The Darkling Bride

by Laura Andersen

  “Did you give Lily that choice?”

  “There was no need. She panicked, poor girl, and chose the wrong direction to run. It was not terribly difficult to corner her. And the battlements were dangerously low even before the lightning brought down a good third of them.”

  “How do you plan to explain my death?”

  “The poor, sad girl who could never belong to Ireland and became obsessed with Deeprath and the Darkling Bride and the present Lord Gallagher…it explains itself. You’ve helped me along very nicely by sleeping with Philip as well. So when Aidan scorned your unhealthy obsession, you killed him. Then flung yourself to your death just like Jenny Gallagher.”

  “You’re going to shoot the seventeenth Viscount Gallagher,” Carragh said flatly. “I thought the title was sacrosanct.”

  “Only to those who honor it. If Aidan cannot be brought to himself, then we will wait for another. Kyla is young enough to still have a son. And if she fails, there are her two daughters.”

  “You’re mad. Really, truly, clinically disturbed. No one’s going to believe in a second murder-suicide, or murder-anything. Sibéal McKenna is much too smart, and she doesn’t give a damn about your name or position. She’s coming for you already.”

  “Then what do I have to lose?” The sculpted face, still so beautiful in old age, did not change.

  “All this because of something that happened a hundred and forty years ago? No one will care. You are still yourself, whatever is in your blood.”

  And now, for the first time, Nessa’s cool poise broke. She practically snarled, “I am a Gallagher. My father was a Gallagher, no matter what his poor, lunatic mother may have claimed. No American with a dubious bloodline can come in here and tell me differently!”

  Nessa recovered almost as quickly, the shotgun unerringly pointed at Carragh’s chest. “Outside now, move slowly.”

  Carragh hesitated, then took a careful step toward the outer door. The longer she could play for time, the better chance that Aidan would arrive. And she didn’t want that shotgun anywhere near the spiral stairs when he emerged. She didn’t want either of them to be shot tonight.

  As she stepped into the open air, she could swear she felt a hand take hers in a gesture of support. Thanks, she thought. Now do something.

  She swung around to face Nessa, who showed no signs of weakening or dropping the hand holding the gun.

  “Just think,” Nessa said in a terrifyingly calm voice, “you will be linked forever with Jenny Gallagher. That should please you.”

  “I won’t jump.”

  “Jump, or I shoot.”

  “You’ll have to shoot me, because I am Not. Going. To. Jump.”

  Carragh stood with her back to the battlements, the lightning-scarred section dropping into nothingness just a foot or two away. Nessa faced her directly. She could hardly miss. They stared at one another, each waiting to divine the first movement of the other.

  She saw the slight tightening of Nessa’s jaw and just had time to think, You’ve got to be kidding me, when a burst of light exploded around them. Like a lightning bolt, or a dozen flare guns going off at once. The brilliant light made Nessa instinctively raise her arm to shield her eyes.

  In two steps Carragh was within reach, swinging her heavy flashlight against Nessa’s shoulder and arm. She heard something crack, and the gun dropped to the ancient stones.

  Instantly, she was on her knees, scrabbling for the weapon. Nessa threw herself against Carragh, as though intending to bodily throw her off the tower. She wouldn’t even have to throw her—just pull her close enough to the crumbling edge. But the best of intentions cannot resist the weakness of old age—or a second flare of light, an echo of the first. Nessa Gallagher was still blinking, right arm hanging crookedly, when Carragh turned the rifle on her.

  She would take no risks, so the two of them simply held like that, facing each other, for what could have been minutes or hours, for all the sense of time Carragh had. Finally, she heard footsteps and then saw Aidan, his stupefied gaze swinging from her to his great-aunt and back again.

  But as a police officer, Aidan had the training and instincts to act quickly in a crisis. Taking Nessa’s arm securely in his, he said to his great-aunt, “Come down. I’m not letting you take the easy way off this tower.”

  With withering scorn, Nessa replied, “As if I would. I am a Gallagher. I do not run away.”

  Aidan looked warily at Carragh, still pointing the rifle in their direction. Slowly, she laid it on the stone floor of the battlements. Reaction had hit her now, teeth chattering from delayed shock. “I’m fine,” she assured Aidan. “Take her down. I’m coming.”

  Carragh waited until she could no longer hear their footsteps. Until the dark and timeless quiet of Deeprath had settled once more on the tower. She stood in the open doorway, firmly and safely away from the drop, waiting. And watching.

  She and Nessa had not been alone on the battlements. In that first burst of light, Carragh had seen two figures. Even now, she felt that if she could just turn her head quickly enough, she could glimpse them again.

  Two women, both with long black hair and soulful eyes. Two women who had brushed words against her mind even as the light vanished. Thank you.

  Jenny Gallagher. And the other? Not Lily, as Carragh might have expected, for she knew Aidan’s mother had been blonde and sleek. No, Jenny’s companion had been quite other, in every sense of the word: a woman who had outlived even her name until she had become no more than the whisper of a memory.

  The Darkling Bride.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  DIARY OF JENNY GALLAGHER

  1 January 1882

  I do not know what day it is. I know it is cold. They would not bring me my diary for a long time, until I gouged my skin enough to bleed and try to write with that on the walls. Only then was I allowed both ink and paper…but paper will not do. Paper can be destroyed. I will not let the truth be buried.

  My son is out there. They have stolen him, those jealous fae who never forgave the Bride for choosing a human love over her birthright. The changeling in my house must go back—I will bargain—I will plead—I will sacrifice all to break the curse of the Darkling Bride.

  The first day of 1882 passed in the same deep melancholy that had pervaded Deeprath since Jenny’s September collapse into complete insanity. Evan had learned a great many things in the last three months, one of them being how exhausting fear and sorrow could be. When he was awake all he craved was sleep, and when he went to bed all he could do was stare into the blackness.

  Some days Jenny thought she was the Darkling Bride. Some days she called him Niall. Some days she would not speak to him at all. But on no day at all would she accept her son. Twice, when her behavior had appeared docile and even clear-headed for some time, they let her leave the tower. Both times she ran away. The second time it was the dead of night and she was clad in only her night robe and slippers. “I have to find him,” she kept insisting. “Let me find him!”

  Lord Gallagher had had enough. The day after Christmas, he’d summoned a leading doctor who ran a private, forward-thinking asylum in northern England.

  “I promise you,” Evan had once told his wife, “that for the rest of my life your care and happiness will be my only concern.” But what did one do when “care” and “happiness” were mutually exclusive?

  James continued to thrive physically—and he had no shortage of love from his nurse and Dora Bell—but how would he grow up, Evan wondered, without his mother? The only thing he could think of was to pray for a miracle: Jenny, fully restored. Jenny, once more in his arms and smiling into their son’s face.

  When he went to see her that evening, as he did every evening, a miracle of at least a smaller order had occurred. Jenny was neatly dressed in a pale blue frock and reading in the sitting room under a nurse’s eye, rather than painting the walls of the upper bedroom with scrawls of ink. The doctor had told them not to forbid her this outlet, but to encou
rage her away from it gently by showing no interest.

  Evan dismissed the nurse, as always, and cautiously sat next to his wife on the sofa. “What are you reading?”

  She showed him the book—one of his. He refused to ask her if she was enjoying it, for that was taking writerly pride too far, so he asked the most useless and vague of questions: “How are you feeling?”

  “Quieter.” She laid the volume down and turned to him. “As though I have been in the midst of a great storm without knowing it. But now…I begin to believe in calmer waters. I know that I must leave. I do not want to go. But I understand now. I see it all, and I am sorry.”

  He was afraid to hope, but too young not to. They stayed in that quietness until the nurse returned two hours later, Evan stretched on the sofa, with Jenny curled against him. And when he said good night, she pulled him down for a kiss. The first since James had returned.

  As a frosty, bitter dawn rose in the mountains, they found Jenny’s body at the bottom of the Bride Tower. It seemed she had squirreled away hairpins over the weeks, and finally managed to pick the iron lock of the outer door. There, she must have stood on the battlements and jumped.

  Numb as a leaf tossed on the violent winds of the household’s grief, Evan picked up the book Jenny had been reading that last night. He turned the pages, wanting only to linger over the last object she had held, and found the note she’d left him.

  I did not lie, my love. I do understand now. I had thought my son stolen and replaced by a changeling child. But that was only my mind trying to protect me. The poor baby boy in this castle is no changeling…he is a human child. A stolen human child. And our son is dead.

  If you cannot believe me, ask my father one question from me: what have you done?

  We will wait for you, Evan, our son and I. All my love forever,

  Jenny

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Three weeks after leaving Deeprath Castle, Carragh returned to the Wicklow Mountains. The gentle May afternoon in the cemetery at Glendalough bore little outward resemblance to the freezing January rain at Glasnevin Cemetery when her grandmother had been buried. But the words of the committal rite were fresh and expressive in her mind.

  We commend to Almighty God our brother…and we commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  They had foregone a vigil and mass, preferring this quiet burial with only Father Hennessy, Aidan, Kyla, the Bells, Sibéal McKenna, and Carragh to witness. Nessa Gallagher remained in the women’s center of Mountjoy Prison, awaiting trial. She had made one statement—in which she admitted destroying her own and Kyla’s clothes the night of the reception, ripping up Carragh’s books and damaging her laptop, and setting fire to the library. And yet somehow she’d still managed to blame Carragh—Sibéal had discreetly leaked her the details. Miss Ryan was a troublemaker who couldn’t keep to her place. If not for her meddling, none of this need ever have come to light.

  Since that statement, Nessa Gallagher had refused to speak to anyone. And though she had admitted to slashing the portrait of Jenny Gallagher and the Darkling Bride, Nessa had not claimed responsibility for its earlier, eerie wanderings.

  Carragh did not believe that had been done by human hands.

  Lord God, whose days are without end and whose mercies beyond counting, keep us mindful that life is short and the hour of death unknown.

  The grave of Jenny Gallagher had been quietly opened two weeks earlier. Forensic specialists had sampled her humerus bone for DNA testing against the infant’s skeleton found in the tower walls. The report had concluded—with all the standard caveats about testing methods and the degeneration of material over long periods of time—that it was more likely than not that the two bodies were closely related. Today, the remains of Jenny’s son were being laid to rest with his mother.

  “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,” Father Hennessy said.

  “And let perpetual light shine upon him,” those at the graveside replied.

  After the last prayer, Aidan asked Carragh to walk with him along the river. She felt almost shy, for they’d had little contact since that night on the Bride Tower.

  If he felt shy, he didn’t show it. “I’m moving back to Ireland.”

  Carragh suppressed the instant leap of happiness and asked, “Why?”

  “Because Nessa was right about one thing—Deeprath is not mine to sell or give away. It is a heritage that is in my care, and Kyla’s. You know, when I first decided to donate it, Kyla wanted me to create a foundation instead. One that could administer Deeprath as a trust, allowing us to choose how it is used in future. Turns out she’d done her homework. Business models, a plan for a board of trustees, pages and pages of research on places like Malahide Castle that manage to make money. The problem was always going to be freeing up the ready cash to start it.”

  “And you’ve found it?” she asked.

  “I’m selling the London house. Once that decision was reached, it was easy to decide to leave England altogether.”

  “So, you’re coming to Ireland to run this foundation with Kyla.”

  “I think she’ll be rather better at that than I would. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do. Inspector McKenna seems to think the Siochana Garda would be glad of my services. But I don’t know that I’m entirely committed to the police. It was always the art and antiquities part that excited me.”

  They crossed the river in silence and onto the path leading to the castle. Carragh kept sneaking glances at Aidan. He looked, not younger, exactly, but freer. The tightness of his expressions had eased and the blue of his eyes was even more brilliant than before.

  “How are you?” Aidan finally asked. “And your family?”

  “Am I speaking to them, do you mean? Yes. My parents not only told me in no uncertain terms that I am not permitted to sell my grandmother’s house, but they sent my brother over to help renovate. In all his various starts and stops and adventures around the globe, Francis has become rather handy. We’re turning it into two flats, so there will be rent money to keep things up. Sibéal McKenna and her daughter are moving in next month.”

  Carragh had also, at last, read the Hong Kong letter. It contained a restrained message from her birth grandmother—who wrote that her husband had preferred to cut all ties, but with his recent death, she herself wished to tell her granddaughter that she had always thought of her—and a dozen photographs of Mei-Li in Boston with her little girl.

  We wrote infrequently and in secret, Mei-Li and I, her grandmother wrote, out of respect for my husband. But she managed to send me these and wrote of her great love for you. If you would like, I could have those letters translated.

  Not quite ready to discuss all of that openly, Carragh changed the subject as deftly as Aidan might have. “Have you been able to discover how your mother found out about Jenny and her baby?”

  “It was all in her journal. The turning point was a letter that Evan Chase wrote to his publisher after Jenny’s death—a letter that your grandmother helped my mother find. In it, he announced that there would be no book forthcoming. I don’t know where that letter is now—maybe Nessa found and destroyed it, maybe it’s still hidden somewhere as part of my father’s intended treasure hunt. But my mother wrote in her journal that Evan had inserted some kind of puzzle or riddle in the letter that allowed her to find the stone in the tower behind which he’d interred his son and his manuscript.”

  “I know you said the document case didn’t include Evan Chase’s lost book. So what, exactly, was in it?”

  “Ah,” Aidan said, with that smile that was just so unfairly attractive. “The manuscript in question was not, as I said, the novel Evan Chase came here to write. But it is a book, and it is entitled ‘The Darkling Bride.’ ”

  Somehow—perhaps because she could feel the faintest shiver of a presence she had last felt at Deeprath—Carragh knew what he was going to say. “Are you telling me—”

  “He wrote about Jenny,”
Aidan confirmed. “He wrote about Ireland and their first meeting and how they came to love each other. He wrote of their marriage and their son…and he wrote of her father’s betrayal. James Michael Gallagher died at seven weeks old in June 1881, after having been removed from Deeprath to protect him from measles. When Jenny’s father learned of it, he decided to substitute a newborn child from one of the families who had been rescued by the Gallaghers during the Famine. A poor family, it goes without saying, who could not easily refuse.”

  “You’ve read it?” Carragh tried, not very successfully, not to yelp.

  His smile became a boyish grin, and if she’d had any heart left to lose, it would have gone now. “I’ve read it,” he answered. “But you are going to edit it. I want you to prepare it for publication.”

  She couldn’t decide whether to scream or weep. “Are you sure you want all this information out there?”

  They had reached the end of the path. Deeprath Castle rose before them, much as Carragh had seen it on her first day.

  “What are they going to do?” Aidan asked. “If they—and I have no idea who ‘they’ would be, since the Gallaghers were never an extensive family—really want the castle and the title, then we can fight over them. But no one can take my name, or my family.” Tilting his head down, he said softly, “I believe it was you who taught me that truth.”

  He kissed her then, and Carragh didn’t know which was making her pulse race more—Aidan’s touch, or the thought of getting her hands on Evan Chase’s last work.

  Deeprath Castle watched them as though called to bear witness to this particular moment of its history. Because the story of Deeprath was always and forever the story of the Gallaghers.

  The castle knew her own, and jealously kept their secrets.

  She alone knew what was lost

  And would not lie, whate’er the cost

  To love and life and tears that glossed