The Darkling Bride

by Laura Andersen

  “I’m Jenny,” she said. “Jenny Gallagher. And you are the writer who has come to capture the Darkling Bride.”

  He swallowed once. Hard. “Yes. And you are the one who will show me how.”

  DIARY OF JENNY GALLAGHER

  12 September 1879

  A man has come to Deeprath, a lovely man with brown hair as fine as silk floss and longer eyelashes than I have. Father told me a writer was coming to ask about the Darkling Bride—I did not dream he would be young. And kind.

  I could tell he was kind from the first. I have not met many men these last few years, but the ones I have all look at me the same: as though I’m a cake they would like to devour. Though I know he finds me beautiful—I am not blind, nor stupid—Mr. Chase managed to look at me as though…as though I am a person. When I asked about his books, he gave me one to read. I am only twenty pages in, but already I can tell that he is a man who treats the world—and everyone in it—with care.

  He said I would help him capture the Darkling Bride. I think he is well on his way to capturing more than a story.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Welcome to Deeprath Castle, Miss Ryan.”

  Nessa Gallagher made no move to shake her hand. Even if the old woman had seen fit to extend her own hand, Carragh reflected, it would no doubt only have been in expectation of someone kissing her heavy silver ring. The ring was the only ornament Nessa wore. Dressed otherwise in neutral tweeds, she had a periwinkle silk scarf around her neck that looked wonderfully chic against her white hair.

  But Carragh repented her uncharitable thought when she saw the cane the woman leaned on with her left hand. No modern metal and plastic for Lady Nessa Gallagher: the gold top was heavily scrolled, and narrowed into a mother-of-pearl shaft that in turn led to a beautifully polished dark wood. In a concession to practicality it had been fitted with a rubber grip at the bottom, but it must be at least a hundred years old.

  More to the point, Nessa looked frailer on her feet than she had seated with aplomb in the hotel suite. She might have all the pride in the world, but old age could not be entirely controlled by even the strongest will. Carragh vowed to not be so quick to judge.

  She had a few moments to look around the Tudor hall while Nessa directed the driver with her suitcase. Like a royal great hall in miniature, it had dark wood floors and paneling to shoulder height, then white plaster rising to the lofty hammerbeam ceiling. The original beams achieved a feeling of airiness, thanks to the open spaces between them. Carved into the stone above the enormous Tudor hearth was the family crest and motto: three mountain peaks (for Wicklow), an Irish round tower (for Glendalough), and the central griffin, the mystical half eagle, half lion, standing rampant in deep crimson. The Latin motto? Non Nobis Solum. Not for Ourselves Alone.

  Carragh had to shake her head to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. Two hours ago she had boarded a train in busy Dublin, and even Rathdrum, where she disembarked, had been recognizably twenty-first century. But somewhere along the ten kilometer drive to Deeprath, she seemed to have passed into a different time and place and even climate. Dublin had been cool and damp, Rathdrum lit by occasional pale streaks of sun, but Deeprath sat beneath a steel-gray sky that felt…not malevolent, exactly. But definitely reserved. Taking its time while it weighed her in the balance.

  “I thought you might care for a tour before going to your room,” Nessa said courteously. “If you’re not too tired.”

  Right, because at twenty-eight she would tell the eighty-eight-year-old woman in front of her that she required rest. “Thank you, that’s very kind.”

  The woman who had answered the door stepped forward, but Nessa said, “I’ll do it myself, Mrs. Bell.”

  “Are you sure? You shouldna overexert yourself, Lady Nessa.”

  Carragh liked the look of Mrs. Bell—her mother’s age, perhaps, with the fading colors of the natural blonde and lines carved around mouth and eyes that hinted at a sense of humor. She spoke to Nessa Gallagher respectfully, but also with the familiarity of one who knew the house and family well.

  That instinct was confirmed by Nessa. “Miss Ryan, if you do need anything at all, Mrs. Bell’s study is next to the kitchen. She has been at Deeprath for forty-five years and knows it better than anyone but the family. She will gladly provide whatever you seek.”

  Carragh smiled at her. “I’ll try not to be too much trouble, Mrs. Bell.”

  “No trouble. It’s good to have people here once more. The castle has been too silent for too long.”

  And there, perhaps, was the reason for Nessa taking control of Carragh’s introduction to Deeprath Castle: because twenty-three years ago, Cillian and Lily Gallagher had died here by violence. In the aftermath, Nessa had taken her nephew’s two children and raised them in her own home in Kilkenny. Deeprath had stood empty ever since.

  The moment Carragh had secured this job, she threw herself into research beyond merely Evan Chase and his Victorian tragedy. The murder of the sixteenth Viscount Gallagher and his wealthy American wife, Lily, in 1992, had clearly been a story on par with the death of Princess Diana or the disappearance of Lord Lucan in the seventies. The inquest had returned an open verdict. Reading between the lines (and in the more salacious tabloids), Carragh found that many people had suspected Lily of having first killed her husband and then herself. Officially, the case remained unsolved.

  Unofficially, Carragh had quelled a moment of panic. This house and family had been scarred by an intimate trauma. Her own demons were put to rest years ago. She had no intention of stirring them up again—which is exactly what she’d said to her mother about that stupid, intrusive, unread letter.

  But then she had breathed deeply and reminded herself that she was going for the library and its past, not the contemporary family. Probably she wouldn’t even meet most of them.

  As Nessa led her out of the Tudor hall, she launched immediately into stories of the Gallaghers and their architectural and decorative legacies. She was a competent guide, if rather dry. Carragh would have preferred tales of the people and their lives, but got mostly a recitation of names and dates.

  The eleventh viscount’s French wife imported the damask wallpaper…Henry Gallagher painted his bedchamber black for mourning when the Act of Union passed in 1801…William Gallagher brought stonemasons from Italy to restore the battlements in 1745…

  From the Tudor hall with its enormous fireplace of dressed stone and lofty beamed ceiling, they passed into the Regency wing. Here the plasterwork and carved wood were still lovely, though signs of damp and age encroached. There was a breakfast room and parlor in the same wing that had been updated in the 1920s, and a heavily masculine study with its Victorian desk and bookshelves still in place.

  “The work of Michael, the thirteenth Viscount Gallagher,” Nessa said, and Carragh felt her interest prick. Michael Gallagher had been Evan Chase’s father-in-law. No doubt the writer and the viscount had sat together in this room many times. Could this be the very spot where Evan Chase had the nerve to ask for the viscount’s daughter as a bride?

  The second wing they visited was the oldest. Here, remnants of the medieval structures had gradually been incorporated into newer architecture, meaning the Elizabethan and Stuart eras. Here, too, stood the chapel that had given way to a different sort of worship two centuries ago: the library.

  To Carragh’s intense disappointment, the library itself was locked. She could not repress a small sound of distress, enough to make Nessa stop.

  “By orders of the viscount,” the old woman said crisply, gesturing at the anachronistic Yale cylinder lock. “Since 1992. There are two keys. My great-nephew possesses one, and Mr. Bell, the estate steward, the other. We will have to wait for Aidan to open the library. He is due tomorrow.”

  “It was the family chapel once, right?”

  “Correct. Built in 1512, as a replacement for the oratory.”

  When Carragh looked at her blankly, Nessa elaborated. “No doubt you noticed the old stable
s to the right of the castle. It’s where we keep the cars and gardening equipment these days. Just behind it is the original oratory from the late thirteenth century. It’s where the family worshipped in those early centuries. There are still three walls partially standing, and the remains of an altar, but not much more.”

  Carragh’s disappointment at the locked library vanished when she realized the walls beyond it gave way to a roughly dressed stone, which practically hummed with its centuries. Even without Nessa’s guidance, she would have known this for the original Norman keep. Once exterior, this section of wall had been used to buttress a later structure, and an arched opening carved through the ten feet of stone so one could enter directly into the keep’s ground floor.

  “Various restoration measures have been carried out on the Bride Tower over the generations,” Nessa explained, as Carragh prowled the empty, echoing space that would have stored grains and possibly housed livestock in the winter.

  “The Bride Tower? How long has it been called that?” Carragh asked.

  “Oh, for ages. At least three hundred years.”

  The steep, irregular stone stairs twisted out of sight, leading up to the floors where the earliest Gallaghers would have lived and worked, with the Great Hall at the top being the gathering place for all. Though Nessa did not say so, Carragh knew that those steps wound up to the chamber where Evan Chase’s mad wife, Jenny, had ended her days. She resolved to return as soon as she could to explore without Nessa’s suffocating presence.

  The wall to the right of the entrance possessed an alluringly narrow arched door that must lead directly into the library. Curious. Perhaps it had been a convenient entrance to the chapel in those days when prayers were observed with clockwork regularity. This door had the same maddening Yale lock on it.

  Backtracking through the Tudor hall, they arrived in the long western wing (“early Georgian,” Nessa said) and Carragh was led to a comfortably shabby bedroom. Mullioned windows, the griffins of the Gallagher coat of arms carved in dark wood above the fireplace, the bright primrose walls of the early eighteenth century faded to a pale lemon, the heavy four-poster bed with toile hangings…all very country-house proper.

  Save for the single piece of artwork in the room. Carragh couldn’t help but gasp. She might have expected a hunting scene or a romantic landscape or a formal family portrait. Instead, it was a painting of a woman, done in pre-Raphaelite fashion. With wavy black hair loose to her waist and wearing a vaguely medieval white dress, there was a fey quality to the woman’s shy smile that was very Irish, Carragh thought. A powerfully evocative painting, with an undercurrent of unease to it.

  At first Carragh could not understand why she felt uneasy. Then she noted a disturbing detail. The painted lady stood over a mirror-smooth pond, but the reflection showing in the water differed from the original. It was the same face, more or less, the same loose, dark hair and deep eyes and wide brow…but the mirrored figure wore black, not white, and her expression was one of deepest mourning.

  Or, perhaps, terror?

  “The painting…”

  Nessa, on the point of leaving, slanted a look to Carragh over her shoulder. “The woman in white is Jenny Gallagher.”

  Carragh looked from poor mad Jenny to the sinister black-clad reflection at her painted feet. “And in the pond?”

  Nessa raised a single eyebrow. “The Darkling Bride.”

  * * *

  —

  Aidan had not been any nearer to Deeprath Castle than Kilkenny since he was ten years old. He had two shots of whiskey in Dublin before boarding the train to Rathdrum, thinking it would calm the nerves that he refused to openly acknowledge. All it seemed to accomplish was to bring his nerves nearer the surface. He was abrupt with the driver who took him out to the castle—a stranger, fortunately—shutting down every attempt at conversation. It was as though all the skills of effortless deflection he had so long perfected were left behind in London.

  Very little had changed. Why did that surprise him? Deeprath had been nestled in its shallow mountain bowl since the year 1196, its timeline running parallel to without ever quite intersecting that of nearby history. The iron gate of the entrance, leading to the badly eroded gravel drive, hung permanently open, frozen in position for so long that it now looked a deliberate part of the landscape. Aidan dismissed the driver and swung his leather duffel bag onto his shoulder. He did not want an audience for his homecoming.

  He’d deliberately told Nessa he was arriving tomorrow so he wouldn’t have his great-aunt causing a fuss over Viscount Gallagher Returning to His Ancestral Home. (Before signing away said ancestral home to the National Trust—Nessa had a gift for ignoring facts she found unpleasant.) So Aidan had the mile-long walk through the forest to himself, and when the castle appeared before him, he saw it as it should be seen—without a hint of human habitation.

  And still with the power to reach into his chest and squeeze his heart into a fury of pride and pain. He had always been taught—had always believed—that Deeprath Castle did not belong to the Gallagher family. Not For Ourselves Alone, as their motto proclaimed. No, it was the Gallaghers who belonged to Deeprath. The castle knew its own and suffered its inhabitants so long as they were of the proper blood or family ties. The castle was not a property—the castle was a living heritage.

  One that he was about to give into the hands of strangers.

  Aidan took his time, scanning the windows and towers and echoes of battlements with deliberate care as though imprinting them on his memory. Last of all, he allowed himself to settle upon the unmistakable shape of the old chapel’s roofline with its single spire still reaching heavenward, though its interior had known nothing but books for generations. The library, locked at the orders of a frightened child twenty years ago. No one had entered that space since, except the steward, Bell, who brought in an archivist once a year to check for damage.

  He ignored the enormous doors into the Tudor hall and passed up the Palladian entrance to stop at last outside the library. From its past as a Catholic chapel under constant threat from the Protestant English, a door had been cunningly constructed in the narrow corner butted up against the thirteenth-century keep. Designed for unobtrusive escapes by outlawed priests, it provided as well the perfect entrance for someone who did not want to be met before he was prepared.

  Aidan used his key—the only one, not even Bell could access the library through the priest’s door—and winced at the screech of unoiled metal and then the louder scraping of wood on stone as he shoved it open with his shoulder. Dropping his bag at his feet, he passed behind what had once been the rood screen to emerge into the open space of the library proper.

  He knew this room in his bones: the shelves groaning with books fitted beneath and between the arched windows; the stained glass skipping shards of color across wood and stone; the distinctive scent of old paper, glue, and leather. Aidan breathed in deeply and felt a dangerous crack in his walled-off memories.

  At first he had wondered what his father was doing, sprawled across the flagstone floor. Then he’d seen the crater in the side of his head, the depression flecked with blood and bits of bone…

  The memories were hazy from that point, swirled with panic and fear and the bewilderment of being told his mother was also dead. Twenty years on, and he had no more answers now than he’d had then. Just questions. And grief. And anger.

  Aidan was wrenched from reverie by a sound to his right, where another locked door had been carved into the thick walls of the Norman keep. Visions of a woman in white, the ghost of his insane ancestress, rose unbidden to his mind. Jenny Gallagher, condemned by her own misery to haunt the place where she’d died, rumored to be seen when a Gallagher death was imminent…

  But he was no longer ten years old. Aidan found his second key and wasted no time using it and swinging the door wide.

  It wasn’t a ghost, not unless ghosts these days wore jeans and jumpers and a sloppy ponytail above a face frozen in shock. The wom
an recoiled back a step, and Aidan had the impression that she’d been half expecting a spirit visitation herself.

  “Who the hell are you?” Aidan didn’t recognize his own voice, strangled with strain and temper. “And why were you trying to break into my library?”

  “Ah. You must be Aidan. I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow…” She trailed off in a questioning manner.

  “So that makes it all right to sneak around my castle?” He was shocked at how unbalanced he felt—and how possessive. My library, my castle. Nessa would be delighted. Modulating his voice to a calmer register, he asked, “How do you come to be at Deeprath?”

  She was small and black-haired, with jewel-toned streaks of color painted beneath her ponytail. Her accent wasn’t quite Irish. Asian blood, he thought, as he watched the color stain her high cheekbones. Chinese? Korean? He was embarrassed not to know.

  “I was hired,” she replied loftily, “to help catalog the library. I’m Carragh Ryan.”

  “Ryan? Nessa hired you, I remember. Sorry.” He attempted a smile that wasn’t as warm as he meant it to be. Beneath his cultivated calm, his heart still beat with the tremors of fear. “I wasn’t expecting to trip over you on the threshold of a locked door.”

  “I only wanted to look again at the keep.” Unexpectedly, she broke into a cheeky grin. “And I wouldn’t have minded finding a secret passage to the library.”

  “Any secret passages were locked up long ago. I was just going back out the way I came. Do you want to come through?”

  She peered around him into the library, then said ruefully, “You shouldn’t reward me for nosiness. I’ll wait until tomorrow. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Gallagher. Or do you prefer…should I call you Lord Gallagher?”

  “Please don’t. It’s Aidan.”