The Irish Manor House Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 his 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