Legacy of Secrets Read Free

in any case, the first husband died a couple of years later and I was a free woman again. I became the Merry Widow Molyneux—because like all the Molyneux women, I didn’t take my husband’s name. By the way, it’s pronounced
Molynoo,
just so we get it straight.
    Life went on. I had a ton of friends scattered across continents, and I finally came into my grandfather Molyneux’s trust money, so I could visit them as often as I pleased. I had my horses, Paris was back swinging again with American jazz and fashionable people … oh, I had myself a wild old time.
    Then I went on a trip to India with Pa and Mammie. Pa took a bad fall from a polo pony and a few days later he developed tetanus. He was dead within a week and I had to bring Mammie home. She was devastated without him, and of course I was too.
    Mammie stayed quietly at Ardnavarna, tending her gardens—oh, they were a picture in those days, you can be sure, and after a while I picked up my old ways again, flitting from London to Paris to Dublin like a butterfly. But I always returned to Ardnavarna for the hunt season. Our stables were among the best in the country, our dalmatians the best of the breed, fine descendants of the notorious Lily’s own dogs, and our gardens the most beautiful in Connemara.
    And then, when Mammie finally died, I came home to Ardnavarna for good.
    But I’m talking about myself again, the way Faithless Brigid always says I do, and all the while I meant to tell you about what happened just yesterday, about all the excitement, and my unexpected guests.

I T HAD RAINED that morning, and the dogs were tired because we had already been for our usual ride along the strand. That is, they run and I ride. On my fine bay hunter, Kessidy, or on mad Malachy, the chestnut who can go like the wind and often does, whether you want him to or not. He’s a tricky old beast and you have to be trickier and let him know who’s boss, and then he’ll give you a grand ride. Fearless and fast and built like an ox, that’s Malachy.
    Most days we go through the bridle paths in the woods and down to the strand and we race along the edge of the water, with me hollerin’ and laughin’ like a mad creature, I’m enjoying myself so much. And the dogs running hell-for-leather alongside, barking their heads off from the sheer joy of it.
That’s
the best part of my day. The wind whistling in my ears, the surf pounding hard as my heart and the horse fairly singing with speed beneath me. It’s the next best thing to making love, I can tell you. Ah, and there I go, spilling my secrets again like wine from an overfull glass. “That’s enough of yourself,” as my mammie, God love her, would say to me when I talked indiscreetly. And you can see she was right.
    Have you never been to Connemara? Well then, you have a treat coming, because to see Connemara for the first time is like having God’s own country revealed to you in a dream. Every few miles the landscape changes; one minute it’s all bleak and desolate, with bare blue-greenmountains and maybe a rushing crystal stream carving a passage from on high down to a fast-flowing brown river. Then you’ll leave the sparse, rocky landscape behind and there’s miles of peat bogs the color of bitter chocolate, and mysterious, reedy silver lakes encircled by trees. Where the land dips toward the ocean you will see tiny, rugged whitewashed stone cottages with their thatch roped down against the harsh winter gales.
    The Connemara sky brings artists from all corners of the world. It’s the color of moonstones and opals and sometimes it’s exactly the same mother-of-pearl gray of the sea, and it makes me wish I could paint. As you go, you’ll maybe see a lone caramel-colored cow sitting on a rocky outcrop, placidly chewing its cud, watching you. And maybe a little Connemara pony will trot past you along the road, unattended, with its tiny foal, white with a curling wind-tossed mane and a plumed tail like a pony in a