As we moved away from the grave the unforgiving back of the old woman was turned on me, and she left the churchyard ahead of everyone else.
The scene of the day before was repeated at Meremount as people came to refresh themselves before the drive home. But now they were freed of the restraint imposed by the presence of the dead woman. The talk was louder, livelier, and there were more requests to O’Keefe for Scotch than for tea. Today, Otto Praeger was present, keeping in the background, yet knowing that for many, now that I had been thoroughly examined, he was the centre of interest. Gossip had reached those who had come to the funeral of Praeger’s activities beforehand; the presence of O’Keefe and the Castle Tyrell staff confirmed it. As people judged the quality of the Scotch, the lavishness of the buffet, they knew that Maude Sheridan’s estate was not paying for this part of the day’s business. As they asked each other why, the glances swung between Connor and Praeger and myself. It seemed that in their minds I had fallen heir to all that Lotti had not fulfilled.
Then it was over. The people were gone, the cars manoeuvred out of their parking places, the dining-room stripped of its linen and silver and big urns. Annie was back in the kitchen. Even the twilight of that incongruously joyous spring day was rosy, the evensong of the birds seemed to have lost none of its exultant quality. Now the Reverend Stanton left, and even Otto Praeger must go. He had to go, because etiquette demanded it, with the most important question still unanswered.
We knew soon enough what the answer was. We withdrew with James O’Neil to our seats before the newly lighted fire in Connor’s office. The document was spare and tight, and more realistic than the will of a supposedly demented old woman had any right to be. There was a bequest to Annie, and the residue of the estate was left to Connor ‘who has served me well’.
When the reading came to an end, the solicitor peered at me over his glasses, saying immediately, as if to forestall an objection, ‘That is Lady Maude’s will as she revised and amended it two years ago. As perhaps you know, I had an appointment to see her here on this very day, if she had lived. I don’t know if it was her intention to make any changes. But this ‒’ he tapped the stiff legal sheets, ‘is her last will and testament, legally executed. In my opinion, this is what the law will uphold.’
Then he too left, and we were alone in what now seemed a huge and empty house. As he closed the door on the radiance of that spring twilight, Connor said quietly, ‘The old bitch … Even when she formally gives me what I have already earned, she treats me as her servant.’
Twelve
I stayed in my room the next morning until I heard the front door slam and Connor’s footsteps on the gravel below. His car and mine were now the only ones parked on the drive where yesterday there had been so many. From the window I watched him as he crossed towards them. He was wearing the tweed jacket he usually wore to the glassworks, and there was a kind of lightness, an eagerness, in his step that betrayed him. The slam of the car door was not the kind of moody gesture of displeasure I had seen in him, but a youthful impatience to be on the way. Well, the way was his now; from this day on he worked for no one but himself.
Almost at once Annie’s knock sounded on the door; she came in balancing the tray. ‘Himself’s just gone,’ she announced, ‘and I thought you’d be likin’ a wee bite, Miss Maura ‒ but I see you’re up an’ all.’ She laid the tray on one of the many tables in the room and brought a chair up to it ‘There now ‒ I tried to do it to suit your fancy.’ The tray was set carefully with a starched cloth that didn’t yet wear Meremount’s look of defeat, the silver shone, the china breakfast set was matching and complete, the toast was not burned. ‘I hope it’s to your likin’.’
I cracked the top of the boiled egg as she watched me anxiously. ‘Perfect ‒ thank you.’
Her smile of pleasure faded though, when, her effort approved, she took time to look around the room, and her eyes fell on the open suitcase on the bed.
‘You’re never leaving, Miss Maura?’ It was a wail of protest.
‘I have to leave some time, Annie. It might just as well be now. What’s there to stay for?’
‘Well, sure there’s … Ah, don’t go, Miss Maura. What ever will we do without you?’
‘Just as you did before, Annie.’ I said it as gently as I could, but still she winced.
‘Before there was Lady Maude … now that she’s gone, I’ve no one to tend to ‒ nothin’ to do.’
‘Mr. Connor will need you.’
‘Ah, him? No, he’ll not need me. That one needs nobody. And are you thinkin’ for a minute he’ll keep on this great house just for a single man? He’ll sell it if he can, and all that’s in it, now that it’s his.’
‘There’s nothing to stop him doing that, Annie. Things change. You’re quite right.’ I broke a piece of toast and buttered it ‘What would he need with a big house like this?’
‘Unless … unless you were to stay, Miss Maura. Unless you and Mr. Connor …?’
I bit violently into the toast. ‘No, Annie. It is not going to be. Now you just put it out of your head.’
‘Well, sure it’d be no worse than many a marriage I know of, and better than some. He’s a worker, I’ll say that for him, and Miss Lottie fancied him enough to marry him … You could go a long way and do worse.’
‘Annie!’
She sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Maura. I’m speakin’ out of turn. Sure, your mother made that kind of match, and it didn’t work out for her. And Mr. Lawrence was a gentler kind of man than Mr. Connor is or ever will be.’
‘No …’ I agreed. I nibbled slowly now on a crust. ‘No, Connor is not a gentle kind of man, at all, is he, Annie?’ Then I looked right at her, and said, hard and fast. ‘Do you think he did it, Annie? Do you think he was the one who didn’t tell Mrs. Sheridan about the bridge being down?’
She started away from the question. ‘Honest to God I don’t know, Miss Maura. I don’t know atall.’
‘You must know, Annie. You were so close to both of them. You have to feel it about one more than the other.’
‘Ah, now you’re tryin’ to catch me, Miss Maura, and I’ll not be caught, for I don’t know, and that’s God’s truth. If it wasn’t Mr. Connor, then it had to be Lady Maude, and that I’ll never believe.’
I had reached the same impasse that Praeger had come to long ago. I could go no further. I poured tea, and said slowly, as I stirred, ‘Annie, why is it that you’ve done so much for Lady Maude? You must know that other servants these days have an easier time of it ‒ far less work and better conditions. Why did you stay all these years ‒ coping with all this by yourself?’
‘Lady Maude was good to me,’ she answered evasively.
‘Lady Maude didn’t know how to be “good” to anyone in that way, Annie. She wasn’t a soft woman, or even a reasonable one. She demanded services of you as if there were six others to help you. And finally ‒ finally, you did more for her than anyone had the right to expect. You took a fearful risk for her, Annie. You might have gone to gaol ‒ you know that don’t you?’
‘I know it right enough. But I owed it to her. It would have been a terrible thing to do to her to have dragged that whole business before the police and all the rest of it. A terrible thing. And what good would it have done, atall?’
‘No good, Annie,’ I said. ‘No good.’
‘And yet she never asked it of me, mind you. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that the police would come into it or any of that kind of thing. She used to think in an old-fashioned kind of way, you know, that you kept these things inside the family. She knew I would never speak out against her ‒ or Mr. Connor. Of course, Mr. Praeger thought I did it because I was fond of Mrs. Sheridan ‒ and sure I was that. But Lady Maude was the only one I would have done that for ‒ the only one.’
‘Yes, Annie, I know,’ I said, waiting. She had begun to talk, and she would finish.
‘It’s as well for you to be knowing a wee bit about what your grand
mother was like. Sure you thought she was a cranky auld sod, fond of her own way, and gettin’ it, too. Not carin’ much for people. Well, it’s best you know what she did for me ‒ an’ you the last Tyrell there is. For me and me mother. Me mother was in service at Castle Tyrell ‒ lady’s maid to your grandmother, she was. Well, it’s the auld story. She got in the family way, and wasn’t the young fella not goin’ to do anything about it. He was bound for America, and didn’t want a wife and child to hold him down. Lady Maude found out, and didn’t she go and get him, and tell the priest about it, and arrange the marriage and herself was witness to it. You’ll not be knowin’ what it was in those days for a Protestant ‒ an’ the daughter of an earl ‒ to stand up as witness for a poor young country girl in a Catholic church. But she did it, and she only a young girl herself, and the devil to pay when her father found out. But I had me father’s name, though he did take off right after. I could hold me head up, and me mother too, because of what she did. What was her own, she took care of. So when her turn came, I took care of her, though she’d never be admittin’ she had need of anyone’s help, much less the help of the likes of meself. She bore a lot, Lady Maude did, with her father sort-of daft-like, and her brother a wild one ‒ him that was killed the night Tyrell burned. Sure she hadn’t much left over to give to her poor husband, and maybe less to give to her only child. It was all used up, you might say. It’s as well to be rememberin’ all this when you think about Lady Maude, Miss Maura. I could never forget it ‒ me mother neither ‒ so that’s why I’ve stayed. Now it’s come to the end of the line in you, and I thought it was surely a miracle when you appeared the way you did. And so I was hopin’ …’
‘Don’t hope, Annie.’ I heard myself echoing something Otto Praeger had said to me. ‘Life doesn’t tidy up the ends the way we wish it would.’
‘I suppose not, Miss Maura. And what’s not worked out here will be settled in the hereafter. Well, she’s there now, God rest her soul. I’ll pray for her, and you too, Miss. God go with you.’
The words followed me, more than any wishes of good luck or good journey would have, as I drove away from Meremount, and Annie’s figure, planted squarely in the middle of the perfect symmetry of the house, diminished in the rear-view mirror, and finally the trees closed in, and was ended.
II
O’Keefe showed me into Praeger’s study immediately, without enquiring first if he should do that, as if he already knew what Praeger’s answer would be, and didn’t waste time asking the question. Praeger was working; the desk was covered with orderly piles of papers; Fräulein Schmidt sat on the straight-backed chair near him with a stenographer’s notebook balanced on her plump knee. As he rose to greet me, Praeger jerked a quick nod in her direction, and she left at once.
‘So ‒ you come! I was going to telephone Meremount when I thought you would be up. Tonight I fly from Shannon to New York I ‒ thought you might give me the pleasure of having a little lunch …’
‘I came to say good-bye, Mr. Praeger. I’m going back to London. I’m planning to get either the sea or air car-ferry ‒ whichever can take me.’
‘So …!’ He waved me into a chair opposite, and himself dropped back heavily into his own. For a moment he was like a man winded, and struggling for breath. ‘This is very quick,’ he said. ‘You could not stay a little longer? You must rush off? ‒ everyone is in such a hurry.’
‘I can’t stay at Meremount,’ I said. ‘You know that.’
He shrugged. ‘Meremount is not the only place. Castle Tyrell also has a few spare rooms.’ He leaned forward, suddenly spilling out his eagerness. ‘You could stay here while I make my journey to New York. Have your holiday ‒ lie in bed late, give O’Keefe someone to look after, and Mrs. Sullivan someone to cook for …’ He stopped, because I was shaking my head.
‘I can’t stay.’ The temptation was almost more than I could withstand ‒ just to relax into Praeger’s organised luxury, to let him take care of everything, to do nothing myself, to look at his pictures and walk in his gardens, read his books and eat his food, not to see Connor and to try not to think about Brendan. But it could not be; one other thing that Lady Maude had said haunted me: ‘She has sold herself … the rich have their ways …’ I could lose myself in all this luxury. ‘I have so much to see to in London …’
‘So …?’ He shrugged unbelievingly. ‘Is it that you don’t want to stay because you are hurt a little ‒ disappointed that the will was not different?’
My head snapped back. ‘No! ‒ I wanted nothing! How could I? A week ago I didn’t know any of this existed! What is there to want?’
‘Does it need a week to want something? You’ll forgive me if I say you are naive, Maura. It needs only the instant of first beholding.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want it. And how did you know about the will?’
‘You’ll forgive me again,’ he answered. ‘But I had to know. I was leaving for New York and I had to know so that I could start in motion the means to help if it was needed. I sent O’Keefe to see Annie last night. So you see, I know. That was why I was going to ask you to come before I left. I have telephoned my Dublin solicitors …’
‘Wait!’ I stared at him, staggered at what had already gone through his mind, what had already been done. ‘Why have you done all this?’
‘Because, naturally, you must contest the will. And the machinery should be set in motion at once. A delay could be quite fatal.’
I slumped down in my chair, wondering for a moment how I could put it across to Praeger what apparently was a new idea for him. ‘I don’t want it,’ was all I could say. ‘I don’t want it!’
‘What has wanting to do with it? I am certain Lady Maude meant to change that will ‒ once you came she knew where the inheritance belonged. It is your duty to see that her wishes are carried out.’
‘But we don’t know that those were her wishes. She made a legal will recognising Connor’s rights ‒’
‘He has no rights! You remember what she said at the end? ‒ “You have no rights but those I granted you. Now I withdraw them.” What could be plainer?’
‘But we were both rejected, Mr. Praeger. If you remember that so well, you must also remember what she said to me. “You gave me nothing. I owe you nothing”.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Well, then ‒ you are equal. In spirit, if not in fact, Lady Maude died intestate. If she had reached the top of those stairs she would most probably have lived to let a new will speak her decision. But being without it, the one with the closest blood relationship has the stronger claim.’
‘Connor would fight it ‒ unless we tell in court what really happened that morning, make Annie and Brendan tell it. And Connor knows we won’t do that. So, it is still her signed will against the fact that I am her grandchild.’
‘What would Connor fight us with? He has no money, and we can tie up the estate so that he can get no money from that source.’
‘And what would I fight with? I have no money, either!’ He dismissed the thought with a wave of his hand. ‘The finest solicitors in Ireland are on a retainer from me. Let them work at something.’
‘Supposing they succeeded? ‒ and a court ruled that I did have a claim? But that Connor’s work, and his expectations were also a claim? They would split Sheridan Glass down the middle ‒ and it’s almost dead now. It couldn’t survive.’
‘Connor would not survive!’ His voice was growing thunderous as his mind played with all the possibilities. ‘He would be bankrupt from the legal fight, and we could force him to sell out. He would not exist. He would be wiped out!’
He hated Connor ‒ was it because he believed that Connor had let Lotti die, or because first Connor had taken Lotti from him? His anger and hate had swept away all the reasonableness with which he had made himself speak of Connor before I had known the full story. Now he seemed not to care that I knew he would like to destroy the other man if he could. And he would use me to do it. I went back to my f
irst defence, less confidently now. ‘I wish you would try to understand. I don’t want any of the inheritance.’
He sat for a time, fingers pressed together, eyes half closed; he looked as if he were trying to gather patience. ‘You are saying this because you are young. The young think freedom is everything. But let me tell you that there is no such thing as freedom. The most you can have is the freedom to choose which will be your prison.’
‘But doesn’t one also need the freedom to find that out?’
‘So … you start to be clever with the old man, eh? But let me tell you also that if you should let this go now, you can never have it back again. It is no use ten years from now deciding that after all it would not have been such a bad thing to have owned Sheridan Glass, to have Meremount, to be a Sheridan and a Tyrell.’
Amazement made me edge forward in my seat. ‘You expect me to run Sheridan Glass? To live at Meremount? ‒ not to sell it?’
He shrugged. ‘You could not run Sheridan Glass alone ‒ at least, not in the beginning. But these things can be arranged. Good management can be bought for good money.’
‘And where would the money come from?’
‘There are ways of borrowing money. If you have the right guarantees, and I would see that you did.’
‘There weren’t any guarantees for Connor and Lotti. When Lotti died there was no more help for the glassworks then.’
The heavy jowls trembled. ‘When Lotti died I had no interest in helping Connor Sheridan. The arrangements Lotti made for Sheridan Glass were her own. They ended with her.’
Edge of Glass Page 26