The Darkling Bride

by Laura Andersen

  And not just about the Bride. The Gallaghers had a long and varied history. Nessa made sure she knew all the best stories by heart. By Nessa’s lights, that meant those that were the most flattering to the family. Lily didn’t want historical gilding—she wanted the odd, the funny, the tragic. All the communal, messy memories that go into making up a family.

  She knew just where to start. Leaving the rest of the curtains unexamined, Lily went straight to the Bride Tower.

  It was a place the family mostly avoided. From the moment Kyla was born, Cillian had ensured that the two entrances were securely locked night and day. There had been no children in the castle since World War II, and no one wanted to take risks with centuries old wood and stone. Not to mention that the tower was creepy as hell.

  That last phrase was Cillian’s. Lily didn’t find the remnants of Jenny Gallagher’s life creepy so much as sad. Now those remnants were the perfect starting place for her new project: surely Jenny’d had some affinity for the Darkling Bride, or else why that doubled portrait?

  Lily prowled the sitting room level, mind whirring with what she knew of the story. Jenny’s isolated girlhood in the mountains, her father’s only heir, the arrival of Evan Chase, followed by marriage, motherhood, and madness. Her fingers itched to start making notes…and that was before she’d even reached the top floor and its walls of words.

  This was it. This was her project. And it would be a surprise for Cillian.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sibéal and Cullen met Philip Grant in his Financial District office at eight o’clock Thursday morning. She wouldn’t have pegged him as the work-all-hours type of man, but whatever Sergeant Cullen had said to him had sufficed. He was there and ready to talk. About Carragh Ryan.

  With Cullen taking notes, it gave Sibéal pleasure to disabuse Philip of his notions of why they were there. “I don’t care about what’s happening at Deeprath today, Mr. Grant. Except insofar as it sheds light on what happened there in 1992. Miss Ryan was four years old at the time and living in the United States. She is not relevant to this case.”

  As she’d noted at Deeprath, he was handsome, in that sulky, well-groomed way of public school graduates who move through life without any awareness of their own privilege, believing they have earned their good fortune. Definitely not Sibéal’s type. She might not be brilliant in her personal life, but at least she had the sense to avoid a man who would never truly think of anyone but himself.

  And yet, she could see the appeal for some women. But if Philip Grant’s resentment masked a personal interest in Carragh Ryan, Sibéal would wager he didn’t have a chance with her. Not with Aidan Gallagher around. There was a man too good-looking for his own good, but (mostly) without the arrogant edge of entitlement. Probably the traumas of his childhood had knocked the edges off some of those tendencies, though it seemed a harsh way to learn to think of others.

  “You spoke to the police in 1992,” Sibéal noted.

  “I remember. I remember that I had nothing useful to contribute. And I remember quite clearly that you and I have already discussed this.”

  “You lied to them.” She had gone over his statement word by word, and planned this attack with meticulous care.

  And, as she almost could have bet, he neither denied nor confirmed. He simply said, “You think so?” He had a carefully schooled expression of cool disinterest, but his eyes flicked restlessly between Sibéal and Cullen.

  “When asked about your internship with Gallagher, you told the police at the time that it had been arranged while you were at Oxford. But you had not actually been at Oxford for almost a year.”

  “I told them that, too.”

  “You told them, and I quote: ‘I left Oxford for personal reasons.’ ”

  “There is no lie in that.” The self-assurance slipped a little more, his shoulders beneath the tailored suit tightening.

  “Perhaps I should have said that you lied by omission. You left Oxford because you had to, because it was part of the deal your father struck to keep you from being prosecuted for illicit sex with a minor.”

  The first rule of the arrogant: place blame when confronted. “The girl lied to me about her age—”

  “Ah yes, don’t they always?” she murmured.

  “And it has nothing to do with Deeprath or what happened there. So why on earth would I have mentioned it to the local plods?”

  “Because, Mr. Grant, you were living with a family that had a fifteen-year-old daughter. With your history, it is not a far stretch to imagine you might have overstepped your bounds with Kyla Gallagher. If I had been investigating the murder of her parents, I would have been very interested to know about your history. Because I can easily imagine outrage, an argument, violence that may not have been intentional—”

  “Bloody hell,” he breathed. “You think I killed them? Over Kyla?” He infused his wife’s name with contempt.

  “Someone killed them over something.”

  “It damned well wasn’t me! And I never touched Kyla that summer. Not much. I’d learned that lesson. But it was bloody difficult keeping her off me. Any compromising positions that ensued were wholly her idea.”

  “And yet you married her several years later.”

  “I didn’t say she wasn’t attractive.”

  “I’d imagine her trust fund was especially attractive.”

  Grant had regained some of his confidence. He leaned forward, hands clasped on his desk, and said smoothly, “Look, my marriage had nothing to do with that whole affair, except that I felt sorry for the girl and so I kept in touch longer than I otherwise would have.” Directing a smile at Sergeant Cullen, he said man-to-man, “And she grew up very nicely.”

  “And you didn’t mind pissing off Nessa Gallagher,” Sibéal countered. It was a shot in the dark, but as it turned out, a very effective one.

  “Too bloody right,” he retorted indignantly. “Damned woman had it in for me from the beginning. Tried to tell the police I’d made advances on Lady Gallagher.”

  Now that was something else that hadn’t made it into the written reports. “And had you?”

  “Nessa Gallagher has been a cold-blooded bitch since the day she was born. Yes, I talked to Lady Gallagher, but talking isn’t ‘making advances.’ And I couldn’t help it if Lily flirted as naturally as she breathed.”

  Was this how Philip Grant ran his entire life—convinced that every woman he met was mad for him and he was helpless in the face of it? It made her want to gag. “Are you saying that Lady Gallagher took a personal interest in you? And if so, was it the sort of interest her husband might have disliked?”

  “Who are you trying to pin this murder on, anyway? Look, I don’t know why they died. But it was nothing to do with me. I wasn’t important enough for that.” The flash of bitter insight vanished as quickly as it came, and his mocking smile returned. “Not then, at least.”

  “If you’re implying that you’re important enough now not to be investigated, you’re wrong.”

  She proceeded to prove it to him by putting him through an hour’s interrogation, taking apart his original statement sentence by sentence.

  What did you do that morning? Compiled a summary of stock reports from the last ten years for Lord Gallagher.

  Where were you working? His study.

  Alone? Gallagher was in and out. Taking phone calls. Writing letters. Arranging a trip to New York for the following month.

  Did you see anyone else? Lady Gallagher came in once and took her husband off for some reason. No, I don’t know why. Mrs. Bell brought tea late morning. After lunch, Mr. Bell reported on estate matters while I took notes.

  When did you last see Lord Gallagher? I was dismissed at two in the afternoon. I left Lord Gallagher with Winthrop and Bell, with orders to retrieve some old ledgers from the library and go through them on my own. Which is where I last saw Lady Gallagher, in the library with Aidan.

  Where were you between the library at 2:00 P.M. and 4:30 P
.M.? Working in my room.

  Can you prove it? Can you disprove it?

  Sibéal finally allowed the questions to lapse, the only sound that of Cullen’s pen. She studied Philip Grant as though he were a natural history museum specimen. Here is an excellent example of twenty-first-century man, notable qualities being self-interest and utter disregard of the common good.

  She asked one final question. “Where was Kyla during the relevant afternoon hours?”

  “Ah, the question no one bothered to ask me all those years ago. Very good, Inspector. As a reward, I’ll answer you: Kyla and I were together.”

  “Doing what? I thought you said you were working.”

  “I was. And so was she. Some summer essay for school. She just liked to be where she could see me.”

  “So you claim you have an alibi from the impressionable adolescent girl who you later married. It’s not terribly strong. For either of you.”

  “It doesn’t have to be. Not unless, after twenty-three years, you have produced evidence from thin air. You are grasping at straws, Inspector. If you want to know what happened at Deeprath, then you should return to Deeprath. That castle…I’m not an especially sensitive person, but nothing happens there that the castle doesn’t know about.”

  Although she made a skeptical noise, Sibéal felt a shiver down her spine. “What a pity I haven’t learned the art of questioning inanimate objects.”

  Grant regarded her speculatively. “A great pity.”

  * * *

  —

  Carragh found a note in the library when she showed up to work: There’s a stack of family genealogies in the last cabinet on the left against the rood screen. Take a look through. My mother must have been referencing those when she noted baptismal records on the list you found. I’ll be back later. A.

  There were indeed genealogies in the specified cabinet, as well as supporting documents such as birth, death, and marriage certificates. Baptismal records, confirmation dates, and newspaper notices. It was like Christmas day for a lover of the past. Carragh had to resist the urge to throw them all into the air and see what came down to her first.

  It took a while to sort through them, for they were in no easily discernible order. She separated handwritten from typed, then roughly by decades. She indulged herself for a few minutes with Aidan’s and Kyla’s birth certificates (Aidan Cillian Gallagher; 10:20 A.M., 5 March 1982, and Kyla Serene Gallagher; 16:31 P.M., 17 May 1977) and noted sadly the absence of records after those dates. Would Aidan choose to add his parents’ death certificates to this collection? At the least, Kyla’s daughters should be included here, even if one would prefer to forget her marriage.

  Going backward, Carragh pulled out documentation for Aidan’s grandparents and his grandfather’s half sister, Nessa, born of the fourteenth viscount’s second marriage nineteen years after her half brother. The fifteenth viscount, James Michael Gallagher, who was himself the only child of Jenny Gallagher and Evan Chase-Gallagher.

  But Carragh only knew that because of her own research into the novelist. If she’d been relying on family records to tell her anything, she’d have been sorely disappointed. From the birth certificates of Nessa in 1931 and her half brother in 1912, there stretched backward a long, empty gap. She took her time, two hours all told, reading every single sheet filed in the genealogies section, and was finally forced to admit she hadn’t missed anything. There was a record of Jenny Gallagher’s birth in 1860, and then…nothing. No marriage certificate, no death certificate, no record of burial, no acknowledgment at all of Evan Chase or their son—not a single record for fifty-two years.

  Someone had blown a hole through the Gallagher genealogies. Who? And why? The most likely suspect, she supposed, was Lily. She was the one interested in family history, had reminded herself in a note to look at baptismal records, and told her husband she’d found out something “of greatest interest to all the Gallaghers.” Very possibly she had gathered the pertinent records in order to support those findings. But where the hell could she have left them?

  Aidan, when he returned, had no more idea than Carragh did. “All we can do is continue to follow her clues,” he said. “I’ll ask Winthrop if she entrusted anything to his care. Though I doubt he would have forgotten to tell the police something like that.”

  So they returned to solving riddles. They compared their separate notes on the Bride poem, Aidan’s much messier than Carragh would have expected. He saw her puzzling over the lines and circles and arrows going every which way and said, “It helps me see connections I would otherwise miss. Investigations need inspiration as well as logic. This allows the subconscious to make leaps I haven’t knowingly thought of yet.”

  “All right. So what do…” She squinted at two circled phrases joined by a line. “…‘the Lady Church’ and ‘Aiofe Gallagher’ have to do with each other? Who even is Aiofe Gallagher?” She gave it the soft Irish pronunciation corresponding to the English name Eva.

  “Aiofe was Jenny Gallagher’s mother. She died before Evan Chase came to Deeprath, and I seem to recall she was considered delicate in her lifetime. I’ve got a family history somewhere in here that talks about her—a second cousin, I think, who liked to gossip about the wealthier members of the family and call it history.”

  “And the leap between that and the Lady Church? Which is where?”

  “Glendalough. You saw the ruined walls the other day, though we didn’t go near it. The little church north of the Round Tower. It was built outside the walls of the city, but was still part of the monastic community. It was a church for women, maybe a convent church for nuns associated with the community. Or maybe more general. We should go look at it. It has another unusual cross—engraved beneath the lintel on the main door.”

  She could feel the pull of curiosity, that instinct of all true scholars to follow a meandering path of inquiry merely because it was intriguing. But right now, she reminded herself, they had more specific concerns in mind. “And Aiofe Gallagher?”

  “Hmmm, yes. I must dig out that history, but I do remember that she had several stillborn children who were buried near that chapel. There’s a little graveyard there, meant for children who died without baptism. Although no longer much used, Aiofe wanted them buried there.”

  Pity was even worse than curiosity—Carragh had a nearly overwhelming urge to go straight to that little graveyard. She had always searched out the graves of children in old cemeteries, maybe because she knew she had been lucky not to have joined them at the age of four. She couldn’t imagine the bleakness of a spot where mothers laid their children while believing them to be beyond salvation’s reach. Just because she was Catholic didn’t mean she subscribed to all the traditions that had accumulated over centuries and through sheer weight of time had become fixed.

  “Carragh?”

  “Sorry. It’s just very sad.”

  “There is grief enough and to spare in this world.” He sounded as though he were quoting someone. “But pertinent to our search are the references in the Bride poem to lost children. Did you note them?”

  “Not particularly.” She skimmed through her copy now, wanting to find them before he had to point them out. “Here,” she said. “Third stanza: ‘A son of joy, a lullaby/Till jealous eyes did peek and pry/And vow her heart to mortify./They made her baby seem to die,/The Dark Bride of Deeprath.’ ”

  Aidan pointed further down. “And in stanza five: ‘My child, my heart, my baby lost,/I will find though balked and crossed.’ ”

  “I see it.” She read over them both several times. “Are you telling me that the next clue is somewhere at this church or graveyard? It seems a little thin. I thought you said your mother laid her puzzles strictly within the castle itself.”

  “For me, yes. But I was a child. Maybe for my father…?”

  Carragh sighed. “What you’re saying is that we’re going back to Glendalough. I suppose you’ve considered that even if your mother made this church the third clue, whatever
she left will be well gone after all these years.”

  He shrugged. “Can’t hurt to try. Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow is Friday.”

  “So?”

  “Do you really need reminding of your grand Gallagher Farewell Ball or whatever Lady Nessa is calling it? I doubt she’ll let you go anywhere tomorrow.”

  “We could sneak out.” It was hard to tell if he was teasing.

  “Are you twelve?” she asked. “You may not be scared of your great-aunt, but I am. Look, this chapel has been there for hundreds of years. An extra day won’t make any difference.”

  He gave her a look full of long-suffering concession. “Saturday it is. But don’t come crying to me when Nessa runs you off your feet tomorrow like a nineteenth-century housemaid. When it comes to impressing outsiders, she knows no limits.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Aidan hadn’t been exaggerating his great-aunt’s zeal for forced labor. The moment Carragh poked her head out of her bedroom Friday morning, Nessa pressed her into service. Aidan’s own service seemed to be more of an advisory role (listening to his great-aunt move militantly through her list), but Carragh was detailed to carry in flower arrangements and move tables and generally do whatever other unskilled work needed doing.

  She was concentrating so hard on ensuring that the table linens were laid without any wrinkles that Aidan had to speak to her three times before she heard him. “What did you say?”

  “I said, there’s a phone call for you. You can take it in the study.”

  How did he manage to still look cool and crisp and freshly pressed when she knew she must look as grimy and tired as any historical housemaid after hours of physical labor?