The Irish Manor House Murder

by Dicey Deere

  And now here he was, temporarily domiciled in Ashenden Manor. It would be another month before renovations on the elegant little Georgian house in Dublin would be completed and they could move in.

  He had come to love Ashenden Manor. Slum child that he had been, born in a squalid section of Limerick, as a small boy he’d sometimes daydreamed of having been born to landed gentry and perhaps been stolen from a country estate. Then, just four months ago, driving with Caroline in his Bentley through the iron gates and up the drive of Ashenden Manor and seeing for the first time the broad, gracious Georgian manor, he’d thought, Yes. There it is. At last. At last he was coming home.

  With his creamed hand, he slicked back a tendril of Caroline’s fair hair that had fallen across her nape. He was thinking how, these last four months of being married to Caroline, each late afternoon when he’d left his office in Dublin and come home to Ashenden Manor, he imagined all over again that this was the estate he had been born to, grew up in. He’d had a pony, then a horse. He’d worn good clothes, slept in a soft bed, breakfasted on porridge, eggs, and sausages. Warm rooms in winter, crackling fires in fireplaces, servants.

  So here he was at last. Ashenden Manor.

  But alas, there was a snake in this paradise: his father-in-law. It spoiled everything.

  “Mmmmm, heavenly,” Caroline murmured, eyes closed, Mark could see her right profile as she lay with her face turned sideways. White eyelids, a touch of rose in her cheeks. The tiny lines of pain around her mouth were gone; the massage always helped. “I’ve good news,” he said. “Carey Construction called. They’ll be done in about ten days. Then they only have to pave the terrace. But we can start moving in.”

  The white lids flew open, Caroline turned on an elbow, alarm in her hazel eyes. “Oh, no! Not yet!”

  “What?” He was startled. He’d expected her to be delighted.

  “Well, I don’t … I’m not ready! I mean, there are so many things —” Her voice broke, she turned her head from his gaze and lay facedown. “Oh,” her voice was muffled, “it’s too soon!”

  He was bewildered. Caroline had never been happy at Ashenden Manor. She’d told him as much. She’d had a wretched childhood. Yet now she didn’t want to leave. Too soon? Why too soon? It puzzled him. And something in her voice. Almost as though she feared to leave Ashenden Manor.

  “Well, no rush,” he said comfortably. “They might as well finish the terrace first.” And under his broad hands on Caroline’s shoulder blades, he felt the rise of her breath in a relieved sigh and a relaxation of the sudden, surprising tension in her shoulders. He sighed. So, weeks longer, living with that cold-faced, scornful bastard, Dr. Ashenden. Looked down upon. Bad accent. Limerick slum boy. Easy to guess, too, that the eminent Ashenden had little use for a chiropractor.

  But at least he’d succeeded on his own. Slaved and saved. Waiter, doorman, valet parking attendant, all the dirty work.

  Ashenden, though, had had the silver spoon. Generations of landed Anglo-Irish Ashendens before him. And he an only child, heir to the estate.

  Enviable, too, Ashenden’s looks. An early photo in the library downstairs showed him to be extraordinarily good-looking. A crisp wave in his thick, fair hair, dark eyes under strong brows. Now at seventy-six his crisp hair was gray, his eyebrows were gray-white. But his tall frame had hardly thickened — he still wore the same dinner jacket he’d worn in his twenties.

  Mark Temple, five feet eight, thickly built, and with rusty hair, tightened his abdominal muscles. Dr. Ashenden was also admittedly in enviable physical shape. Even though he got to his Dublin office at seven o’clock each morning and operated two mornings a week, he rode every evening at six o’clock. There were two horses in the Ashenden Manor stable. The bay mare he’d given to Rowena on her twenty-first birthday and Thor, the steel-gray stallion, the one he himself rode.

  Damn it! Rowena’s strange violence in the meadow yesterday, Rowena on Thor. Unfair that Caroline should now have this frightening worry about Rowena.

  “I’m getting a chill.” Caroline sat up. Drooping water lily, too thin, stretch marks on her thighs, but lovely.

  “I’ll close the windows.”

  Closing them, he looked out. The sun was setting. At dusk, around six o’clock in this fall season, he often glimpsed Gerald Ashenden on the gray stallion, cantering or galloping along the bridle path, an upright, handsome figure in breeches, riding boots, and cowl-necked maroon jersey; he never wore a riding jacket despite rain or cold autumn weather. Enough to make one shiver and long for a pint by a blazing fire. But would Ashenden ride today at dusk with an injured shoulder? Very likely, the bastard. In an hour or so, with the sky turning violet and the woods darkening, he’d be cantering along the bridle path astride Thor.

  “Sweetie,” Caroline said, “my book. The Eavan Boland, I left it downstairs in the library, on the writing desk, I think. Would you mind? I’m going to take a shower.”

  Mark nodded. “Right. Which book? What’s it called?”

  “In a Time of Violence. Poetry.”

  * * *

  At half past four, Mark Temple picked up the book from the desk in the library. A slim volume. Why was poetry always called a “slim volume,” he wondered. A “slim volume of poetry”?

  He turned to leave — and collided with Dr. Ashenden just coming in. “Sorry! Sorry!” Christ! Ashenden had staggered back. Bandaged shoulder, face grotesque with damage … Deservedly — or not? Took a beating there in the meadow; he looked terrible, not just the physical damage, but something, some inner devastation had taken place. Mark felt a surge of pity. But Ashenden was looking at the book in his hand. “Caroline leaves her things about.” Then, nastily, “Wasted your time marrying my daughter, Temple. I’m revising my will next week.”

  For a moment Mark gazed at his father-in-law. Then abruptly he strode past him, just managing not to strike him with the slim volume, In a Time of Violence.

  10

  “I’ve rented the groundsman’s cottage to Torrey Tunet,” Winifred Moore said to Sheila Flaxton. They were on the sunny, wind-protected west terrace of Castle Moore. They’d arrived from London a half hour ago, and after a quick washup were having a reviving tea of liver pâté, rolls, sweet buns, sliced peaches, Stilton, and water crackers. In Winifred’s case, this was preceded by a double vodka, zestfully downed.

  “Torrey Tunet?” Sheila said, “Back again in Ballynagh? Id’ve thought she’d be shy of Ballynagh — what the villagers know about her. Embarrassed.”

  “Nonsense. Everybody has something shameful to hide about his past. At least it wasn’t murder. Besides, people forget.” Winifred rattled the ice in her glass. “Torrey will be all right. Just as long as she doesn’t tread on Inspector O’Hare’s toes.”

  Winifred Moore was fifty years old and big-boned, with little fat. Her face was square-jawed, her cheeks had a high russet color, like a stain. Her hair was reddish gray, and she wore it short and pushed behind her ears. There was a look of suppressed humor about her mouth and in her hazel eyes. She had on comfortable, large-sized corduroy jeans and a pullover.

  “Another thing, Sheila,” Winifred said. “Rowena Keegan. Rose says that this morning when she was doing the ironing, Rowena Keegan showed up here. Moved in above the stables, the old trainers’ quarters. Then Jennie O’Shea came at noon on a bike, bringing some of Rowena’s clothes. She’s welcome, of course — she knows that. What d’you make of it?”

  “How can I make anything of it?” Sheila was always petulant after the trip from London. She hated travel. She was forty and had light blue guileless eyes in a somewhat squishy-looking, pasty face. She cut her own hair to save money; it was mixed blonde and gray and cut somewhat unevenly to above her ears and with a few artistically arranged bits of fringe on her forehead. She was the editor of London’s well-known Sisters in Poetry magazine and both Winifred’s friend and the publisher of Winifred’s sometimes prize-winning poetry. She had on two sweaters and a woolen skirt, as she was th
in and wispy and felt the cold more. “For a poet of your caliber, Winifred, I really —”

  “Easy enough to find out,” Winifred said, and grinned, showing strong white teeth. “Did you see Rose’s face? Bursting with Ballynagh gossip, I know that look by now. But I’d prefer Rowena’s version. We’ll ask Rowena to dinner, ply her with booze, and the tale will out. Something significant is my guess.” She glanced up as Rose, the round-faced maid, came out onto the terrace bearing a fresh pot of tea. “Here’s our messenger now.”

  * * *

  Rose having gone to the stables with the message, Sheila got up. “I’m going to wash my hair, it’s so dusty. It feels absolutely unclean.” She fingered her fringe. “And a bath and a nap before dinner.”

  “Do,” Winifred said. Sheila loved a bath in one of Castle Moore’s enormous marble bathtubs.

  * * *

  Alone, Winifred leaned luxuriously back and gazed over the fields and woods. Hers, inherited a year ago from her cousin, the late asinine Desmond Moore. No more scrimping, boiling the same tea leaves. No more depending on the few pounds from her poems in literary magazines. Castle Moore. Six hundred acres. Mountains and streams, glens and bogs, pastures and woods with bridle paths, one of which she could see now, north beyond the ancient stone wall that separated Castle Moore from the Ashenden estate: In the distance she could see the four great chimneys of Ashenden Manor itself.

  It was turning chilly: The sun had become a flat, dull-gold disk in a lavender-tinged sky. Almost six o’clock. So in a few minutes Dr. Ashenden astride his stallion would go cantering as usual along the bridle path and around the stand of beeches, to disappear. An oddly dramatic sight: Dr. Ashenden rode as though he were casting a challenge to time and the elements. He’d named the stallion Thor. Thor, the god of thunder in Norse legends. Was there a romantic side to Ashenden? If so, it was well hidden.

  “Ms. Winifred?” Rose was back, breathing hard from the stairs; she was getting plump, “Her things, Ms. Rowena’s things. They’re all there in the quarters above the stable. She left them on the bed. And I saw her just ten minutes ago — she was stabling Gravy Train. But now, she must have gone out.”

  Winifred looked again at her watch. A few minutes to six. Dinner would be about eight-thirty. She’d even have time for a bit of racewalking to stretch her jet-cramped muscles. “I’ll write a note, Rose. You can take it over. Leave it under the door.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  11

  “Wear something warm,” Jasper O’Mara said.

  Torrey looked up from the laptop on the card table in the corner. The late sun was slanting through the kitchen window and across the kitchen table and the dish cupboard. While she’d worked, hours had passed without her noticing.

  Jasper was leaning against the sink, smiling at her. She’d been vaguely aware of his chopping herbs and then the mouthwatering smell of sauteeing onions, garlic, and tomatoes, and of lilting Irish music playing softly on the radio. There’d been the clink of a bottle against a glass and a cold beer set down beside her laptop. The glass was empty, so she must have drunk it. The kitchen table was already laid for their dinner.

  She stretched, smiling at Jasper. He was wearing, heavy trousers, a black flannel shirt, and an oatmeal-colored sweater. It was time for their before-dinner walk. Almost six o’clock. Up over the hill, down into the woods, past the bridle path, and along the edge of the pond.

  She closed the laptop and pulled off the bandanna she’d tied around her head, the good-luck bandanna she wore when she worked. It was turquoise with a motif of peacocks, so beautiful she’d caught her breath when her father, Vlad Tunet, had given it to her. Given it to her the afternoon of her eleventh birthday, the day he’d gone off for good, leaving her and her dressmaker mother alone, as though he’d never appeared at all in North Hawk, it was all a dream of her mother’s. Except that there she, Torrey, was. Vlad Tunet. So loving, then gone. Tunet, “thunder,” in Romanian.

  Thunder … Thor. For a flashing instant she saw Rowena on the stallion galloping across the meadow.

  “And wear this, it covers your ears.” Jason took her knitted navy cap from the hook on the back of the door and tossed it to her.

  “If you say so.” Stallion. Thunder. It had surprised her that Jasper hadn’t mentioned the excited village gossip about Rowena’s attack on her grandfather. He knew she and Rowena were close friends. And he must’ve heard about Rowena being in the Ballynagh jail last night. He did, after all, occasionally drop in at O’Malley’s pub. And he was living at Nolan’s Bed-and-Breakfast above the needlework shop down the street from the Ballynagh police station.

  Funny that Jasper wasn’t living here in the cottage with her. They were lovers, after all. Six weeks ago she’d awakened one morning with a throbbing head and a rasping throat. The cottage was cold and she’d dressed quickly, shivering, and started a fire in the stove. It was drizzling outside, but she thought she’d better bicycle to the village and get some cold medications. She couldn’t afford to waste time on being sick. Outside, she’d wheeled her bicycle past the little pond and through the hedge to the road. Then she just stood, weak and trembling, blankly reading the patent number on her bicycle over and over. “Anything wrong?” A bicycle on the road had skidded to a stop. “You all right?” A man’s voice, warm and concerned. Torrey couldn’t answer. She could feel perspiration breaking out on her face. Bile was rising in her throat. “I…,” she began and waved a weak, helpless hand, then turned away and threw up.

  “That’s answer enough.” The man’s resonant voice was sympathetic but held a hint of laughter. He’d helped her back to the cottage, got on the phone while she sat slumped on the old couch, and the next she knew she was looking up at the round face of Dr. Padraic Collins. The doctor turned her arm palm upward and at her inner elbow she felt the prick of a needle. She slept then and woke to the delicious smell of bacon and fresh-baked scones. The stranger was there, wearing her checked red apron and whistling under his breath. He made an omelet with a tang of Tabasco and a pot of hot coffee.

  His name was Jasper O’Mara, he told her. He was a rare-book dealer on a bicycling trip, searching out old books in castles and village cottages. And unmarried. Stopping at bed-and-breakfasts along his planned route. He’d been bicycling toward Ballynagh on the access road when he’d seen Torrey standing on the road, “looking green around the gills.” He was booked to stay at Nolan’s Bed-and-Breakfast in Ballynagh.

  Lovers. First friends, for all of three weeks, while Torrey slowly got well, her convalescence helped along by savory meats and delicately seasoned soups and poached eggs in aspic, dishes created by Jasper O’Mara. Then to Torrey’s amazement, after an incredibly delicious dinner of a casserole of veal scallops with ham and cheese, they became lovers. Am I doing this? Is it really me? Am I seduced by puff pastry and honey-roasted chicken? Ensnared by mouthwatering grilled salmon with fresh thyme? Suborned by gigot farci, rôti á la moutarde? Alas, yes.

  Besides, Jasper O’Mara could talk endlessly about the books she loved. He was also intrigued by her being a gifted interpreter and children’s book writer. He was black-haired, white-skinned, and comfortably overweight by a good dozen pounds. He had a longish face and a narrow nose whose nostrils would twitch when he said something he thought was funny. A kind of silent laughter. He had arrived wearing tan jeans, serviceable boots, and a windbreaker over his shirt and sweater. He was traveling coast to coast, Dún Laoghaire to Clifden, with all the necessities of life, to his mind: a bicycle pack of underclothes, a razor, an extra woolen shirt, camera, thermos, brimmed canvas cap, sweater, a two-by-six-inch notebook, pencils, and the Larousse Guide to Food, unedited edition, weighing in at seven pounds.

  To her surprise, Torrey found herself sporadically revealing bits of her past to Jasper O’Mara. It seemed to her that he was somehow “safe,” that he would not judge her. So Jasper knew that she had once been a thief. He knew that her theft had resulted in a tragic death back in North Hawk. “
Inspector O’Hare discovered it last year when he and I were on opposite sides in a murder case here in Ballynagh. The whole village knows of it now. But I bested O’Hare in the case. He’ll never forgive me for that. And he’ll always be suspicious of me. And determined to get even.” She added, “Inspector O’Hare and I — we’re two enemy beasts meeting in a forest.”

  But one thing she did not confide in Jasper O’Mara was Rowena’s pregnancy and Rowena’s wanting to abort the baby. Rowena’s secrets, Torry felt, were not hers to confide.

  Altogether tempting, this Jasper O’Mara, to whom she’d confided so much else. But of course not to live with. Torrey had learned earlier in life that, working, she had to live alone. No semiconnubial bliss for her. Not if she wanted, as in this case, to deliver a completed three-language kids’ manuscript, ready for illustrations, to Spindling Press within the next three months. It was a deadline she couldn’t afford to miss. Neither morally nor financially. She was thankful that the rent on this cottage that she paid to Winifred Moore of Castle Moore was so low.

  “All set?”

  “Yes.” She zipped up her jacket and pulled the knitted cap snugly down over her ears.

  12

  “Just to the bridle path and back,” Torrey said, shivering. “It’s getting too cold. Damn! I should have worn my padded jacket.” They were in the Ashenden woods, had been walking for fifteen minutes. The setting sun flickered like a scattering of diamonds; a small, brisk wind had sprung up.