairs girl, because you’re young. And remember, I expect you to work hard, not like those other lazy little biddies.”

“Yes, Mrs. Hoolihan,” Lily said, eyes respectfully lowered, but inside she was smiling because now it meant she was free to wander anywhere in the house she wanted. She could borrow the books or play the piano. The house was hers.

But the housekeeper did not hire a replacement for Lily and there was just her and Emer to do everything. Still wearing her blue print frock and apron, Lily swept and
washed and dusted, upstairs as well as down, and Mrs. Hoolihan pocketed the two maids’ wages.

“She’s spending it on gin,” Emer said as they watched the empty bottles mounting in the cupboard in the hallway. “And Cook’s stealing too. She’s in cahoots with the grocer and the butcher. They give her receipts for stuff she’s never ordered, she keeps the money and gives them a cut.” She sighed, thinking of her chapped hands and aching feet. “If I didn’t need the job so bad I would try my luck elsewhere,” she said miserably.