by Dicey Deere
* * *
Upstairs, the morning sun slanted across the tapestry-covered window seat, sun-faded but beautiful, in Rowena’s bedroom. Caroline closed the tall arched door behind her. Even that was an effort: this was one of her weaker days, her legs aching, those friable bones, and today that familiar, enervating pain at the back of her neck. She wore her usual flat-heeled shoes, a shirt, and pants and had pulled on a somewhat raveled navy cardigan against the morning chill. She had found an old barrette of Rowena’s under the Sheraton chair on the landing, and not knowing what to do with it, she had used it to clasp her thin, fair hair back from her forehead. A skinny, overage Alice in Wonderland, she thought and made a face, then shrugged and smiled. She was forty-seven and was four months into her second marriage, in love with Mark Temple, her new husband. Wildly in love was how she thought of it.
Rowena’s telephone call had come some twenty minutes ago, dismaying and exasperating her. “Pack some clothes? You’re going to live above the stables at Castle Moore? But why? Just because you lost control of Thor in the meadow? Oh, for God’s sake, Rowena! Your grandfather —”
“Later, Mother. Please,” and Rowena had rung off.
Caroline looked around the bedroom. Of the nine bedrooms at Ashenden Manor, Rowena’s was the biggest and most beautiful, with its marble fireplace and tall arched windows. Rowena was sixteen when her grandfather had had the room redecorated and gave to her for her birthday. Dark gold wainscoting, blue-green walls, and a frieze of ivory plaster horses prancing around the ceiling. The sleigh bed was buried under a luxurious peach-colored down comforter that Gerald Ashenden had had especially made in Munich where he’d been giving a lecture on thoracic surgery. At the Munich factory, he had himself selected the quality of down. A gift for Rowena’s seventeenth birthday. Seven years ago.
Caroline felt the barrette sliding through her thin hair. She reclasped it, remembering when during her childhood this had been a heavily curtained dark mahogany bedroom with a big carved black bed where her father and mother had slept. The black bed, a dark night, moonlight falling across the bed … A memory surfaced, she saw herself coming crying into this room one moonlit night when she was about eight: saw herself shivering and barefoot in her flannel nightgown, neck aching, that painful aching, frightening her. At her weak cry, her father reared up in that black bed, such a fierce, angry, repudiating look on his face, glaring at her, that she stumbled back, frightened. And her mother? Her mother lying there on her back, asleep, tangled dark hair strewn on the pillow, one beautiful white arm hanging over the edge of the bed. Even then, Caroline had known her mother was drunk. Her mother, who loved her, yet was locked away in some secret place within herself, helpless.
“Ma’am? Here’s Ms. Rowena’s carrying bag.” Jennie O’Shea came in and put the black nylon bag on the bed. “I gave it a good brushing.”
* * *
Caroline packed the clothes. They were mostly worn and stained jodhpurs and boots. When Rowena wasn’t at her vet classes in Dublin, she mucked out the horse stalls at the manor and at Castle Moore and exercised the three horses at the castle a mile west of Ashenden Manor. Winifred Moore paid her thirty pounds a month. But Rowena would have done it for free. She was a lover of animals: dogs, horses, pigs, cats. She didn’t mind getting dirty, mucking out stables. Besides, she was active, vigorous; she loved exercise.
Caroline zipped the nylon bag closed. The simple act sent a twinge of pain through her shoulder and made her gasp. Pain, since the beginning, since babyhood, always pain. She sank down on the bed. When she caught her breath, she’d take one of the pills. Pain …
* * *
Pain … and always her father, the already-famous surgeon, Dr. Gerald Ashenden, looming like a giant, hating the very sight of her. A pitiful-looking thing, with bluish-white skin, fair hair, and bewildered hazel eyes. She whimpered in her sleep, rocked by her mother. Aching bones, thin legs, pains in her neck when she turned her head. School could not be considered. She was tutored at home. Afternoons, when her father returned from his surgery in Dublin and happened upon her, she hardly dared look at him. She shrank into corners. She was afraid of him and ashamed of being the pitiful little thing she was, so that he could not love her. She knew her mother loved her, but her mother, her beautiful mother, would go off to the village. The two maids whispered about it; Caroline sometimes caught the murmured words, “O’Malley’s pub,” and once, “staggering on the access road.” She heard other whispers. Her mother had been Kathleen Brady: she’d been a girl, eighteen, come from Galway to live with a spinster aunt above a shop in Ballynagh. She’d gotten a job as a waitress at a pub. Whisper, whisper, the young intern, Gerald Ashenden, heir to the Ashenden estate, had one evening dropped into the pub … whisper, whisper. “Milk and honey,” Father Donovan said to Father O’Neal. “No Catholic girl has a right to look like that.” Whisper …
When Caroline was eight, her mother somehow managed to arrange a birthday party for her. Neighboring children came. The party was ending in the late afternoon, and on the west lawn three or four children, departing, began roughhousing, playfully pushing each other around, faces getting red and sweaty, shirts being pulled out. In the midst of this, her father appeared, arriving home from his office in Dublin. He stood watching the children, smiling. And with a stab of misery, sharp as a knife, Caroline saw that her father liked children who had glowing health — active, shouting children, the kind who liked to play violent games and weren’t afraid to ride horses.
* * *
The phone on Rowena’s bedside table buzzed. Caroline picked it up. “Hello?” No answer. Instead, after an instant, a click. Disturbing, that sort of thing. If it had been a wrong number, the person could have said. She put down the phone. The pain in her neck was lessening. She rummaged in the pocket of the raveled cardigan, found her little plastic bottle of pills, and swallowed one without water; she’d long since gotten used to the art of pill swallowing. In a few minutes she’d be fine. What had started her thinking about those childhood miseries? Poor little wren that she’d been!
And then, worse, when she was eleven, something dreadful happened.
It was July. There was a drought. For six weeks no rain fell. Rushing streams in the valley where Ballynagh lay became trickles, then dried up altogether. Foxes, squirrels, rabbits died, snakes became bolder. High on the mountains among the gorse and heather, sparkling streams were diverted to supply the valley with water, but already in the woods, dry branches rustled in dry winds. Then one early evening in the woods in sight of Ashenden Manor, there was a burst of fire like an explosion, a brushfire, crackling, then roaring. Ballynagh’s volunteer firefighters fought it: reinforcements arrived from surrounding villages. In a four-hour battle they conquered the fire. Dying, its thick smoke rose and drifted like a fog over Ashenden Manor. Two hours later, the firefighters, cautiously walking through the still smoldering woods to put out any last vestiges of fire, came upon the body of Kathleen Brady Ashenden. Later it was established that Kathleen Ashenden had left O’Malley’s pub, and as she sometimes did, must have been taking the shortcut through the woods to get home.
For weeks after her mother now belonged to them, as Caroline confusedly thought of it — belonged to those other Ashendens lying within the iron-railed Ashenden cemetery — Caroline lived inside of books, reading, reading. In some strange way it was as though she was searching for her mother somewhere in the pages. The other odd thing was that she felt she had lost a child, that her mother had been a child who had run away.
But then, two months later, a miracle happened. It was September, about five o’clock in the afternoon. She was sitting on the broad stone steps of the manor, reading Ivanhoe. She looked up and saw her father, just returned from his day in Dublin, coming as usual from the stable where he kept his car. He came toward the steps, tall, handsome, fair-haired, his dark, heavy-lidded eyes concentrated with thought. At sight of her, the frown, that familiar faint repudiating twitch, appeared between hi
s brows.
That’s when the magic happened.
As though released from some kind of bondage, she suddenly no longer cared. Gone was the ache of being unloved, gone the shame that she was such a hateful sight to her father. She did not care. She did not care. From the stone steps, she looked composedly back up at him in his city clothes. She even smiled. And she saw instantly that he knew.
From then on, she did as she pleased. When she was twenty, wearing a Queen Guinevere circlet to hold back her fair hair and with the smell of marijuana on her breath, overcome with love she married Tom Keegan, guitar-playing rock star. “A darling man, besides,” they said of Tom Keegan, who was then thirty-one, with recordings that were at the top of the charts. And when he was thirty-six and died in the van accident at Galley Head, “It took a piece out of Ireland, a main missing piece,” they said of him. Caroline thought at first she would die of the loss. But at least by then she had the children, Rowena and Scott.
“Ma’am? I’ve finished up here. Should I bring Ms. Rowena’s bag downstairs for you?”
“Hmmm?” She swam up from the past. “Oh, yes, Jennie. And didn’t I say? You’re to take it to Castle Moore, just leave it with Rose. You can use Ms. Rowena’s bike, it has a big enough basket.”
* * *
Alone, Caroline raised her head and looked up at the frieze of plaster horses, mares and stallions, manes flying, hooves upraised. She shivered. Something terrible had happened in the meadow, why lie to herself? And something terrible between her father and her daughter had caused it. Something beyond dreadful. But what? The what loomed like a giant wave. What? Who could tell her? Scott? She would sound out Scott.
She drew a breath of relief. Scott would know. He and Rowena were unusually close. He was two years younger than Rowena. But Rowena had always loved and protected her little brother. And Scott, maybe because of his deformed leg, seemed to have compensated by developing an intuitive sense.
Yes, Scott. He would know.
8
Jennie heard Dr. Ashenden come into the front hall behind her. She recognized his definite step, the crack of his heel on the marble floor. She was putting on her three-quarter-length coat. She’d meantime put the black nylon bag on the settle beside the front door. It was already eleven o’clock.
“That bag,” Dr. Ashenden said, his voice sharp, “belongs to my granddaughter. Why’s it here? What’re you doing with it? What’s she up to?”
Buttoning her coat, Jennie looked at Dr. Ashenden, one long, shocked, fascinated glance, then down at her buttoning fingers. His face! Scratches, purple bruises around his bloodshot eyes. One cheek was swollen from chin to cheekbone, a dark red. It was so painful to see that it made Jennie flinch. One of his shoulders was heavily bandaged. The left. His arm rested in a dark blue sling.
“Well?” Authoritative. It made her jump.
“The bag?” She was taking it to the stables at Castle Moore … Clothes, yes, some clothes … No, she didn’t know … Mrs. Keegan — that is, Mrs. Temple — had packed them … A telephone call, she thought, from Ms. Rowena.
“I see.”
Out the door with the bag, shivery somehow. Closing it behind her, she heard a sound, at first she thought a hoarse and strangled cry, but the door, a massive door, squeaked like a human in pain. It got that way in the wet of October, the wood expanding; it was oak.
* * *
A half hour before lunch, the smell of pea soup with curry wafted into the hall where Caroline at last found Scott. He was standing by the hall table, flicking through the morning’s mail, resting his weight on his good leg. Caroline stood watching her son, smiling, but with that inevitable ache in her heart. Scott was twenty-two years old. Like her, he was too thin, and not tall. He had a thatch of fair hair and blue eyes with a tinge of gray that made them look so light as to be almost transparent. “See-through eyes,” Caroline had heard a youngster in Ballynagh call them. In any case, Scott was undeniably a handsome young man.
Right now, he was in a navy shirt and yellow sweater. He wore dove-gray trousers that as usual he’d bought from a catalog to spare himself the mortification of buying trousers in a shop, exposing his pathetically narrow leg in the steel brace. Caroline thought: My bones, my son’s bones. Not like Rowena’s. Did Scott envy Rowena that, her health and vitality? How could he not?
Scott looked up. “Hello, Ma.” He was separating catalogs from the regular family mail. “Smells like something with curry.”
“Pea soup. Where’s your muffler? The new one, the brown that I knitted, there’s such a chill in the air. And wind. Leaves blowing all about.”
“My muffler? Don’t know, Ma. Last I saw, Rowena was wearing it. Sneaking out of here early this very morn, her worn-out parka and the muffler, old brogues. Looked like a refugee from War and Peace.”
“Rowena here? This morning?” She felt somehow betrayed. “What’s going on, Scott? Two conflicting … My father saying he was out riding and his stirrup broke and he fell off of Thor. And Inspector O’Hare’s different version. And Rowena last night in jail! What’s going on, Scott? If a mother may be so bold as to ask?”
“Hmmm?” Scott was tapping the pile of catalogs on the the table to even them, his fair-haired head bent down. “Am I my sister’s keeper?”
“Scott!”
He looked up, contrite. “Sorry, Ma. My wicked tongue. But I was in Dublin. I got home late last night. Haven’t got it straight yet, that meadow affair.”
Caroline felt a familiar apprehension. In Dublin. One of those parties. A lot of drinking, gay young men, some nights not even coming home. It had started two years ago. Where did he get the money? He had no money of his own, no job, only the small royalties she’d made over to him, royalties from his late father’s guitar recordings. So where did the money come from? She looked at the catalogs in his thin fingers. Catalogs for the expensive things he bought lately: the Renaissance lyre chair for his rooms at Ashenden Manor, gifts of perfume and leather and recordings for friends who were young men Caroline had never met. And having his favorite books specially bound by Erasmus House in Geneva.
She put a hand vaguely to her hair as a wisp fell across her eyes. Her poor Scott. She hardly dared think what she suspected.
“Ma?”
She looked at him blankly. She was seeing a morning twenty-two years ago, when Scott was born and she looked down at him in her arms and sensed that something was wrong and felt danger like a dark halo around his still-damp head.
“Maybe at lunch,” Scott was saying, and his tone was gentle, “we’ll ask your pa, the good Dr. Ashenden. He’ll sort it all out for us, don’t worry. All right?”
“Yes, darling,” Caroline said, with total disbelief. “Your grandfather will explain it. That’s best.”
* * *
Scott watched his mother cross the hall. His gleaming little red Miata convertible was parked outside on the gravel near the stable. He longed to escape the ordeal of Saturday lunch. These hellish weekend lunches. Charlatan! The word, so contemptuous, though not actually spoken aloud, was in the curl of his grandfather’s lips and in the angry glare of his dark, heavy-lidded eyes when Ashenden looked across the soup and noontime cold meats at the thickly built, fifty-year-old Dr. Mark Temple. That Ashenden’s daughter Caroline had married a chiropractor! Fakes, all of them! A travesty to call them doctors. It made for a disagreeable and indigestible lunch. Scott had heard his grandfather expound on the subject of Dr. Mark Temple, ranting to his friend Padraic Collins one evening in the study, “The Ashenden name, damn it! Associated with that bone man’s name!” Outrageous that he, Dr. Gerald Ashenden, whose name was preceded in medical journals and weekly newsmagazines by the word eminent, now had a son-in-law who pushed around people’s bones. In Ashenden’s view, Mark Temple had pushed around Caroline’s bones in his expensive office in Dublin, full of charts of people’s spines, until he had pushed her into marriage. Caroline believed totally in Dr. Mark Temple, who presumably adjusted her bones and wh
o massaged her neck and back and limbs. “Believes in him! Damned fortune hunter! After her money!” Infuriating. And she loved him.
Scott knew that at lunch his grandfather would be silent about Rowena’s murderous attack on him in the meadow.
As for his mother — “The Lady of Shallot,” Scott said under his breath. Not weaving at a loom, no, but knitting; knitting mufflers and gloves and sweaters for him and Rowena, blue, brown, rust, red. He smiled, thinking of it. And then he stopped smiling, because his mother was bewildered and frightened for Rowena and wanted to know. But anything he could tell her would break her heart.
9
At four o’clock it was quiet at Ashenden Manor except for the murmur of voices and clatter of china in the kitchen, where Jennie O’Shea and Molly, the second maid, were fixing a high tea.
On the second floor, in the west bedroom, a Brahms concerto played softly. Broad latticed windows were open to the view of Wicklow mountains and the high hills dotted with grazing sheep. Below, fields spread from the manor to the woods and the beginning of the bridle path.
Mark Temple stood beside the massage table where his wife, Caroline Ashenden, lay facedown, naked, a towel across her buttocks. He briskly rubbed his hands together, warming the lotion. Then he put his palms on Caroline’s naked back just below her neck. Then downward, long, slow strokes, putting gentle pressure on the strokes where they ended at Caroline’s waist.
“Heaven,” Caroline said drowsily, eyes closed.
Mark said nothing. He was frowning, his hands resting lightly at Caroline’s waist. So delicate, so thin boned. And those pains. Shoulders, neck. He wondered if Caroline was aware that one of her legs was slightly thinner than the other. He thought of Scott’s thin leg. Caroline was lucky to have come through childbirth so well, first with Rowena, then with Scott. When she’d appeared in his office in Dublin a year ago, hoping he could help her, he’d been surprised that her father, Dr. Gerald Ashenden, had been unable to diagnose the cause of Caroline’s bouts of pain. Would gentle massage help? In his office on Merrion Square, Mark Temple had examined Caroline Ashenden Keegan, widow of Tom Keegan, the rock star. Then, listening to her low voice, he had looked at her untidy fair hair and delicate pale mouth, her hazel eyes with the heavy white lids. He had, lastly, in a final check, put his hands gently on her clavicle that linked the scapula and sternum. And unable to help himself, he had fallen in love. He was fifty years old, had been married twice, and was just divorced.