Legacy of Secrets (18 page)

Lady Nora was waiting for her in the hallway. She knew her daughter only too well, and her pretty, fine-boned face was drawn into severe lines as she caught Lily emerging from the study smiling.

“I want to speak to you, Lily,” she said crisply.

“Yes, Mama.” Noting her mother’s coldness Lily used the formal “Mama” instead of her usual affectionate Irish “Mammie.” She knew something was up and she walked apprehensively behind her mother to her little private sitting room.

“Close the door, Lily,” Lady Nora said. She sat down wearily in the brocade-and-gilt chair by her desk. Frowning, she indicated that Lily should come to stand in front of her.

“I don’t know what the truth of this matter is,” she said severely, “but I can guess. I am quite sure it was you who was responsible for Ciel’s fall, just as you always are. Though there’s no use telling your father that, because he would never believe you could be so wicked.”

Lily stared at her, shocked. Her eyes widened with horror. “Oh, Mammie, I am not
wicked.
How can you say that?” She flung herself, in a torrent of tears, at her mother’s feet. “It’s not true, Mammie, it’s not true that I’m wicked.” She sobbed, clutching her mother’s knees and gazing piteously up at her. She couldn’t bear her mother to be angry with her, she adored her almost as much as Pa. She clutched her mother’s knees tighter. “Please don’t say that. It’s just that I didn’t think.”

“You never
think
until it is too late, Lily,” her mother said coldly. “It is a serious flaw in your character and one you must endeavor to change.”

“But how can I change?” Lily demanded tearfully. “I am what I am. A stupid, silly girl who never thinks.”

“No one is only
what they are”
Lady Nora said, relenting a little. “We are also what we make of ourselves. Otherwise we would all be savages, no better than unlearned children.”

“Yes, Mammie.”

Lily hung her head and Lady Nora sighed, staring down at her perplexing young daughter. “You are almost thirteen years old now, Lily,” she said at last. “I’m wondering whether it’s not time to send you away to school in England for a year. Maybe the teachers could put the fear of God into you, because I certainly cannot.”

“Jayzus, Mammie.” Lily leapt to her feet. “You can’t send me away to school.”

“Kindly do not use the language of the stable yard to me,” Lady Nora said icily. “And I shall have a word with your father this very day on the matter. In the meantime you will apologize to your sister and you will spend every minute of your time by her bedside in the sickroom, attempting to keep her from dying of boredom if not from the fall off the pony. You will eat all your meals in the nursery and you will not leave this house for an entire week. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Mammie. Of course.” Lily accepted her punishment graciously; after all, she deserved it. “But about school, Mammie …”

“You may go now, Lily,” her mother said, turning to the papers on her desk. “And remember, I don’t want to see your face down here for another week.”

Lily trailed despondently from the room. Not that she minded keeping Ciel company, and she certainly didn’t want to go to the stables and face Finn O’Keeffe’s white-hot anger, but this business about the English school terrified her. She resolved to speak to her father as soon as possible, even though it would mean breaking the promise she had just given to her mother not to show her face downstairs again for a whole week.

Lily waited until after dinner. For once there were no guests at the house, and she knew her mother would have gone to her boudoir, where she would be making yet another needlepoint seat-cushion for the set of forty Sheraton dining chairs. “A lifetime’s work,” she called it, choosing a different flower for each one, and a motto running like a ribbon along the edge.

Ciel’s freckles stood out like spots against her milky white face and there was a big bandage around her head. She sighed as she watched her sister open the door and peer out.

“Oh, Lily,” she breathed anxiously, “this time you’ll be whipped for certain if you’re caught.”

“I won’t be caught,” Lily promised, closing the door silently behind her.

Lamps blazed along the corridors, as they always did throughout the entire house with no thought of economy, because there was simply no need for any. Lord Molyneux liked his house lit like a Christmas tree. “It’s like a beacon, so anyone who wants me knows I am here,” he would say proudly. “Just the way they know I am in residence when they see my standard flying from the roof.”

Lily crept cautiously along the bright corridor, past the rows of doors and down the stairs to the first-floor landing. The servants had been warned that she was not allowed downstairs and she glanced apprehensively along the corridor to her mother’s boudoir. But she had chosen her time well; the servants were eating their supper and her mother’s door was firmly shut.

She ran noiselessly down the last flight of stairs, across the hall and along the corridor to the west wing and the library, where she knew her father went every night after dinner, to smoke his cigar and drink a glass of port and read the
Irish Times.

She pushed open the door a crack and peeked in at the shelves of leather-bound books and the set of globes of the ancient world, and the heavy, claw-footed tables and deep club chairs of green leather. A fire glowed in the grate and
a curl of blue smoke wreathed into the air over her father’s head. He was sitting in his favorite chair in front of the fire, wearing his dark velvet smoking jacket and reading the newspaper, just as she had known he would be. His back was toward her and he had not heard her enter.

She crept up behind him and put her hands over his eyes. “Guess who?” she whispered.

He turned around, astonished. “Darling girl, you are not supposed to be here. Your mother told you.”

“I know, Pa, I know. I was just so upset. Not about being punished, because that’s right. I know that. But about the English school. Oh, Pa, dearest Pa, please don’t send me away. I couldn’t bear it. What would I do at school all day? Alone? In England? I would be so miserable. I’d never get to see you, and I would miss you so very much.”

She knew instinctively which words to use to persuade him. It would have been no good saying, “I don’t want to go to school, I don’t want those strict teachers telling me what to do.” Instead she had told him exactly what he wanted to hear: that she couldn’t bear to leave Ardnavarna and she couldn’t bear to leave him. And she meant it.

Lord Molyneux looked affectionately at his daughter and she looked anxiously back at him. “Besides,” Lily added with an upward glance at him through her lashes, “I would be so bored there I’d probably be even naughtier.”

He laughed, easily won over. “I’ll have a word with your mother tomorrow,” he promised. “Now, off back to bed with you before she catches you.”

“Good night, dear Pa. And I’m truly sorry about Ciel.” She threw her arms around him and kissed him affectionately then tiptoed exaggeratedly across the room. She turned at the door, a finger to her lips and a mischievous gleam in her eyes, and he laughed.

“Little monkey,” he said indulgently, turning back to his paper as she closed the door softly behind her.

W
ILLIAM RODE AT A SEDATE TROT
alongside Finn. He stared into space, thinking instead about his new telescope and the pattern of the stars in the heavens. William was no athlete, and though his pale face was attractive, like all the Molyneuxes, he could never have been called handsome. He was tall and thin like Finn, but the resemblance ended there. Finn’s shoulders were wide, his belly was concave and his hips narrow; Finn had a vital, wiry strength and he carried his head proudly. “More proud than a peasant had the right,” some grumbled, envying his progress up the ladder at Ardnavarna. And Finn was more than handsome, with his thin face and prominent cheekbones, strong features and wide, sensual mouth. And those cloud-gray eyes and dark lashes that turned every girl’s head for miles around, even at barely thirteen years of age.

It was William who looked like the peasant, not Finn O’Keeffe. His fair hair was rumpled, his glasses had misted over in the rain, and his amiable fair-skinned face was smooth as a baby’s. As usual he had been late and he had thrown on his riding clothes in a tearing hurry. Some buttons were buttoned wrongly and others not buttoned at all, and though he had got his boots on the right feet—at the second try—he had forgotten his hat.

He slumped bonelessly in the saddle, his shoulders stooped and his head sticking forward. Glancing at him, Finn sighed deeply. There was no way he was ever going to
turn Lord William Molyneux into a horseman, no matter what he did. All he could hope for was to keep the boy in the saddle and make sure he didn’t break his neck.

The thought brought him full circle again to Lily, and he groaned out loud. He would kill her one day, he swore to God he would.

William did not even notice: he was there in the flesh, but in spirit he was back at school. Not that he was the most popular boy at Eton; he was too introverted and academic, but he loved English literature and poetry and was passionately interested in astronomy. And he loved being near the river, even in the bitter winter cold, because he was an avid bird-watcher.

He could lose himself—and all sense of time—lying on his stomach with his binoculars clamped to his eyes, watching for birds; and he was equally happy slumped in a chair with his nose in a book. He wrote treatises on the birds he saw, and on the stars and the planets, and he also wrote poems, though he had never shown them to anyone. Especially Lily, whom he knew would tease the life out of him.

William was a dreamer. He hated all the so-called “gentlemanly” sports—hunting, shooting, and fishing—and he was terrified of horses. His impatient, horse-mad father had forced him onto the backs of ponies since he was little more than an infant, and when his daughters proved fearless it had only made him more impatient with his son.

“The boy is always in his room,” he would complain to his wife. “Always with his nose in a book. He should be outdoors, like a proper gentleman, riding with the hunt as befits his position, not watching damn-blasted birds!”

William stared down at the back of the horse’s neck, seeing only the twin opaque circles that were his misted spectacles. The fact that he couldn’t see through them didn’t bother him; he wasn’t even thinking about where he was going or what he was doing. It was simply a chore he was forced to undertake.

“Y’ll be needin’ to sit better than that, sir,” Finn admonished him. “Straighten your back, Lord William, and take
control of the beast. Else yer fayther will be onto me again for not teachin’ ye right.”

“Sorry, Finn.” William straightened up obediently. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“Aye. That’s what they tell me is your problem. But I could make a good horseman of you, if y’d only concentrate. Now will you just look at yerself, sir, trailin’ along like a soppy girleen. I’m tellin’ you, sir, your fayther is determined to keep you in the saddle, so it’s better for yerself if you just makes up your mind to do it right. You’ve a fine brain in your head, sir, or so I’ve heard. It can’t be difficult for you to learn something if you really want to.”

“That’s just it, Finn,” William said sadly. “I don’t want to. And I don’t see why I should have to.”

“Look at it this way, sir. You have yerself a fine home here at Ardnavarna, and a fine life. One day it’s going to be yerself takes over this place, and everyone around, from the other lords and ladies to your own tenants, is going to expect you to act properly, the way your fayther does. It’s only right, sir, that you accept your duties the way we all have to, and make your fayther a happy man. At no great cost to yerself.”

“What do you mean?” William rubbed his glasses with his sleeve to get a better look at Finn.

“Well, sir, and don’t you have the finest teacher in the whole of Connemara in meself? Place yerself in my hands, sir, and with a bit of concentration we’ll have yer fayther pattin’ yer back an tellin’ ye what a fine lad y’are, before this very month is out.”

William stared interestedly at him. “One month, Finn? Is that really all it would take?”

“One month—of
concentration,
sir. And it is.”

William thought it over carefully; if he sacrificed exactly one month of his life he could make his father a happy man and buy his freedom to do whatever else he wanted. “Then it’s a bargain, Finn O’Keeffe,” he said, offering his hand. “My time is yours for the next four weeks. After that I never want to see another horse again.”

He told Ciel and Lily that night, warning them to keep it a secret from his father. “I want to surprise him at the end of four weeks,” he said cheerily.

Lily stared jealously at him. Finn still hadn’t spoken to her, though she saw him all the time in the stables. Now he was no longer her groom, he no longer had the right to wear the smart green uniform, and he was back in his old flannel shirt and cord pants. He wore a blue-and-white spotted handkerchief tied around his tanned throat and he looked handsomer than ever, and twice as angry as she had ever seen him before. There was a permanent scowl on his face whenever he looked at her and he went out of his way to avoid having anything to do with her.