by Dicey Deere
“So, Sylvester Hall. I arrived on a Friday noon. It was August. The housekeeper, Mrs. Dugan, had the second maid bring me out to the coach house, to where I’d stay, a room up above. On a hanger was my uncle Olin’s summer uniform. Blue twill. It had been cleaned. I put it on. Too big in the waist, and I was taller, but it fitted well enough. Then I went down to look at the cars.”
His voice stopped. After a moment, a sigh. “There were only two cars in the coach house. One I don’t remember. Ordinary. The other was a silver Rolls. A Rolls! I’d seen only one Rolls in my life. It was in Galway, parked in front of the Great Southern, it had a diplomat’s license. And now my second. Made me gasp.
“I got in the car. It felt strange. Here I was, the son of a farmer with a piece of land the size of my shoe, and I was sitting behind the wheel of a Rolls on a seat of the softest leather. The car’s upholstery was green leather. The wood was polished walnut. The fittings gleamed. There were keys in a green marble ashtray on the dashboard. I poked about, looking for a manual, but I couldn’t find one. I sat there trying to figure out what to push and pull. Then I heard a voice. Husky and laughing. ‘There’s a booklet in that little drawer, you press the button to make it open. Anyway, Mr. Chauf feur, I know how the bloody thing works.’
“It was Natalie. She got in the car beside me. Smelled like sweat, sweet sweat and horse sweat; she’d been riding. Hair in a tangle of curls, sunburn across her nose. Looked sixteen, which she wasn’t, she was eighteen to my twenty. ‘Shove over,’ she told me, ‘I’ll show you.’ Talked a blue streak, you’d have thought she’d taken a course in mechanics, what with all she knew. Slangy, too. Dirty mouth for a girl. I didn’t know what to make of her. There was an open tin of tobacco in with the manual, my uncle Olin must’ve left it. Putting the manual back, I scratched my hand on it, the palm. ‘Double shit!’ she said, ‘Poor lad!’ and she ducked her head and licked it clean, her tongue on my palm. Then, like a joke, she pulled my hand up to her mouth and kissed the palm and laughed. ‘Salty!’ she said, ‘Blood always is … red and salty.’ At that I was—it was as though my head got turned around, I didn’t know what. But something changed in me. I was never the same after that, right from the beginning. She was in my … my blood. And I in hers.”
In the hospital room, Torrey looked at Thomas Brannigan’s narrow, pale face. He had turned his head toward the window, but she had a sense that he was smiling. Gone was the cultured voice that over the years in Canada had become his. He had gone back, years back. The young chauffeur, telling his tale, spoke in the voice of the twenty-year-old from Drumcliff.
“All that August I’d drive her to Dublin in the Rolls to visit her great aunt in hospital. She wore a navy suit that was too small, she’d grown so. She had no dresses, only a white afternoon dress for proper social occasions and the suit ‘for tea or the dentist in Dublin,’ she told me, making a face, and a pair of jodhpurs for riding. The rest were school uniforms, but she’d graduated from her girls’ school in June.”
His voice drifted off, came back. “In Dublin, we’d eat sausages and mashed at a Bewley’s. Then we’d wander around St. Stephen’s Green or poke through bookshops. A bit of ice cream off a cart, sometimes. Then we’d drive back home to Ballynagh. But the fourth time we went to Dublin was different.” Again he stopped, then went on:
“That fourth time, after Bewley’s, Natalie wanted to go to shops, look in department stores, even buy something. But her allowance wasn’t enough to buy more than a pencil case. I had my pay, but she wouldn’t let me use it. She was in a daring mood, laughing and excited. We went to a shop where Natalie’s great-aunt bought her school clothes, and Natalie bought a yellow party dress with flounces. Beautiful and expensive. She charged it to her great-aunt’s account. She thought the manager would refuse or ask her questions. She almost didn’t breathe, signing the charge. But they just thanked her and gave her the dress in a box, all in tissue paper. When we got outside with the box, she said,” ‘I’ve been let out of school! In actuality!’ It was as though freedom from school and from her great-aunt in hospital had gone to her head, made her daring and wild. And she laughed so hard that people passing looked at her and couldn’t help smiling.
“But in the Rolls driving back, she started to cry, so anguished I couldn’t bear it. So I offered to let her drive, she’d never driven though she knew the manual by heart, she hadn’t been allowed. The driving calmed her down. But that night she came to my room over the coach house.”
Tom Brannigan rubbed a hand over his face and drew an enormous breath. “She had on the yellow party dress. She’d put on lipstick. She stood looking at me. Then with the back of her hand she wiped off the lipstick and came to me.”
31
At eleven o’clock Torrey got off the bus on the access road outside Ballynagh. The early morning sun had disappeared, the sky was overcast, a wind swirled the dry leaves about.
It would be at least a ten-minute walk to O’Sullivan’s barn. But if she kept her hands in her windbreaker pockets they’d stay warm. And she had on her knitted cap, it covered her ears.
She tucked her chin deeper into her woolen turtle-necked sweater and started off. She didn’t even see the woods around her, she didn’t feel the cold, she was only hearing Tom Brannigan’s voice, as he lay in the hospital bed.
“The old witch! I was chauffeur at Sylvester Hall for four months. Sybil Sylvester came home from hospital in September. I’d drive her to play bridge or to dine with her friends in surrounding great houses.
“Finally, Natalie and I knew we’d have to tell her we were going to get married. And that there’d be a baby. We were excited, happy. We had it planned. If it was a girl, we’d name her Millicent, for Natalie’s mother. If it was a boy, we’d name him Dakin, after my father and grandfather.
“But then I had to go to Drumcliff for my older brother’s wedding, I’d be gone two days. ‘We’ll tell her when you get back,’ Natalie said. She was wild with joy.
“So I was gone two days. When I got back to Sylvester Hall, I threw my duffle into my room above the coach house and went to find her. But she wasn’t anywhere about. No one, not the housekeeper, not the maids—no one knew were she was. I was bewildered. Then frightened. Natalie had known what time the bus was bringing me back to Ballynagh, she would have been waiting impatiently for me.
Finally, frantic, I burst in on Natalie’s great-aunt Sybil in the drawing room. I’d never even been in that room before. Sybil Sylvester was playing solitaire at a gate-legged table near the fireplace.
“‘What’s happened?’ I said, ‘Where’s Natalie?’
“At that, Sybil Sylvester just looked at me as though I were too contemptible to be worth answering. Then she said, ‘Natalie had a stomach upset. She confessed to me why. She wasn’t even ashamed! What did she think? That I’d embrace the situation? Take you to my bosom? Pah! I explained to her that she’d been foolish, that you were only after the Sylvester holdings. That she must not see you again. That she must not have a child by you.’
“I was dazed. I must have gawked. And then she said, ‘If you persist, if you think you can marry Natalie and live happily ever after—pah! I’ll disinherit her. I’ll leave her penniless. She’ll get to hate you. Being a chauffeur’s wife! A Catholic wife, besides, ending up with a gaggle of hungry brats! Living in some shabby public housing.’ And she said, smirking, triumphant, ‘I told her so. I painted a graphic picture for her.’
“I shrank from that. Sybil Sylvester sat watching me. She had blue eyes like agates, marble cold and shining, a doll’s eyes. She was tapping the edge of a playing card on the table, her rings glittered.
“And she went on, watching me, ‘Natalie didn’t want to listen. But finally she knew I was right. You understand? Natalie at last has understood. She has agreed not to see you again. She has already left Ireland. I have sent her abroad to some connections of mine. They will discreetly—they will take care of everything.’”
Torrey shivered,
not only because of the wind that swept across the field as she approached the O’Sullivan’s barn. She was seeing Tom Brannigan in the hospital bed. The edge of the bandage that swathed his head had darkened with sweat. “Gone. Natalie gone, leaving no word for me! But one thing that Sybil Sylvester had said rang in my head, the one thing I hated to think but it could happen: Natalie, penniless, trapped, could get to hate me, despise me. It was true she’d be better off without me. Comfortably off, rich, a secure life, marrying her own kind. And … maybe she’d gone because she wanted to keep on loving me! Loving me forever and ever. Was that a crazy way to think? Anyway, it’s what I thought. She loves me that much!”
There in the hospital bed, Tom Brannigan turned his face fully to Torrey. “Sybil Sylvester was lying, of course, about what had happened to Natalie. But I didn’t know it. Not then.
“And there in the drawing room, Sybil Sylvester’s agate eyes watched me. And her voice was thin as vinegar.
“‘I have business connections in Canada. I can arrange a position for you. Clerking in a bank, in Montreal. At the Bank of Canada you will find five thousand pounds deposited to an account in your name.’
“When I left the drawing room, I could see Sybil Sylvester’s reflection in the mirror over the mantle. She was laying down a new hand of solitaire.
“Upstairs in my room in the coach house I found a plane ticket lying on the table. A direct flight from Shannon to Montreal.”
32
The BMW was parked in the rutted drive beside O’Sullivan’s barn. Shivering in the cold, Torrey knocked hard on the barn door. “Kate!”
“Go away! I’m working!”
Oh, no! Let the world of art suffer. This was a matter of murder. Torrey pushed open the door and went in.
Kate Burnside was sitting on a swivel stool holding a mug. The easel before her was blank. What Kate Burnside had been working on was a glass of whiskey. The bottle was on the table beside her among a jumble of paint tubes. If Kate had been drinking hot rum, Torrey would have asked for the same. Her fingertips were ice cold. A cast-iron stove warmed the studio. Torrey blew on her cold hands and sat down on the arm of the leather sofa.
Kate Burnside, holding the glass, stared at her. “I said, don’t come in!” Her voice was angry, a frown formed lines between her brows. She was wearing a heavy brocade kimono edged with what looked like sable. Her dark hair was in a single braid that was drawn forward over her shoulder and fell across her right breast. She looked romantic in a disheveled way.
Torrey said, “I’m sorry, but it’s about Natalie Cameron. Because you were Natalie’s friend. Her best friend. And—”
“Whoever told you that? Besides, it was a thousand years ago.”
“All right. But while she’s out on bail Inspector O’Hare is huffing and puffing, gathering evidence to get a conviction. I don’t know what the penalty is in Ireland for murder, but it can’t be pretty.”
Kate Burnside swirled the drink in her glass and stared at her. “What’s it your business? Just because Dakin got that phone call at your cottage. Yes, he told me about it. He tells me lots of things. Besides, Inspector O’Hare dislikes you. You irritate him.”
Torrey said, “I’ve just come from Glasshill Hospital. I saw Tom Brannigan. He told me things.”
No response. The only sound was the low roar of the stove. Then Kate said, “Went right to the fountainhead, did you?”
Torrey said, “You were best friends with Natalie, weren’t you? Right up until you were seventeen or eighteen. Best friends. So you would’ve known about the chauffeur. Tom Brannigan. And that Natalie got pregnant with Dakin.”
“That’s none of your—”
“That’s why Ricard was murdered, isn’t it? Because he knew. And threatened to reveal it.”
Kate Burnside said, “You are a tiger, aren’t you?” She turned on the stool and uncapped the whiskey bottle on the table. “A libation?” Holding the bottle, she looked at Torrey.
“No, thanks. So. Blackmail. Of course!”
Kate filled her glass and recapped the bottle. Glass in hand, for a moment she sat looking back at Torrey and biting the inside of her cheek. Then she shrugged.
“Dakin came here that Thursday. He told me that Natalie had received two letters demanding money under threat of revealing something. But that Natalie had no idea what. Mystifying and frightening. Yet for some reason she was hesitating about going to the Gardai. That in itself alarmed Dakin even more. Poor lad! Struggling so with his bewilderment!”
“You were able to help him? You, his mother’s old friend. Or not?”
“Not. It had become too complex. A Pandora’s box. I didn’t dare. Better to keep him in the dark, not knowing.” She gave a sudden hoot of a laugh. “It was something that the blackmailer didn’t know, either! It was something only I knew.”
Torrey, on the arm of the leather couch, sat very still. “Knew?”
“Because I’d been there when it happened. Back then. I was seventeen. Natalie was eighteen. And in love with the chauffeur. Tom Brannigan.”
“Knew what?” Torrey said.
“That second blackmail letter? Dakin told me that Natalie had refused to go to meet the blackmailer at the cairn.”
“Yes?”
“So I went to meet him. I … well, not just because of what I knew that the blackmailer didn’t know. But because I felt I owed Natalie something. In a way.”
“Owed?” But then, when Kate only shrugged in response, Torrey remembered the mustard-colored jersey hanging in Kate’s elegant bathroom.
Kate said, “So I went. That Saturday noon. I thought the blackmailer would be Tom Brannigan, come back from somewhere because he wanted money. I went to meet him at the cairn to tell him to let Natalie alone because she would never, ever, pay blackmail since she had no idea what he was talking about.”
Torrey could only stare. She waited.
“But when I got to the cairn, it wasn’t Tom Brannigan. It was this Rafe person.” Kate put up a hand and touched the braid that fell across her breast. She pulled the brocade robe closer, the sable edging dark against her white throat. “Raphael Ricard, the papers say.” She looked at Torrey. “I told him what I had come to tell Tom Brannigan.”
“And what was that?”
“I told this Rafe person the truth. That Natalie had retrograde amnesia. She didn’t remember that Tom Brannigan had ever existed. She actually thought Dakin was her son by Andrew Cameron.”
33
“It was a rainy evening,” Kate Burnside said. “I had a party to go to in Dublin. My father was away, or he would have forbidden it. ‘No daughter of mine’—and such-like drivel. ‘You’re only seventeen! Dublin is a sink of iniquity!’ But my mother never could cope. I had a flame-colored dress and my parents had given me a little convertible when I’d graduated from Alcock’s.”
Telling it, Kate walked back and forth in the heavy, brocade kimono. She wore soft, thickly padded Oriental slippers that made no sound. She hardly glanced at Torrey, who had slid down from the arm of the sofa and sat among the cushions.
“Anyway, I kissed my mother and threw on a raincoat and went out. And there was Natalie just driving up in that big silver Rolls. “Get in!” she told me, her voice all queer. So I got in beside her. She sounded hysterical. She’d had a terrible quarrel with Sybil, her great-aunt. Sybil had found out about Tom Brannigan and that Natalie was pregnant. Sybil had been furious. ‘Sleeping with the chauffeur! Like in some cheap sex film! Or like in that disgusting D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’sLover, sleeping with the gardener or whatever he was. And you’re pregnant, besides. But you’re not having this baby! We’ll go abroad. I’ll arrange everything.’
“In the Rolls, telling it, Natalie’s face was white, she was wild with rage. ‘How dare she! Tom and I—we love each other! We’re going to get married!’
“‘Fine,’ I told her. I looked out at the rain splashing down on the hood of the Rolls. ‘Is there anything I can do? Just tell m
e. Anything. It’s a shame! But I’m in a rush. I’ve a party to go to in Dublin.’ And I said, ‘D’you want to come?’”
“‘I’ll drive you,’” she said, quick as a flash, ‘It’ll make Sybil wild to know I’m driving the Rolls. She’s never allowed it. But I know how. Tom always lets me. And to Dublin! To a party! That’s even worse.’ And she laughed.”
In the barn, Kate Burnside turned to Torrey and spread her hands helplessly. “I should have known better! And in that weather! But I was only a kid! And there was that party! By the time we got to Dublin, the wind was gusting, blowing the rain in sheets. We could barely see through the windshield, the streetlights were blurs. On Chancery Street we hit a curb and crashed into a streetlight.
“The accident was minor. Thank God for that, I remember thinking. Little did I know! Only a dented fender and a broken windshield and side window. But Natalie’s arm was cut by broken glass. Luckily, the Gardai showed up right away, lights flashing.
“At the hospital, Natalie’s damaged arm turned out to be a nasty business. Then it appeared that she also had a concussion. By that time, it was late, so staying overnight at the hospital was advisable for her.
“Aside from that, we had a problem with the Gardai: Natalie had no driver’s license.”
Kate, pacing, stopped in front of Torrey. “That coldhearted Sybil Sylvester! The teachers at Alcock’s Academy were angels compared to her. Well, anyway. I telephoned Sybil Sylvester from the hospital and told her about the accident. ‘Indeed?’ she said, her voice coming from somewhere north of Iceland. ‘A fitting punishment! Running off in a temper! And driving the Rolls! Injured her arm? A deserved punishment! Don’t expect me to rush off to Dublin and bring her home. She can take the bus. Feeling chastized if she has any sense. Not that she has shown much of that. As for the Rolls, I will see to the repairs. The cost will come out of Natalie’s allowance.’