The Darkling Bride

by Laura Andersen

  They ate, as she had predicted, in the cavernous dining room at a table that would have seated twenty with ease. Two adults on each side, facing one another across the exact middle of the mahogany expanse, with china so fine it could almost be seen through and silver so heavy it could do serious damage if dropped. Or thrown. Kyla’s daughters—Ellie and Kate—were escorted in by their au pair and allowed to sit with her farther down. Their china and cutlery was not so grand.

  Carragh was next to Nessa—less, she thought, because the older woman preferred her company, and more because she wanted to keep a piercing attention on her younger relatives. There were barbs delivered over and between the food as it was served by Mrs. Bell, but they were all Gallagher aimed and directed, until she began to wonder if they even remembered she was sitting here.

  “Kyla, have you given further thought to accepting the position on the Children’s Cancer Research board? After the strings I pulled, it would be a pity to turn it down.”

  “I didn’t ask you to pull strings. I am capable of choosing my own activities.”

  “Your work with Kilkenny Marketing is quite good, but we must all be willing to offer our talents in service as well as in business.”

  “The Kilkenny Civic Trust takes a considerable amount of my time,” Kyla said, sounding defensive.

  “Yes,” Aidan interposed smoothly, “it must take loads of work to turn heritage properties into hotels.”

  “What would you know about it?” Kyla snapped. “Your only interest in business is how much your investments bring in. At least I know where our money comes from.”

  “It comes from the dead,” Aidan answered.

  It was like being caught in the crossfire of a particularly mean-spirited Victorian novel: the cool matriarchal figure, the ambivalent heir, the disappointed and sarcastic sister. Carragh would have written them all off as unlikable—were it not for the undercurrents of loss and fear that ran just beneath the surface. She knew something about being unlikable in order to keep people away.

  Nessa diplomatically turned her attention to Carragh. “How are you finding Deeprath, Miss Ryan?”

  “Everything at Deeprath is most interesting,” she answered diplomatically. In truth, she found the empty corridors and rooms a little grim. Beyond the showpiece areas of the castle—and despite evidence of physical care and cleaning—there was a melancholy air to the place. Deprived of the family it had sheltered for centuries, it was as though Deeprath had turned brooding, twisting ever more inward…

  Which was exactly like something out of a novel. “That’s what imagination does to you,” her mother had often warned. “Don’t let your imagination make you see what you want to see.”

  “No sign of our ghosts?” Lady Nessa asked, perfectly serious.

  “I don’t think so. What sort of sign should I be looking for?”

  “It depends on the ghost. Thomas Gallagher, who built the original keep, can be seen by moonlight walking the battlements. Marthe lingers around the music room. She was French, very delicate, and spent most of her time singing to herself. You might catch a few notes from her if you’re quiet. She’s sensitive to interruption.”

  “Don’t forget the Darkling Bride,” Kyla intervened. “She’s rarely seen, but it’s said she can frighten Gallagher men into flight.”

  That gave Carragh a perfect opening. “There was an author who came here in the 1880s to write about the Darkling Bride. Evan Chase. He married Jenny Gallagher. She had such a tragic life and death…are there any ghost stories about her?”

  Lady Nessa said sharply, “If she walks, she does so only in the tower. And we do not disturb her.”

  “Maybe that was mother’s mistake,” Aidan said. “Maybe she disturbed Jenny Gallagher and ended up at the bottom of the Bride Tower as punishment.”

  Carragh was as shocked by his bitterness as by the words themselves.

  Kyla blanched, and in a whisper meant to keep the end of the table from hearing, she said, “Aidan, please. Whatever grudge you bear my girls, there’s no need to be brutal in front of them.”

  “That wasn’t—” Aidan stopped himself, almost as pale as his sister. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

  That effectively ended conversation, while Mrs. Bell brought in the second course of poached salmon. Carragh was aching to leave. It’s not as though she came from a conflict-free family. Even without alcohol, the Ryans knew how to argue. Loudly. They could be even louder when agreeing with each other. But loud, she decided now, was far and away better than painstaking chilliness.

  Kyla continued to drink, Ellie and Kate began to squirm, and Nessa conveyed distaste for both those activities with no more than a tightened cheekbone and a hard flick of her consonants.

  And Aidan? After his enigmatic statement, he resumed his distant and distracted air. It seemed he could change personalities at the drop of a hat. When he’d yanked open the library door and confronted her that first day, he’d been hostile—and then switched to an obviously well-practiced charm. Carragh imagined there were many who wallowed in that charm.

  After yesterday’s unthinking rudeness about her family, Aidan had appeared genuinely apologetic, and when discussing the library with her, he was focused and straightforward. How was she supposed to know how to behave when he kept switching on her with dizzying speeds?

  Just be professional, she told herself sternly. All I have to do is not openly antagonize him and get thrown out of Deeprath before I’m finished in the library. I can do that.

  With the third course (spring lamb and carrots), Lady Nessa turned her attention back to her. Probably because she was the only one at the table who would feel compelled to be polite.

  “Tell us about your family, Miss Ryan. Do I recall correctly that you have siblings?”

  “Three brothers.”

  “Older or younger?”

  “They are fourteen, twelve, and six years older than I am.”

  “I assume your mother wanted a girl and couldn’t have one, until she took you in.”

  As though Carragh was a puppy dog that had strayed too far from home. “You would have to ask my mother that.”

  And wouldn’t that be a conversation, she thought in amusement. Lady Nessa Gallagher might have name and title and position on her side, but Judge Anne Ryan bowed and scraped to no one. If her mother were sitting at this table tonight, no one would have been left in doubt of her opinions on…well, everything.

  Nessa tried another tack. “You said last night that you have nieces and nephews.”

  If the old woman wanted a family tree, Carragh would oblige her in spades. “Sean and his wife have two boys and two girls and live in New York. He’s a professor of economics, like my father, and Abbie is a pediatrician. Patrick and his husband”—let the lady linger on that one—“live in Boston and have a three-year-old daughter. They’re both finance professionals. And Francis, who is nearest me in age, is still trying to find himself. So far that has involved a stint in the Peace Corps, teaching English in Vietnam, and starting—and dropping out of—graduate study three times.”

  Kyla laughed, and raised her third—or fourth?—glass of wine in toast to Carragh. “To your family. I hope you see more of your brothers than I see of mine.”

  Nessa stopped trying to interrogate her after that. They shared a few stilted comments about Dublin traffic and the weather before the old woman turned her attention back to her great-niece. For fifteen minutes Kyla and Nessa bickered over the children’s behavior and lack of table manners. (“Those are habits which can only have been learned at home, Kyla dear, for their breeding is impeccable,” to which Kyla replied, “They are children, not horses.”) Eventually, the problem sorted itself when Nessa insisted the au pair put the girls to bed. Kyla protested halfheartedly, then bid her daughters good-night with open affection.

  When Kate whispered in her mother’s ear, Kyla laughed without any of her previous cultivated bitterness. “Miss Ryan, the girls would like to know if t
hey could play with your nieces and nephews.”

  She smiled at the sisters. “I wish you could. They all live in the United States. Perhaps next time they visit Ireland?” As though she would have any connection with any Gallagher after she’d finished this job.

  Carragh attempted to excuse herself as the children left with the silent au pair, Louise, but Aidan said to her, “I rather think you’re the only reason we’re still speaking to one another. If you go, the rest of us will soon retreat to our separate corners.” He raised that irritating eyebrow. “On second thought, perhaps that’s preferable.”

  “Really, Aidan!” Nessa’s voice held both reproof and weary affection. Though maybe it was simple weariness. “What will Miss Ryan think of us?”

  “If Miss Ryan has a brain in her head—which she certainly seems to—she must already think us either mad or wicked.”

  “Not a chance,” Carragh retorted. “If you want family drama, you should be in the Ryan household when Boston College plays Notre Dame in football. The odds then aren’t on bloodshed, but on whether an ambulance will be needed to clean up afterward.”

  Aidan raised the glass of white wine he’d scarcely touched through dinner. “To families. Long may they haunt us.”

  From the doorway behind Carragh, a voice drawled, “What a bloody depressing welcome! No wonder you’re still single, Aidan, if that’s your attitude to domestic bliss.”

  The speaker moved into the dining room and into Carragh’s line of sight. A handsome man of early middle age with the kind of silver-streaked hair called distinguished and a London suit to go with his London accent. Arrogant, she’d called him, the night they’d met, and nothing about him had changed.

  “I let myself in,” he added unnecessarily. “Hello, darling.”

  For a long, appalling moment, Carragh thought he was speaking to her. She had wondered what it meant when someone said they were frozen in shock. Now she knew.

  Sensation returned with a rush as he sauntered to the other side of the table and leaned down to kiss Kyla’s cheek. Carragh knew that she herself had paled and then flushed, and took a hasty drink to hide her face.

  “Nessa,” the man purred. “Looking perfectly elegant as always.”

  “Your lateness is not excused by flattery. And especially not when we have a guest.”

  He looked at Carragh then, and she thought she saw the glimmer of her own shock reflected in his eyes. But he recovered smoothly as Nessa introduced her. “This is Carragh Ryan. She is helping Aidan catalog the library.”

  “Are you? You don’t look the type.”

  “Forgive my husband,” Kyla interposed, with syrupy sweetness. “There are only two types of women in Philip’s world: those he’d like to sleep with, and those he wouldn’t. The former group is rather larger than the latter.”

  “Don’t exaggerate, darling. Nice to meet you, Miss Ryan. I’m Kyla’s long-suffering husband, Philip Grant.”

  It was the second time Philip had introduced himself to her. And God help her if any of the Gallaghers ever found that out.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  October 1879

  Evan took to the Deeprath library like an ocean fish that had been deprived of seawater for far too long. From the very first day he’d been struck by the aura of time past mixed with time present in the former chapel, thanks in part to Jenny’s dramatic appearance from the stacks. Whatever the reason, the library retained its mystical air.

  As Jenny had suggested, he turned an investigative eye to the Gallagher family history. It took him many hours of tracing names and dates, deciphering spidery handwriting until his eyes crossed and his head ached, before he finally located a Gallagher son by the name of Niall. It was an eighteenth-century copy of a history compiled by a family cleric in the late 1400s, stretching back to the first Gallagher—Tomas Ó Gallchobair, who anglicized his name and married the daughter of an Anglo-Norman settler in 1214.

  Evan knew better than to take everything the cleric wrote as gospel truth, especially as he repeated several of Gerald of Wales’s more startling assertions about Ireland as though they were proven fact—such as kingfishers never decaying after death, or migratory birds spending the winter in some mystical state between life and death. But the man seemed reasonably well-informed of dates and, after all, one did not expect to find hard facts when tracing the origin of legends. The most one could hope for was a distinct beginning point—a story’s inspiration, as it were. And in this fading and crumbling history, Evan found the basis of the Wicklow version of the Darkling Bride.

  Niall Gallagher was born in 1273, a great-grandson of the founding lord Thomas. As the third son to live to maturity, he was designated from birth for the Church, and where better to learn and be called to service than at Glendalough? The anonymous cleric recorded that guileless as Nathan and ever obedient to his fathers, earthly and spiritual, Niall would have made a great saint.

  And then…disaster. In the shape—as so often in men’s recounting of history—of a woman.

  In 1291, Acre, the last remaining Christian stronghold in the Holy Land, fell to Muslim armies. Among those few who escaped was a distant relation of the Gallaghers, who came to Deeprath to recuperate from the trauma of it all. With him came his wife and her servant, Maryam—though many tongues, wrote the cleric two hundred years later, whispered that she was no servant but the Crusader’s concubine.

  Whatever the truth of that relationship, all fell to pieces when Niall encountered Maryam upon a visit home. And with her hair dark as sin and eyes of unearthly blue, the sorceress wove her spell and enslaved the boy so that he forgot all he owed to his family and God. Niall left the monastic life to marry her, a crime for which his family would never forgive the woman. In one of those twisted medieval intrigues, Niall and his wife were invited to visit Deeprath Castle, where Niall was killed by his own brother and Maryam locked securely in the keep. The keep now fittingly known as the Bride Tower. There the story ended, the chronicler concluding with a smugly pious lesson: Surely man must be always vigilant against the snares Satan lays in his path, for never is evil more dangerous than when cloaked in beauty.

  Interesting. No mention of the Sanctuary Cross or Maryam having spent time at Glendalough, though he supposed her speaking in an unknown tongue referenced Arabic. Evan was not surprised that the more paranormal aspects of the story Jenny had told him did not make an appearance in this earliest version, nor even the Darkling Bride name. (Though he did rather like “hair dark as sin” and knew that phrase would make its way into his book.) He was well-acquainted with how legends twisted and turned through the generations and different storytellers, so that the same essential story could have myriad differences within just a fifty-mile radius. As much as he enjoyed spending time with Jenny, he needed to interview more widely in the area.

  But that was for later. He had his beginning, handed to him as though tailor-made for a gothic novel: crusaders, monks, a castle, a beautiful woman, and family treachery. What more could one ask?

  DIARY OF JENNY GALLAGHER

  16 October 1879

  Just because Dora helped deliver me at birth, she takes it upon herself to give me advice while helping me dress or brushing my hair. Yesterday she called Mr. Chase “A fine young man. For a writer.”

  I know exactly what that means. It means that however handsome, however presentable, however well-spoken and successful he is, Evan Chase is not the sort of man society would judge suitable for the only daughter of a viscount. Barring another attempt by my father to marry and have a son, I will inherit Glendalough and his fortune. No novelist, however popular, need apply.

  I have my own opinions about that. On paper, I am considered an excellent match. But marriages do not exist on paper. Where is there a man who will want, not only my money, but my person?

  Evan is the only man I’ve ever met who I think I could trust with all of me.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  For the first time since her arrival, Carragh fierce
ly missed having a connection to the wider world. Even a chance to ignore her mother’s emails would have been a pleasure after that dinner. She had escaped to her room but could think of nothing that she wanted to do. Watch downloaded episodes of Project Runway? What were the chances Philip would stay far away from her while at Deeprath? Play solitaire for the thousandth time on her phone? What other secrets were this house and family going to throw at her? It was all just distraction, and tonight none of that distraction was sufficient. If she were smart, she’d return to the library and work.

  But when she considered the library, another thought snagged at her mind and quickened her pulse: the Bride Tower. She hadn’t been inside it yet, hadn’t even asked Aidan about it, but she knew where the key was kept—right there in the library with the same set Aidan had brought from London with him. As he no longer locked the library itself, he had put them on the top shelf of one of the family history cabinets.

  Right—she would investigate the tower. The unelectrified tower. At night. There was no need to add more gothic trappings, like candles or flowing nightgowns. She wore her flannel pajama pants, tank top, and oversized Boston College sweatshirt, and carried the enormous flashlight her father had given her when she moved to Ireland. It was as much a weapon as a light, for it must weigh five pounds with its solid steel casing. With it, Carragh felt suitably prepared for whatever lay ahead.

  She couldn’t decide if Nessa Gallagher had put her alone in a wing of the castle to emphasize her position as a hired employee, but at least it made covert exploring convenient. Carragh had never been anyplace so dark. And quiet…She would never know if all the inhabitants of the castle just suddenly decided to leave. Sound seemed to have no ability to penetrate here. She couldn’t even hear herself breathe, which set off a momentary panic that made her try to inhale and speak at the same time, and that led to a ridiculous fit of choked coughing.