The Darkling Bride

by Laura Andersen

  “So, poem,” she repeated hastily. “There’s more, I take it?”

  The second article capitalized an entire word—OF—and the third article capitalized THE. On to the fourth and final article, the opinion piece from London that had followed the tragic death of Jenny Gallagher and Evan’s departure from Ireland.

  THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS

  15 September 1883

  We have it on good authority that Mr. Evan Chase-Gallagher, noted folklorist and author, has returned to England’s shores following his sojourn of four years in Ireland. Little could the author have expected such heights of joy and depths of pain as he has endured since he last crossed the Irish Sea. Marriage, fatherhood…to Be followed so shortly by the extremity of gRief known only to those whose loved ones have perished in suspicious circumstances.

  Lady Jenny Gallagher possessed, by the accounts of all who knew her, a brilliant wit to match her dark Irish beauty, as well as the noted charm of her people. But such brilliance too often exacts a cost, and it is well known that the lady suffered an unquiet mind after the bIrth of her son. The strain on her husbanD, cut off from his London home in mountainous isolation, we can only guess at. That he has published nothing since his marriage is, perhaps, telling.

  We understand the inquest to have been generous in their verdict of accidental death, and hope that his wife’s Christian burial will work its peace upon Mr. Chase. WE look forward to once more reading his learned and captivating prose and sharing in the talent that has seen him compared to both Mr. Dickens and Mr. Trollope.

  His son remains in Ireland, to be raised by his grandfather at Deeprath Castle.

  Carragh raised her head, met Aidan’s gaze. “Bride. The Poem of the Bride.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well,” she said drily, trying to damp down the excitement that made her want to believe they were sharing something beyond an intellectual puzzle, “I hope you know what that means, because I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “I do, in fact, know what it means. Or I’m pretty sure.” He stood up and looked thoughtfully at the rows of shelves. “Tell me you’ve cataloged the section on local legends.”

  Carragh reached for her notebook and flipped to the version of a table of contents she’d made for herself. “I think so,” she mused. “I remember looking at quite a few volumes about St. Kevin and the founding of Glendalough. Would that be what you’re looking for?”

  “That section, yes.”

  “Second bay on the left. Shelves three, four, and half of five. I numbered from the top down.”

  “Come help me,” he said.

  Once on the ladder, she asked, “What am I looking for exactly? Unless you want me to pull down every volume?”

  “We’re looking for an old book—”

  “You don’t say.”

  “You needn’t be rude. I remember my mother reading me the poem at bedtime…” Aidan closed his eyes, and Carragh took the chance to study his face. From her angle sideways and above, his closed lashes were annoyingly—seductively—long and thick, and his mouth looked like it had been made for the precise purpose of kissing.

  A laugh in her ear, a laugh that was now becoming familiar. But who was laughing at her? She could only hope it wasn’t Lily Gallagher, considering the improper thoughts Carragh was beginning to have about her son.

  “Red cloth binding,” he murmured. “Gold-embossed griffin and round tower on the front. Vanity published by an ancestor, I think. At least someone connected to the family. Tradition says the poem was written by Evan Chase after his wife’s death.”

  What? Carragh nearly shrieked aloud, managing to swallow it at the last second. You’ve had something written by Chase in this library that no one’s ever seen? And you didn’t bother to tell me? Except why would he, since Aidan didn’t know that was more than half the reason she’d accepted this job in the first place.

  With increased motivation, Carragh took out every book on the third shelf that looked remotely as though it might have been red at some point in its life. But it was Aidan who finally found it on the fifth shelf, tucked between a monograph on Wicklow mountain goats and a history of the rebel Michael Dwyer.

  “This is it,” he said, fingertips caressing the imprint of the family griffin.

  Carragh nearly jumped off the ladder in her eagerness, expecting to follow Aidan to the table. But he simply opened the book where they stood in the bay and carefully turned pages until he reached the endpapers.

  “Interesting,” he mused.

  She could nearly have ripped the book out of his hands. Rising to her tiptoes, she put her hand on his left arm to pull it down. He obliged, tilting the book until she could see what he was looking at.

  “It’s handwritten?” she asked.

  “I never knew that. Look, here at the bottom, it says: ‘Copied 1892 by James Gallagher.’ ”

  Hope surged, for surely a poem copied out by Evan’s son was likely to have been composed by his father. Aidan began to read aloud. And as he did, every aspect of Deeprath Castle that had teased and taunted the edges of Carragh’s awareness since she’d been here rushed in and twined around them as though they were standing in a storm of time and memory.

  When mist grows thick and demons ride

  And all small things begin to hide

  Then cross your heart, eyes open wide

  To keep you from the Darkling Bride

  Her curse will let no secrets lie

  Between her and her vengeful pride

  Against the place where she did die:

  The Dark Bride of Deeprath.

  When Aidan finished all six stanzas, Carragh shivered. “This is what your mother considered appropriate bedtime reading for a child?”

  “We lived in an eight-hundred-year-old castle. In Ireland. Ghosts and curses and tragedy are what our blood is made of.”

  At her skeptical and probably horrified expression, Aidan gave that particular half laugh of his. “More to the point, this is definitely the Poem of the Bride. And we were right—it’s the second clue.”

  He held up the folded notepaper he had palmed while she was coming down the ladder. Inside was written: Clue #2. Well done, darling.

  She wondered if he could hear his mother’s voice as he read the words, and knew she would never dare ask. And then, for a moment, her mind slipped and she wondered if that was why she was afraid to open the letter from Hong Kong: because, when she read it, might she hear an echo of the voice that had been silenced so long before?

  “Carragh?”

  “Yes, sorry. Time to decipher the next riddle?”

  “I think we should eat first. You’re looking a bit drawn around the eyes.”

  “Because we’ve been deciphering twenty-year-old photocopies and examining hundred-year-old books for the last three hours.”

  He closed the red and gold book and held out his hand. “Food. And away from here, I think. There’s a place I used to like in Laragh.”

  What could she say? He was, technically, her employer, and set the terms of her work. If he wanted to have lunch, they’d have lunch.

  It was definitely not, in any shape or form, a date.

  * * *

  —

  Upon Sibéal’s return to Dublin Tuesday night, she’d fallen into bed and, unusually for her, slept without stirring until her alarm sounded at six. She rose with the sun, did a three-mile run along the Liffey, had a tense chat with Josh and a more amiable one with May before her daughter went to school, and was in her Phoenix Park office by eight-thirty. Where she was almost immediately summoned to Superintendent O’Neill’s office.

  “The Gallagher case,” he said.

  Feeling like a primary schooler giving her first oral report, Sibéal presented the pertinent information of the last five days.

  “Good. By the by,” O’Neill said when she had finished. “I’ve had a call from Theodore Grant, MP for Galway…Philip Grant’s father.”

  Of course you have, she
thought mordantly. She could guess what was coming.

  “He is raising questions about your…technique. Seems to think you’ve been harassing his son.”

  “Sir—”

  “And I told him to fuck off.”

  Her eyebrows shot up and O’Neill grimaced. “Not out loud. I’d never have been made superintendent if I couldn’t play politics. But you’re my officer, McKenna, not his, and if he’d known me at all he’d have known his call was practically the one thing guaranteed to make me keep this case running.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t go thinking you can get away with the same attitude, mind. I’ve got both years and gender on you and I don’t want a fine officer ruined because men don’t like a woman asking questions and forming opinions. You can have until Monday, and then I’ll need you to have reached some conclusions. Understood?”

  It was Wednesday. Three days, plus the weekend. But no way was she going to complain. She’d come in this morning expecting to have it shut down at once. “Yes, sir.”

  He—almost—smiled at her before waving her off with a curt, “Get to work.”

  She grabbed Cullen and pulled him into her office. Before she could launch into a list of tasks, the sergeant said, “I’ve been on the phone with Forensics. Officially, they’re still running tests. Unofficially, they think it likely that the marble cross found with the antiquities was indeed the weapon that killed Lord Gallagher.”

  “Great.”

  “And,” Cullen continued with a cheeky grin, “I found something interesting in Philip Grant’s past. Not financial—well, obviously we now know he hadn’t stolen and sold the Gallagher antiquities—but intriguingly relevant. We know that he was at Deeprath interning for Lord Gallagher in 1992. But in 1991, Grant had been forced to leave Oxford because of a scandal with a dean’s daughter. He was twenty, the girl was fourteen when he got her pregnant. ’Course they all hushed it up between them, but that’s what brought him back to Ireland for university. And I don’t imagine it was something he put on his résumé for Lord Gallagher.”

  “No,” Sibéal said thoughtfully, mind spinning with possibilities. “No, I don’t suppose Gallagher would have allowed him anywhere near his home—and his daughter—if he’d known all that. Kyla was fifteen…what if the Gallaghers found out about the Oxford scandal? Or worse—what if there was a repeat scandal in the making at Deeprath Castle? I could imagine tempers getting very heated over the seduction of one’s daughter. Heated enough—”

  “For murder? I agree. So what next, boss? Back to the castle?”

  “Let’s see if we can get Grant away from the Gallaghers. Phone him, will you? See if he’ll be in town for business today or tomorrow…And Cullen?” She remembered the veiled hostility in Philip Grant’s eyes when he’d brought up Carragh Ryan. “If he’s reluctant, tell him we want to talk to him about the archivist working at Deeprath. Imply…well, whatever you think will work. I trust your instincts.”

  “Because I’m a man?”

  “Because you’re a damned good officer. Stop trolling for compliments and do it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She could get used to being in charge.

  * * *

  —

  They walked to Laragh, just past the intersection of three roads, where they could see the Round Tower of Glendalough rising to the sky as it had for centuries. Aidan directed her into a white-fronted low building with a sign proclaiming it THE WICKLOW HEATHER.

  “The first restaurant I ever came to. I was six and my mother brought me here for lunch. It was practice, to ensure I had good enough manners to dine in company with guests. Or Aunt Nessa, who was much scarier.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Fine. Until she gave me a bite of wild game and chicken liver pâté. I promptly spit it back out. Fortunately, my mother always had a sense of humor. I didn’t get to dine in company for another year, but once or twice a month she and I would come here together.”

  “Note to self: don’t order the pâté.”

  Everything they ate was delicious: from garlic mushrooms to the grilled goat cheese on ciabatta that Carragh ate almost embarrassingly fast. Except, unlike some men, Aidan didn’t make her self-conscious about her appetite. He was a very good conversationalist—which shouldn’t surprise her, what with the women he dated and the society events he attended—and told her a string of funny stories about fraudulent art appraisers and the perils of underground antiquities dealings. By tacit agreement, they didn’t talk about Deeprath or the library or the book he’d slipped inside his coat pocket. She knew he’d brought it because he had not forgotten the missing letters from her bedroom. However they had vanished, he wouldn’t risk losing more precious fragments of his mother’s voice from the dead.

  “Dessert?” Aidan asked, without the inflection she so often heard in men’s voices, the implication that she either wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, indulge.

  “You’re paying?” she teased.

  “Depends on what you order.”

  Just for that, she ordered the most expensive item—crème brûlée. Aidan chuckled and followed with Banoffee pie. “Nostalgia?” she asked.

  “Mmmm. Not quite as good as our old cook used to make.”

  “Cook, housekeeper, boarding school…So what’s it like growing up rich?”

  “I don’t know. Children never think to question their positions. It was just my life. A very country-house life, I now recognize. Lots of horses and hunting. Not that I was old enough to hunt when I left, but Nessa tried to get me interested in shooting waterfowl. But after the murder of my parents, I wasn’t all that interested in killing anything.” Aidan raised that eyebrow. “Your turn. What’s it like growing up with three older brothers?”

  “Loud.” She considered. “Protective.”

  “I suppose that’s natural.”

  “Is it an age thing or a gender thing? Did you protect Kyla because she’s a girl, or did she protect you because you were younger?”

  That darkened his face, and she knew she’d tread on a sensitive point. But he answered readily enough. “You wouldn’t believe it by the behavior you’ve seen, but Kyla and I became very, very close after our parents died. We were at different schools, so it wasn’t really a question of protection. But we understood one another in a way none of my friends ever could.”

  “I get that.” In ways you can’t fathom. Because I never talk about any of it.

  “And then she married Philip, the minute she turned twenty-one and got control of her trust fund. And every year since it’s gotten harder. How do I protect her from the life she’s chosen, the life she wants?”

  That was coming perilously close to discussing the many sins of Philip Grant, a conversation Carragh would give anything to avoid. So she dragged their pleasant lunch conversation back to the matter at hand. “I don’t suppose there are any conveniently altered letters in the Bride poem this time?”

  “That would be cheating,” Aidan explained. “My mother never repeated clues in a single hunt.”

  “Then I hope you remember some of those hunts and know where to point us next.”

  “I would imagine she made my father’s a little more difficult than she made a child’s. I think we should make a copy of the poem for you to study. I’ve moved my father’s personal safe into my room—I’ll keep the book in there when we aren’t using it.”

  “So you do think someone is going through my belongings?”

  “Best to be safe. And Carragh—lock your door at night.”

  But that was only protection from the living. And whether or not a living hand had stolen her grandmother’s letters, Carragh felt in her bones that the constant moving of the portrait in her room was intimately connected with forces that had been in the castle for much, much longer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  September 1991

  Lily had never been much for New Year’s resolutions. She was perfectly happy to dance and drink and kiss
at midnight, but January always felt like a letdown month. Who had the energy for ambition in the middle of winter? She’d always felt that autumn, and the start of a new school year, was much more appropriate for taking stock of one’s life.

  Kyla was back at school, and Lily hoped she would have a good term. Her daughter had shot up five inches in the last year, and at five-foot-nine towered over most fourteen-year-old boys. Not that Kyla had wanted sympathy. “What would you know?” she’d cried to Lily. “You’re the perfect size. You’re the perfect everything.”

  As logic was clearly not going to be of any use in the matter, Lily kept her advice to herself and did her complaining to her husband in private. Cillian was unconcerned. “All girls go through hormonal hell at this age. All boys, for that matter. She’ll come out the other side in a few years and we’ll find her perfectly delightful.”

  Anyway, with Kyla boarding and Aidan working diligently at a Catholic primary school and with private tutors, Lily needed a new project. Her last one—lace-making—had ended with several dozen imperfect doilies and an abundance of handkerchiefs even Nessa wouldn’t use. She knew she could go back to one of her previous interests, but that felt like failure. Surely there was something new, something useful, she could do…

  The answer came as she was checking the conditions of the drapes and linens in various unused rooms. A very traditional task that she could never do without a faint sense of the ridiculous. She would have made a very bad Lady Gallagher in any age before this one, for she simply could not take herself seriously. Not like Nessa.

  Lily was in the primrose bedroom of the Jacobean wing, running her hands the length of the drapes to feel for weak spots or loose stitching, when she caught herself staring at the portrait hanging by the door. She knew it well—the portrait commissioned by Jenny Gallagher for her marriage, with her own image reflected back in the pond as the Darkling Bride. Now there was a family story she would like to know more about. She’d heard a few references about the Gallagher connection to the old legend, mostly from Father Hennessy, but that was only gossip. What if she could find out more? What if, in that labyrinth of a library, there were answers?