Reluctantly Charmed (2 page)

“Can I speak to Seamus MacMurphy, please?”

“I’m afraid Mr. MacMurphy isn’t available. Can I take a message?”

“Well, em . . .” How do I say this?
I’ve been invited to my own will reading?

“I just got a letter and I’m invited to the reading of a will
tomorrow and I don’t know who the person is who died. Is that normal?”

“Your name, please?”

“Kate McDaid.”

There was some paper rustling on the other end of the line. “Yes, Miss McDaid. You are invited to the reading of the will of Miss Kate McDaid.” She paused. “Oh, same name.”

“Yeah, that’s why I was wondering if there’s an error or a typo?”

“No, no typo.” Her voice lowered. “We’ve been waiting for the reading of this will for quite some time. There’s a real buzz in the office about it.”

“About the will?”

“Yes. We’ve had it in the office for over one hundred and thirty years,” she whispered. “It’s one of those we never thought would come about.” I heard a door banging behind her. She cleared her throat. “See you at nine a.m. tomorrow. Thank you.” And she hung up.

I turned to Matthew, excitedly. “The will is over one hundred and thirty years old. This other Kate McDaid died back in 1880 or something. How did she know to invite me now? And why? Who is she?”

Matthew looked at me, chewing pensively. “I wonder if she had any money.”

“And I wonder if any of it is going to come my way.”

2

I
am an only child from a long line of only children. Except for me there have been only male children in my family, like there is a direct line to the Chinese government,
one boy child only for you.
It’s not normal to be an only child in Ireland. Four kids is average; five is not unusual. It’s a sliding scale, depending on your parents’ commitment to Catholicism and therefore aversion to contraception.

Catholic Ireland is alive and kicking. Chances are if your mother does the flowers for the local church every Sunday, there could be anywhere up to ten kids in your family. Growing up, friends’ parents viewed me with great sympathy. “Poor Kate, all on her own,” they’d say in hushed tones, as if I’d been left orphaned and limbless. Another lament was: “She’ll never learn to really fight”—a required character trait in Irish society.

Being an only child has never been an issue for me. I’ve always had my parents’ undivided attention, which is a good and a bad thing rolled into one. Being an only child also gave me an overactive imagination, when I was younger. I lived in a world of my own, filled with make-believe creatures and talking trees. But to be honest, while it never bothered me growing up, I would like a big family of my own someday, a gaggle of snotty-nosed, red-haired,
freckle-faced urchins who learn to fight and play with one another. I want a full clan, a bursting-at-the-seams warrior clan.

And
because
I’m an only child, my birthday is a big event for my parents. I should qualify that my mother is a woman, just in case that isn’t clear from the Chinese thing. They get really excited about it—overly excited. I’ve sat through the story of my delivery, including a full reenactment of labor pains, umpteen times. “And the doctor said, ‘It’s a redhead!’” Mam and Dad shout in unison.

This is played out every year in a little Italian restaurant in Sandycove run by an Irish couple with bad sun-bed tans. Dad always orders steak and chips, and none of that “fancy pasta stuff,” which he pronounces “pazza.” Mam drizzles olive oil over everything “in a Mediterranean fashion” and, after a glass of Chianti, pushes her cleavage closer to the waiter, who she says has Omar Sharif eyes.

This year was different, though. It wasn’t just about me and encouraging Dad to try tiramisu. This year, there was another Kate McDaid at the table. Dad had also received a registered letter.

“She could be one of the McDaids of Clare. That’s where we started, but a lot of them went on to America during the potato famine in the 1840s. She died over one hundred and thirty years ago, you said.”

I had repeated my conversation with the secretary over 130 times.

“I’m flummoxed,” Dad said, smoothing down a few wispy bits of hair on the top of his head.

“Your great-grandfather . . . Wasn’t there something funny about him?” Mam jabbed at the air aggressively.

“If you call dying at the age of twenty-two funny.” Dad jutted
his jaw out, and Mam rolled her eyes. Ever since he’d retired last year there’d been a lot of that—backchat, the teachers in school would have called it. Mam had taken to phoning me a couple of times a week to discuss, through a series of sighs, “your father.” Apparently he had insisted on wearing his old brown cords to Wanda Simpson’s dinner party; he was always tinkering with his car and refused to buy a new one, even though they were driving the oldest banger on the road; and he spent an inhuman amount of time on the toilet. I stayed quiet and refused to take sides. As in any great war, sometimes you just have to sit it out.

“All I know about are the men—there were only men. There have only ever been men in my family until you came along.”

Mam and Dad studied the letters intently, flipping them over, looking for a hidden clue.

“Well, there has to have been a woman somewhere.” Mam was tetchy. She’s organized, documented, highlighted, practiced. This would never happen on her side of the family. “You could take a look in the national archives.”

“Ah, here comes the Brit in her,” Dad tutted. Mam’s grandfather had been English, and this apparently accounted for a lot of her faults, including, at times, not getting the joke, even when the joke was bad and didn’t have a punch line. “If we’re going back over a hundred years, sure, we could be hitting the famine, when your people raped and pillaged this country. There’d be no documentation, no paperwork telling you who was born. Weren’t they dying by the millions, and those that weren’t dying were off on the famine ships to America, to try and survive? Nobody knew who was coming or going.”

Mam gave him a cold stare from under her eyelashes. “I will not be blamed for the famine.”

The famine is a seminal event in Irish history. When it occurred
in the 1840s, Ireland was still ruled by our neighbors, the English, and as a result of the potato crop failing all over the country and the refusal of the English to do anything to help us, one million people starved to death and another million—the lucky ones—emigrated to America.

I took a long drink of wine. “I guess we’ll find out about it all tomorrow. Can you come, Mam?”

She nodded and we made arrangements. Later, I had my second birthday cake of the day—black forest gateau—like it was the eighties all over again and I was reliving my childhood.

The office of MacMurphy Solicitors was a sighing, creaking old Georgian building. Georgian architecture is a remnant of English rule over Ireland. They left us with grand and imposing squares in Dublin surrounding well-manicured gardens and beautiful rosy-brick houses that quietly whisper of a more genteel time, when the English wore top hats and
clip-clopped
with gold-tipped canes down cobblestone streets, ignoring the Irish peasantry. Most of the Georgian architecture (but not all, like the offices of MacMurphy solicitors) has been restored to its glorious heyday.

I locked my bike to the rusty railings and quickly surveyed the street for likely thieves. My bike was my trusted steed: I cycled everywhere. I wasn’t a Lycra-clad cyclist, more like a spinning-around-like-a-whisk-in-a-bowl, leisurely, A-to-B pedaler. It was the easiest way to get around Dublin—everywhere is within a three-mile radius and flat. When I was feeling adventurous, I could even cycle in heels.

I tripped up the flaking steps. The hall door jammed as eight inches of ruffled carpet tried to straighten itself out on the other side. I squeezed in.

Mam and Dad were perched uneasily on two wobbly plastic chairs. Dad waved excitedly as if I couldn’t see them, the only people in the room. They both gave my hand a little squeeze hello. They were dressed for a funeral or a job interview—gray and somber. I wondered if I should have worn something other than skinny jeans and wedge heels, something that said more solicitor’s office than pub after work.

A wrinkled, gray-haired woman came around the door. She belonged in this building. “Mr. MacMurphy will see you now. First door on the left up the stairs,” she wheezed.

Seamus MacMurphy looked like he’d administered a number of short, sharp electrical shocks to himself just as we’d pushed the door open. His hair was spiked like the top of a palm tree, and he bolted up out of his chair as we entered. He took long enthusiastic strides across the room, resembling a young skinny-legged and long-necked flamingo.

He shook our hands, tucking his shirt into his belt with his left hand as he did so. “Please, please. Sit, sit,” he said, gesturing with a friendly smile to a number of armchairs, all collapsed and threadbare, before returning to his seat behind a mahogany desk stacked high with brown tea-stained files. The walls of his office seemed to be falling in on top of him; every picture was hung at an angle. “Did Patricia get you tea? And biscuits?”

We all nodded to say she had, even though she hadn’t.

“Great, good.” He rummaged headfirst in a pile of papers, then looked up, smiling. “I’m a bit unorganized, you know yourself.”

We made noises to concur. We knew ourselves.

“But I tell you, we’ve been awful excited about this.”

I suspected he’d be excited about a lot of things.

His face was flushed and smiley. “We’ve a couple of cases like this from the old office.” He spoke from the back of his throat
in a thick, west-of-Ireland accent. “It’s been in this office for one hundred and thirty years. We’d check in every year to see if it was viable or not, and it wasn’t, until your big day yesterday.” He looked at me, grinning with every tooth exposed.

My big day yesterday.

“Where was the old office?” Dad asked.

“Ennis, Clare.”

“I thought as much.” Dad sat back in the armchair, his chest puffed out with pride, having solved stage one of the mystery.

“We shut up there years ago, moved to Dublin, but we carried a lot of the business with us. We’ve been on the go since 1800. That’s why we have a lot of these old files.” MacMurphy lifted up handwritten pages with long elegant inky swirls as proof.

“Sure, I might as well just get on with it,” he then said matter-of-factly. “Is that all right with you?”

We nodded, but my head was stuck in the washing machine drum, going around and around.
My big day yesterday.

“So, the will of Kate McDaid.” He glanced at me over his glasses and chuckled. “Same name. It was written on October 30, 1878. The deceased requested certain conditions. This isn’t that unusual—it happens—and back then most people wouldn’t have made wills, and they wouldn’t have understood the process. They made up their own rules, especially if there was money involved.”

We started to shuffle in our seats at the sound of coins dropping into a piggy bank. “It’s the criteria in this will that are slightly unusual, but, sure, we’ll figure it out.” He faced his two palms toward us as if we were protesting and not dumb-struck. “I should mention that parts of the will were in Irish, but we’ve taken the liberty of translating them into modern English. It’s easier in this day and age.”

He began to read. “ ‘I, Kate McDaid, of the village of Knocknamee, County Clare, being of sound mind, bequeath my entire estate to the firstborn female in my bloodline, Kate McDaid, on her twenty-sixth birthday.’”

My neck did a sharp click backward. That had to be me. The firstborn female in my bloodline. Me.

Mam and Dad leaned in.

“Is that me?” I shouted, sounding like I was seeing my new face after plastic surgery.

“Yes, let me see now,” Seamus said. “Kate McDaid would have been your great-great-great-grandfather’s sister.”

That’s a lot of greats.

“Me. Me? But how did you . . . ? How did you know who I was? Where I was?”

He grinned. “Oh, it wasn’t easy. We hired a private investigator to track you down.”

A private investigator? Visions of a man in a trench coat ducking behind newspapers and tiptoeing around Dublin flashed before me. I hadn’t seen anyone. Had Kojak been following me around, sucking on a lollipop, and I missed him completely?

“But that’s not possible.”

“It is. We do it all the time.”

“And my name? You knew my name?”

“Well, yes. It’s in the will.” He laughed to himself. “Good guess, I suppose.”

This was all feeling very strange. I felt my breathing quicken. I was nervous.

Seamus MacMurphy studied the pages in front of him. “ ‘I, Kate McDaid, the Red Hag of Knocknamee, on this the 30th day of October, 1878, aged eighteen years and upward, hereby bequeath my entire estate to my beneficiary in title by name Kate
McDaid, who shall be a direct descendant of my family line, provided that she lives to her twenty-sixth birthday and that she fulfills the conditions in this will.’” He cleared his throat and looked up. I noticed his eyes narrow. “Now, here are the conditions. You don’t get the estate unless you publish some letters.”