Legacy of Secrets (54 page)

“And this is the clever part, old fella,” he said. “The North End is no longer just Irish, there’s every nationality now. Italians, Poles, Germans. You name it. All the immigrants are here. So I’m not doing it just for Irish children. It’s for children of all nationalities.”

Impressed, Finn looked at his brother. He admired not only Dan’s dedication and his good motives in forming the summer camp, but also his good thinking in not limiting it only to Irish children. By opening it to all Catholic families, Dan would endear himself to every struggling immigrant parent in Boston and they would be sure to give him their votes. So he was doing good and gaining himself a place in Congress at the same time.

Finn did not tell Dan about Lily and he did not go to spy on her again, because he did not trust himself not to act like a fool. Instead, he went back to New York and flung himself into his work, dedicating himself to making money. Because it was the only thing that would make him Lily’s equal.

B
ACK HOME AT
A
RDNAVARNA,
Ciel lived for Lily’s letters. Especially now that they were filled with fresh excitement, all about her busy new life, dashing between Boston and New York, going to theaters and to parties and buying new clothes. And they were also full of Ned Sheridan, the handsome young actor whom she had remet quite by chance in New York. In fact Ciel thought it most odd that Lily’s letters were more often about Ned and New York than they were about her husband and Boston.

Ciel was twenty years old. Her seventeenth birthday and debut year had passed without comment from her father. There had been no celebrations, no portrait, no parties. And no diamond necklace. She doubted he even remembered, he was so wrapped up in his own world. Ever since she had left the Paris school at sixteen, he had kept her firmly out of sight at Ardnavarna, while he spent most of his time in London, dozing the afternoons away on the red leather-covered benches of the House of Lords, or playing cards at his club.

Ciel minded not going to all the wonderful London parties and having the same kind of fun her friends were having, but it wasn’t quite as bad as it might have been because at least now William was home, running the estate instead of their father. And she had her dogs and the horses and there was always the hunting season, when everybody came home to their big houses for balls and supper
dances. She would make occasional forays by train into Dublin to buy new clothes, charging them to her father, and she was always smartly turned out, whether it was in the hunting field or at a dinner party, and she admitted to William with a grin, there were a few young men who seemed to enjoy her company.

William took his nose out of his book and really looked at his little sister for the first time in ages. They lived in the same house and ate all their meals together, but his head was too full of other important things, like the eclipse of the moon or the migrating habit of the Canada goose, to make polite conversation or listen to her girlish gossip, and he almost never really “saw” her. She was just there, the way the dalmatians were, underfoot and usually a nuisance.

“You’re almost as tall as I am, Ciel,” he said with surprise.

“Taller,” she said promptly.
“And
I’ve got a good figure.”

William was no expert on girls, but he thought his sister was fairly good-looking. “You’re no beauty,” he said honestly, “but you’re not bad.”

Her laugh rocketed from the rafters. “Well, that’s a left-handed compliment if I ever heard one. But you’re right, I’m not beautiful. Not the way Lily was. Still, men don’t seem to mind. I think they quite like me.”

She went to look at herself in the ornate gilt-framed mirror over the chimneypiece. Her red hair was long and curly, and usually tied back with a ribbon because that’s as much as she could be bothered to do with it. And there was just so much of it, and it was so shiny and vigorous, it seemed to stand out like a halo around her small, pointed little face. Her eyes were large and of a dazzling blue with, thank heavens she thought, dark lashes, because she would have hated that pate-eyed look ginger eyelashes gave you. Her neck was long, her ears flat, her nose straight, and her mouth too big. Her skin was good but she had freckles, and
she thought irritably that they made her look like a ginger-spotted dalmatian.

Still, there was no doubt she was a success with men; she had dozens of them as friends. They came to see her and they told her their secrets and who they were in love with, or sometimes they said they were in love with her.

She never would have thought it, but now she longed to get away from Ardnavarna. Since Lily had gone it had become a prison, full of bad memories. A place to escape from, though the only escape she could foresee was marriage. That is if her father would ever let her marry, because he seemed determined to keep her locked up—“out of harm’s way,” he said—so that she would not follow in her sister’s sinful footsteps. And if marriage was the only escape, then she had not yet met the right man, because she was in love with nobody. Only life. And that seemed to be passing her by.

On a gloomy November Friday, wet with rain and mist, her father returned unexpectedly from London and informed them that they were going out with the hunt the following morning. Ciel and William glanced apprehensively at each other. Their father was frail and bent, he had not hunted in years, but there was an air of purpose about him they hadn’t seen in a long time either.

“I have work to do, Father,” William said quickly, hoping to get out of it.

“I’ll take no excuses,” Lord Molyneux said. “I want both my children with me.”

He was at the stables early the next morning while Ciel and William were still eating their gloomy breakfast, the silence broken only by the crunching of toast. “It won’t be too bad,” Ciel comforted William as they strode to the stables afterward. “You can always say your horse went lame and escape early. I’ll cover for you.”

“William,” their father roared suddenly, back in his old commanding form. “Why the hell don’t you look after the horses properly? I leave you in charge and what do I find when I come back? Pegeen has a sore fetlock and Black
Lad has a cough. Dammit, boy, can’t you do anything right?”

He stormed around the stables inspecting the horses and decided William would have to ride a sturdy cob with a nervy disposition, while he would ride the massive chestnut hunter that Ciel usually rode. She knew from experience the chestnut was tough to handle; he had a fiery temperament and a tendency to take the lead.

“Take care, Pa,” Ciel warned as he mounted the edgy beast. “He likes to run away with you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said scornfully as they trotted from the yard and into the lane, heading for the meet at a neighboring estate. “No horse has ever run away with me yet and I’m certainly not going to allow this one to.”

The air was full of mist, like floating rain and soft as silk, cutting the visibility down to a hundred yards. William glanced uneasily at the soggy ground; he knew the going would be treacherous and he sighed. He hated horses, he hated hunting, and he hated killing any living creature, but he could see his father was enjoying himself and he squared his shoulders and tried to sit properly upright, the way Finn had taught him all those years ago.

Ciel glanced back at her brother and smiled; after all these years he still looked awkward on a horse, and as they trotted around the long curving road through the parkland to their neighbor’s mansion she noticed how eagerly her father rode, as though he was really looking forward to the hunt for the first time in years.

There were already a couple of dozen people milling around outside the house when they arrived. While drinking a warming stirrup cup they discussed the bad weather and the softness of the ground. The Hunt Master blew the horn, and with yelpings and shouts of excitement they scattered across the fields.

The horn sounded again; the dogs had a scent, and they were off at a gallop. Lord Molyneux was out in front, jumping the low stone walls like a twenty-year-old, with Ciel galloping eagerly behind him. William stopped to wipe
the mist from his spectacles and his horse whinnied nervously. “All right, all right,” he said impatiently, wondering why anyone would ever want to ride a horse. He jogged along behind, marveling at his father off in the distance, and at fearless Ciel on her own frisky hunter.

He saw someone attempt a ditch, he couldn’t be sure who it was at that distance, but he saw the horse balk and the man vault over its head. “Jayzus,” he exclaimed, praying it wasn’t his father. He dug in his heels and set off at a gallop across the muddy field just as the riderless horse turned and charged directly at him. William veered to the left under a tree, but still the horse came at him. Then his own horse reared, throwing him backward, cracking his head against a heavy branch as he fell to the ground.

Ciel never knew what made her turn at exactly that moment: maybe it was just the old instinct to look after her brother when he was on a horse. Whatever it was, she saw the accident happen and she screamed to her father that William had fallen. “He would,” was all he said.

She saw the villagers who were standing in the lane watching run toward him. As she rode quickly up they stood back, standing with heads bowed, unable to look at her.

“William,” she screamed, throwing herself into the mud at his side. He was lying on his back. His eyes were closed, his round silver-rimmed glasses were still on his nose, and there was a big ugly bruise on his right temple where the branch had caught him. The soft mud had cushioned his fall but it did not matter; he had been dead before he hit the ground.

The other riders saw something was wrong and hurried back to them. They took the front door from a nearby cottage off its hinges and William was placed on it. Lord Molyneux sat astride his horse, directing the proceedings. In a bleak, unemotional voice he told them to carry his son back home to Ardnavarna.

Tears flowed down Ciel’s face as she led the somber procession home, and every few minutes she looked at William,
covered in a horse blanket, being carried by the villagers behind her. “I should never have let him ride that horse. It’s all my fault,” she said. But then she looked at her father, stern-faced and straight-backed next to her, and she knew it was all his fault for ever making William become a horseman. And she shook her head and wept for her brother.

The funeral took place the following week, on a dark, bitter winter’s day with the rain turning to sleet. When William’s body was placed in the family tomb and the heavy stone door finally pushed into place and locked, Ciel remembered her mother’s funeral and William picking her up from the gravel where she had thrown herself. She remembered him drying her tears and brushing off her coat, and holding her hand all the way home. And she wept for her gentle, loving brother.

She wrote a long letter to Lily, telling her the awful news. “Pa bore up until after the funeral,” she wrote, “but now he is in a wretched state. He sits in the library staring at the wall, saying nothing and looking a hundred years old, all stooped and with trembling hands, though I never saw him shed a single tear. But then, that was never his way, was it?

“I long to come to see you, Lily, but there is only me to look after Pa,” she wrote. “You can have no idea how unutterably sad life is now at Ardnavarna. And poor darling William, who wanted nothing more than to live quietly, looking after his land, caring for his people, serving God and his country in his own unpretentious fashion; darling William is gone. Oh, why is it, Lily, that the good really do die young?”

F
INN WAS AT THE
S
TOCK
E
XCHANGE
before it opened and he was there when it closed, and he was in his office the rest of the time, apart from the minimum hours required for sleep so he could be up again when the world markets opened.

“He’s obsessed,” Cornelius James told his wife. “He thinks of nothing else. Maybe he’s trying to make up for the debacle when the bank went under, and if so he is succeeding, because he has more than earned back what the company lost. He has an instinct for a good deal and money just seems to float into his outstretched hands. And that’s all he seems to want. Money, money, money. He’s lost his capacity for enjoying life.”