The Darkling Bride

by Laura Andersen

  Lily never had a chance to say goodbye to that ten-year-old, or mend things with her difficult teen daughter. Blinking back tears, Carragh told herself firmly that this would never do. She needed an appropriate detachment if she wanted to find answers.

  So she began again with a professional research eye, taking notes and marking questions to follow up on as she went. From the first letter, she learned that Lily had been told of Eileen Ryan’s collection of Chase esoterica by the local priest, Father Hennessy. By way of introduction, Lily wrote that she had recently begun researching the Gallagher family history in order to compile the most interesting people and stories into a book to give her husband on his upcoming fiftieth birthday.

  There are, of course, any number of “official” histories, Lily wrote, but they focus rather too much on the ideal for my taste. I have always preferred the skeletons in the closet—or in the case of the Gallaghers, the skeletons in the tower. And the least talked about, most glossed-over skeleton is that of Jenny Gallagher’s suicide in 1882. Considering that she went from pampered and secluded only child to wife to mother to death in the three years that followed Evan Chase’s arrival at Deeprath Castle, he certainly presents as the obvious point of entry into those events.

  The local priest, who seemed to have been some sort of antiquarian or collector of Victoriana—it wasn’t quite clear from Lily’s letters—had also directed Lily to a London bookseller who actually had in his possession a handful of correspondence between Evan Chase and his publisher, Charles Maxwell, during Evan’s first two years at Deeprath. That made Carragh practically salivate—even more so when she found that the Londoner had allowed Lily to make copies of the letters for her personal records. Sadly, those copies were not included in the letters she’d written to Carragh’s grandmother, but Carragh’s pulse quickened. They might even now be in the castle, if not the actual library itself.

  Was the local priest who helped Lily still serving in Laragh? She’d have to find out. But while reading the letters, she’d had several sharp texts from Duncan about her plea for blown-up photos of the mysterious tower writing. After questioning her sanity, accusing her of having lost all sense of how time worked while in the Wicklow Mountains, and proclaiming dramatically that he was not a miracle worker, Duncan told her to meet him at a café across from St. Stephen’s Green at three o’clock and he’d give her what he could.

  Perfect. That would allow her to take the four-fifteen train to Rathdrum and be back at Deeprath by dinner as she’d promised. And she had four hours until meeting Duncan, in which to harass the plumber in person about the lack of progress on her bathrooms and to locate someone to check the heating.

  Dealing with contractors was always guaranteed to put her in an exasperated mood, and when Duncan raised his eyebrows at the state of her clothes—she’d had to get on the floor to point some things out and there hadn’t been time to change—he said, “I thought you were at Deeprath Castle to catalog the library, not serve as a kitchen maid.”

  Carragh glared at him as she dropped into a seat, and Duncan rolled his eyes. “In one of those moods, are you? It almost makes me regret doing you a favor.”

  “Give over,” she commanded, one hand extended across the table. “And don’t talk to me about favors. You’d never have graduated if not for me.”

  “True enough. And frankly, what I’ve been able to look at so far is fascinating. My only request is that you fill me in someday on what all this means.”

  “I have to figure it out myself, first.”

  Carragh took the file folder Duncan slid across the tabletop and opened it. There were ten of her photographs, enhanced by whatever digital wizardry he commanded and blown up to eight-by-ten size.

  “I tried to keep to the order you’d taken the pictures in, so if whatever this is has any sort of narrative, you can start to piece it together.”

  Just like last night with her grandmother’s box, Carragh’s nerve endings felt exposed, as though equally craving the photos and afraid of them. Abruptly, she shut the file folder and put it into her messenger bag. “Thank you, Duncan. I will pay the costs, if you can finish the rest quickly.”

  “Sure.” His curiosity was plain. “Want to at least tell me where you took these photos? I’m assuming at Deeprath Castle.”

  She hesitated. “Yes. But that’s all I’m going to say just now. The family received some…difficult news yesterday. And until I can talk to one of them about whatever this is, I don’t think it’s fair to speculate with anyone else.”

  “Right. Well, just know I’ll be anxiously awaiting news about how a story or poem or whatever about fairies and changelings and evil curses came to be scribbled on a wall in an old castle.”

  “When I know, I’ll be sure to share.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  May 1880

  Evan and Jenny were married on a spring day of surpassing beauty at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. He had watched his new father-in-law struggle with indecision, caught between two impulses: to keep Jenny as near to Deeprath as possible with a ceremony in the parish church at Laragh, or to fulfill societal obligations by having his only daughter properly married in a Dublin society wedding. It was Jenny herself who decided him, for she insisted on being married at St. Patrick’s as her parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had been.

  Being a popular and fairly well-paid author, Evan knew how to move in society, but he was not accustomed to the level of scrutiny he received now that he was impudently “marrying up.” Let them talk. His mother had died three years earlier and he had no other close relatives to invite to the wedding, so who else could they insult?

  In the end, his only personal guest was his publisher from London—and Charles probably came as much to check on the progress of the book as for the wedding. When Evan introduced Charles to Jenny, he could see the instant spinning of his publisher’s mind at the marketing possibilities. A novel called The Darkling Bride, with the author newly married to a woman who could be the title character? Doubtless Charles was already figuring out how to introduce Jenny to the reading public.

  Their wedding night was spent at the Shelbourne Hotel. Evan’s intimate experience with women had been limited and mostly awkward—if not downright professional—and he had worried a great deal about frightening or hurting Jenny. But she was as trusting as she was lovely, and responded to him with an ardor that assured him their marriage was well begun.

  The viscount expected the two of them to return immediately to Deeprath while he traveled on to London for business. But once her father had departed, Jenny begged Evan to stay on in Dublin for a few days. “I have seen so little of it in recent years. I have seen so little of anything,” she said plaintively.

  Of course Evan agreed. They remained at the Shelbourne and spent the days walking on St. Stephen’s Green across the street and visiting the National Museum and its hoards of ancient treasure. They also browsed through the National Gallery, and it was on that evening that Jenny presented to him her wedding gift.

  He’d known she was being painted, but he hadn’t expected this half portrait, half fantasy. Jenny had been depicted as Evan first remembered her, that amaranthine timelessness caught on canvas as she smiled at her reflection in the water. Except…it was not a reflection. Or not a completely accurate one. Though portrait-Jenny smiled, her watery echo was grave. And even the soft blurring of the reflected image could not hide the haunted expression in the eyes.

  “It’s the Darkling Bride,” Jenny told him proudly. “I have always felt connected to her. And why not? God must have known it was the Bride who would bring you to me.”

  When she twined her arms around his neck and kissed him, Evan allowed himself to forget the concern caused by the doubled portrait with its disquieting expressions.

  But from the next day, Jenny’s moods began to shift. So quick and subtle at first, like American fireflies at dusk, that it was easily dismissed. A snap of temper that vanished the next mom
ent into smiles, an absence of attention that she apologized for so charmingly it was forgotten. Even so, after two days of this Evan suggested they return to Deeprath. Her father was expected back from London in a week, after all, and Lord Gallagher would not like to find them still in Dublin.

  But the logic served only to strengthen Jenny’s stubbornness. Frowning, she insisted that the two of them deserved “a proper wedding trip.” Beneath her stubbornness, Evan could glimpse in snatches a franticness that frightened him enough to speak soothingly and agree to whatever she wanted—if only to erase that look from her eyes. The same trapped look that the Bride gave him from the portrait.

  Ten days after the wedding his world came completely unmoored. Jenny’d had difficulty sleeping for several nights, awake and sometimes pacing until dawn, so when she remained deeply asleep at noon, Evan let her be and was grateful for it. Perhaps she was simply exhausted. She woke just before sunset and insisted on going out. She chattered and laughed and teased as the hotel maid dressed her hair, but it was a false brightness like nothing he’d seen in her before. As though she were only pretending to be Jenny.

  Against his better judgment, she had persuaded him to take her to the Gaiety Theatre. But she lasted only a quarter hour inside before coming to pieces. She could not stop talking, her speech increasingly fast and disjointed, and she flinched away from him when he tried to soothe her. At last, he told her firmly they were returning to the hotel and practically marched her outside. When a carriage pulled up, she would not get in and began to shriek that he was hurting her, forcing her, calling upon passersby for aid…but Evan looked the part of the Victorian gentleman in charge of his hysterical wife and managed to keep calm and get her inside the carriage and back to the Shelbourne without being questioned.

  He summoned a physician—who gave her laudanum to keep her calm—and then wired Jenny’s father in London. Lord Gallagher arrived sooner than Evan dared hope, and whatever anger he felt at the flouting of his expectations he kept well in check while speaking in a kind but no-nonsense tone to his drowsy daughter. The three of them left Dublin in the still, dark hours before dawn. When they reached Deeprath, Lord Gallagher gathered Jenny into his arms and carried her inside.

  Evan followed, expecting the viscount to take the main stairs to the rooms that had been prepared for the new couple, but his father-in-law went directly to the oldest part of the castle. The door at the base of the Bride Tower was unlocked and open, with gaslights illuminating the ancient steps. With increasing foreboding, Evan tagged his father-in-law’s steps all the way to the top.

  Jenny’s childhood nurse, Dora Bell, stood waiting for them in the tower’s top floor, which contained only a bed, a desk, and a chair. Drowsy still from being drugged for the trip, Jenny murmured a little when laid on the bed but made no other sound or protest.

  Lord Gallagher looked at Dora. “Let me know when she’s awake.”

  He brushed past Evan as though he wasn’t there, leaving him to scramble after with a growing anger. At the foot of the stairs, he grabbed his father-in-law’s arm. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Lord Gallagher shook him off and opened the door to the library. “I told you to bloody well bring her straight home after the wedding. How could you have been so stupid?”

  “You never told me what would happen if I didn’t! How was I supposed to know?” Evan sat abruptly in a chair and dropped his face in his hands, fighting against anger and despair. And fear.

  At last, he raised his head and met his father-in-law’s eyes. Lord Gallagher looked years older than his age, and no longer angry. Just very, very weary.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Evan asked softly.

  “Alternating fits of hysteria and melancholia, exacerbated by too much excitement and best treated with solitude and rest.” Delivered in the flat monotone Evan had heard at other times and other places—the clinical words used in asylums to disguise the true horror of madness.

  Even now, he couldn’t believe she was really mad. Not his Jenny. “Why didn’t you tell me all of it?”

  “Because you wouldn’t have married her if you’d known…and Jenny wanted you.”

  “And you wanted an heir,” Evan shot back. “Right? You couldn’t risk marrying her to someone of name and rank who might well walk out on a marriage based on a lie. You must have been over the moon when I showed up—too starry-eyed to ask questions and not important enough to make demands. You knew I’d simply count myself lucky when you agreed to the marriage and never look closer for the reason why.”

  “Are you going to leave her?”

  Evan shook his head in disgust. “You don’t know me at all, do you? I love her. And the saddest part of all is that, if you’d told me before, it would not have changed my mind. I’d still have married her. All you accomplished by your lies of omission was to ensure that I put my wife in danger because of my ignorance. I find it hard to forgive you for that. No more. I want to see the doctors you’ve consulted and I want a full history of Jenny’s illness and treatments.”

  Lord Gallagher still looked weary, but some color had returned to his face. “Very well.”

  “And no more lies about anything to do with Jenny. Ever. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly clear.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  After a refreshingly restful night in the mountains, Sibéal woke at dawn and went for a long, long walk. She did not attempt to return to the old well that had offered up its unexpected contents yesterday. Instead, after a brief study of the literature provided by the hotel, she explored Glendalough itself.

  As a schoolgirl she’d visited the ruins of Red Hugh O’Donnell’s Franciscan friary in Donegal. About the only thing she remembered was that it had been destroyed in an explosion during a siege in 1600 or thereabouts. County Donegal was known mostly for its natural attractions—the peninsulas and cliffs and golden beaches that made it one of Ireland’s top tourist destinations. Other than being a significant Gaeltacht (Gaelic was the primary or only language), her home county’s connections to Irish history had mostly eluded Sibéal.

  The Round Tower, medieval cathedral, St. Kevin’s Kitchen (so-called because its own miniature round tower integrated into the roof made it look like a chimney), St. Kevin’s Cross…she was astonished by how moving she found it all. Perhaps there was more to history than she’d ever learned. Probably a good lesson for someone working cold cases.

  It was a surprise to her that the cemetery contained recent graves. She would have supposed its days of use long past, but it seemed the local parish church continued to bury their dead in the monks’ graveyard. Alert and curious, Sibéal began to examine the newer stones.

  She found the Gallagher family in its own section, set off from the rest by a rusting iron fence. Like the gate at the castle, this one hung open as it clearly had for years. Within lay a jumble of stone and grass, wildflowers peeking through at odd angles from those memorials that had broken or sunk slantwise into the ground over the passage of centuries.

  The oldest marker that she could decipher was for a Henrietta Gallagher, who had died in 1704. Sibéal had her notebook out and drew a simple plan of the plot, marking the readable gravestones as she went. There were no mausoleums as in fancier graveyards, but there was evidence of carving and design on many of the headstones: winged death’s heads and Celtic crosses and even the Gallagher griffins. The littlest markers, those of infants and children, wormed their way into her heart like poison, and she knew they would haunt her in her dreams. Many of the children’s gravestones bore stone daisies or depictions of broken flower buds.

  Despite her professional curiosity, she took her time approaching what looked to be the newest markers. There she found the most recent of them all: CILLIAN GALLAGHER, 16TH VISCOUNT GALLAGHER, 1942–1992; LILY MORGAN GALLAGHER, 1945–1992. Too Soon.

  Just that. One stone shared, no protestations of having been greatly loved or dearly missed. Following that line of thought, who had chosen
the stone and the engraving in the first place? Not his children, surely. No child or even adolescent would propose such restrained phrasing. Most likely it had been Nessa, Sibéal mused as she left the graveyard, as it had been Nessa who had taken care of everything else, from business to guardianship.

  After showering and changing, she returned to Deeprath warily, wondering if the local police had wormed their way back in with the family and were looking for a fight. But the grounds were as quiet and remote as ever, with the brooding feel of a coming storm. Sibéal locked her car door—her little VW had protested the uneven and neglected gravel drive—and decided to prowl around the grounds before announcing herself. The police photos taken at the time allowed her to now fill in a great deal of color and structure where there was the bare minimum of upkeep. In 1992 the castle frontage had been offset by the neatly raked gravel drive drawing a large circle before the house. In the center of that had been inner rings of manicured turf, beds of Irish wildflowers, and a stone fountain. Today, the fountain was the only recognizable element remaining, though it had long ago stopped running and the only water it held was that caught from rain. Both flowers and grass had succumbed to a free-for-all of waving fronds almost waist-high in places, and the circular drive was full of potholes.

  It was not for lack of money. Sibéal had seen the pages Sergeant Cullen had compiled about the family’s finances over the last thirty years. Aidan Gallagher could have chosen to keep the castle maintained even if he preferred not to live here. Instead, he’d locked up the library and more or less the castle itself, with only the Bells and the occasional hired hand to see to the most necessary repairs. He had a townhouse in London and various rental properties throughout Dublin. Kyla Gallagher’s Kilkenny manor house represented less than fifteen percent of her personal worth. The amount of zeros in their finances tempted Sibéal to make the murders a matter of money—except children, when they killed, did not do so for eventual gain. They acted on immediate needs or fears. Aidan Gallagher had not murdered his parents just so he could get his inheritance early.