The Irish Cottage Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

Willinger’s was a Coke. Ms. Winifred’s friend Sheila had sherry. Anyway, Ms. Winifred was talking very instructivelike about how there had never till now been any Irish women poets; it was the male Irish syndrome: “Women were nothing in Ireland back then, good merely to cook and breed a pack of kids. Irish poets exalted men and wrote stupid, romantic nonsense about women. Only one Irish poet ever pointed out a truth about the sexes,” and then Ms. Winifred quoted from a poem. I wrote it down later in the kitchen: “‘Bloody treason, murderous act/Not by women were designed/Bells o’er-thrown nor churches sacked/Speak not ill of womankind.’”
    “I get it,” Mr. Desmond said, swirling the Jack Daniels around in his glass, the way he does, “It means men mess up the world and blame the women. That it?”
    “You’re close, for once, Desmond,” his cousin Winifred said, ironiclike, and her friend Sheila Flaxton said, “Oh, Winifred!” reproving, as though Ms. Winifred were a naughty child.
    Honestly, Hannah! Then Mr. Desmond said, a bit nasty, “Must have been a damned liberal, that Irish poet.”
    At that, Ms. Torrey Tunet (she looked like a mermaid in a skinny green wool dress) gave a kind of giggle and said, “Fourteenth century. By the poet, Gerald Fitzgerald.”
    “How did you know that?” Ms. Winifred asked, as though a frog had just spoken English, and Ms. Tunet said, “Oh, well,” and shrugged her shoulders.
    And then, such a look, sneering, you might say, that Mr. Luke Willinger gave Ms. Tunet, and he said, significantlike, quoting again from the poem, “‘… murderous act/Not by women were designed’?” like a question, and he added, staring at Ms. Tunet, “Mr. Gerald Fitzgerald was not wholly right.”
    I was stationed by the sideboard for when Mr. Desmond would nod, but he only poured himself another Jack Daniels. He was smiling and very flushed as though he were enjoying Mr. Willinger being sharp to Ms. Tunet.
    “You read Gaelic?” Ms. Winifred asked Ms. Tunet, surprised, “Gaelic poetry?” Then it came out what Ms. Tunet does for a living, interpreting at diplomats’ meetings and Common Market delegates’ sessions and such, but not much money in it. She loves it. She’s all about words, languages. She can skip around like hopscotch in words and languages.
    I got the signal then from Mr. Desmond, and I went to the kitchen. But I heard Ms. Winifred say, “Genes, it’s all in the genes! They’ve made tests. Languages are natural to some folks. That’s a scientific truth! You can check it out on the Internet.”
    I have to go now. Take good care of yourself, Hannah. It will be all right. I know it.
    Rose sighed and wrote, “Your loving sister,” and signed her name.
    Hannah was the youngest child, then herself, then the three older brothers who lived in Cork. She and Hannah had always been close, so close.
    Rose picked up the pen and added a postscript: “That garda sergeant, Jimmy Bryson, who likes you? I talked to him on the telephone this afternoon. About a yellow car, a Saab that someone had left parked on the road. Up near the break in the hedge. Ms. Winifred almost ran into it. Jimmy said he’d go see. He asked after you.”

10
    A cloud drifted across the moon and the dark bulk of the stables merged with the woods. Desmond Moore stumbled and said, “Bloody Christ!” and turned on his flashlight. “Mind the muck.”
    “Right,” Luke said. He wished gloomily that he were in bed. It was already midnight, but after dinner Desmond Moore had wanted to sketch out a couple of landscaping ideas in the library. Desmond was a little drunk, which didn’t stop him from downing two more sizeable whiskeys. Then he had insisted on Luke seeing his new horse, “A bay mare I got at a sale in Wexford, a beauty, Darlin’ Pie. You’ve got to see her. Bought her this morning. Had them bring her this afternoon.… Brian!” he called suddenly into the darkness.
    A light went on in a