Treasure of the Celtic Triangle

by Michael Phillips

  “I will tell them that you are the father of the Lorimer brat.”

  A smile spread across Steven’s face. “Do you seriously think anyone would believe that?” he said. “To make such a charge would only convince everyone all the more that you are the guilty party. On the other hand, if you deny it and I learn you are lying, and if that is the case I will find out … I promise you that it will go worse for you than had you confessed honorably to the truth from the beginning. You have only one choice, Courtenay. That is to tell me the truth. If you are the father, and you tell me plainly, I will respect your honesty and pursue the matter no further.”

  Even in his fury at finding himself powerless before this clodhopping interloper of a factor, Courtenay was yet in sufficient awe of his calm demeanor and measured tone that he did not for a moment doubt that he would do exactly as he said. He knew something of the esteem in which Steven was held throughout the community. He was practical enough to realize the consequences of crossing him. “I am not the father,” he answered after a moment.

  Steven nodded then walked back behind his desk and sat down.

  “I presume that is all, Muir?”

  “Yes. Thank you, Courtenay.”

  Courtenay rose and stood a moment. “You may consider this your notice, Muir,” he said. “You are hereby terminated. I want you and your mother gone from the manor by six o’clock on the morning of the seventeenth, which is my birthday. Is that understood?”

  “Very clearly.”

  Steven watched Courtenay go, more sad than angry, then took out a sheet of writing paper, set it before him, and took pen in hand.

  Dear Percy, he began,

  We are only days from Courtenay’s birthday and his assumption of the viscountcy. However, that is not the reason I am writing, but rather about a crisis concerning Florilyn. I do not know if you have been apprised of recent events—her engagement to Colville Burrenchobay. My own concern for her well-being and future mounts daily. She is much changed—and I am heartbroken to have to say, not for the better. The spiritual being that had begun to blossom, under Burrenchobay’s influence, is fast becoming a withered flower and a mere memory of happier times. I am writing to implore you to return for the purpose of speaking to her and warning her of the danger of being joined for life with such a one.

  We are two men who love her. We cannot allow this to happen without speaking forthrightly to her. I do not want to act without you, but I fear time is critical. Every day that passes she seems to slip deeper into what I am convinced is a deceptive attempt to woo her affections and distance her from her mother and the rest of us.

  Please consider my request seriously. The matter is urgent. Please come.

  Your friend and servant,

  Steven Muir

  SIXTY

  The Viscount, the Miner, and the Scot

  As they approached down one of Lugnaquilla’s projecting ridges, Percy saw that the new Barrie home was indeed a fine one, easily twice the size of their former cottage in Wales. In the distance, the diminutive figure of Codnor Barrie was surrounded by several sheepdogs and a huge, moving mass of white.

  They walked toward the shepherd and his flock. He saw them coming and turned to meet them.

  “Look who I found on the mountain, Papa!” exclaimed Gwyneth, as they made their way into the midst of the flock.

  Barrie’s face held its perplexed expression but a moment then brightened into a huge smile as recognition dawned.

  “Mr. Drummond!” he cried. “How do you come to be here?”

  “It’s a miracle, Papa,” said Gwyneth simply. “I think an angel led him to us.”

  “Gwyneth may not be far wrong, Mr. Barrie,” said Percy as the two shook hands. “I would rather say that God led my steps, and I found an angel.”

  Gwyneth glanced away shyly.

  Barrie looked back and forth between the two and understood. “Do you and I need to have a talk, Mr. Drummond?” he said.

  “We do indeed, sir,” replied Percy.

  Beside herself with curiosity about what the two were saying, Gwyneth’s sense of the propriety of things kept her from intruding. She walked quietly toward the house, pausing once at the door to glance back.

  The two men, the younger towering over the older, walked slowly away across the field, heads as close as their difference in height would allow. They were obviously engaged in earnest conversation.

  Her heart full of many things she dared not think, she watched them a few moments more then went inside.

  An hour later, from where she stood at the window, Gwyneth saw the two returning.

  Her father’s face wore a serious expression. He nodded occasionally as Percy spoke.

  She stepped back from the window.

  As they came nearer the house, Percy noticed above the door a beam of oak into which were carved two words in Gaelic—the house name, he presumed. Though he could not read them, they seemed somehow familiar. He had no leisure to think about it, for a moment later Barrie led him through the door and into the spacious sitting room.

  “Grannie!” Percy exclaimed as he saw the old woman sitting across the room in a positive fever of anticipation for whom Gwyneth had told her was coming.

  She scarcely had time to pull herself up before finding her aging frame nearly crushed by Percy’s embrace. “Aye, laddie,” she said, “you’re as big and strong and handsome as I knew you must be!” she said. She pulled his head down toward her and kissed him on the cheek.

  “And you, Grannie!” said Percy exuberantly. “You look well indeed.”

  “For an old woman of eighty-eight years, I’m just grateful enough to the Lord for keeping me here long enough to feast my eyes on your face one more time.”

  “Oh, but Grannie,” said Percy excitedly as he released her, “I just remembered. I have something of yours!” He reached into his pocket and pulled from it the gold coin she had been given on the sands of Llanfryniog more than eighty years before. He held it toward her.

  “No, no, laddie!” she said. “That night when I told you how I came by it, and the evil that had stalked me because of it, I said I wanted it no more. I gave it to another to keep. But I’m thinking it wasn’t you.”

  “You’re right,” smiled Percy. “Perhaps it is time I returned it to her.” He turned toward Gwyneth where she stood watching. “You gave me this for safekeeping,” said Percy. “I told you at the time that I would always consider it yours. I have carried it with me every day since. Not a day went by that I did not think of you. It remained with me as an unspoken pledge of our … of a friendship that I treasured. You are a grown woman now. It is time I returned it.” He held the coin to Gwyneth.

  Her hand reached out, and he placed it in her palm. His fingers lingered briefly upon hers. She felt a sudden heat rising in her cheeks. She pulled her hand away as it closed over the coin and glanced away.

  “But why have you come, laddie?” said Grannie as she eased back into her chair. “How did you find us?”

  “It is a long and intricate story, Grannie,” replied Percy as he and Codnor also took seats.

  Gwyneth moved toward the kitchen at the far end of the room and put a kettle on the stove for tea.

  “It concerns my uncle, the viscount,” began Percy. “He had a riding accident a year ago, and his injuries were mortal. He died a week later.”

  “God bless the man—I am sorry to hear it.”

  “On his deathbed he asked me to do something,” Percy continued. “He asked me to find someone that no one else in his family, not even my Aunt Katherine or Florilyn or Courtenay, knew about. Then he told me a story he had told no other living person in more than thirty years.” Percy paused and drew in a breath.

  By now Gwyneth was seated with the rest of them. She and Grannie listened intently as Percy told them what he had already told Gwyneth’s father—of his uncle’s sojourn in Ireland as a young man, of his marriage to Avonmara O’Sullivan, and of the tragic circumstances that had followed
in which he lost track of the daughter that had been born to him. “It was this daughter, whom he had never seen again,” said Percy, “whom I thought he wanted me to find.”

  “But if he was dying,” said Gwyneth, “why would it matter so much to him?”

  “Because according to the terms of his viscountcy, she would be his legal heir, not Courtenay.”

  “But she was a girl, laddie,” said Grannie. “How could that be?”

  “Every peerage is unique,” explained Percy. “They are established according to terms that must be legally followed in perpetuity unless the peerage is abolished. The particular viscountcy my uncle inherited from his father must originally have been established by a progressive and far-seeing man who determined that a firstborn daughter, and her own children who followed, was equally deserving of the rights and privileges of the title as a son. I have been studying law, you see, Grannie, and I looked into it as much as I was able. It is extremely unusual, but those are the terms. No doubt it will ultimately have to be decided in court. But my uncle was certain enough of the legality of the terms to commission me, as I thought, to find his daughter. He knew she was the rightful heir by his first marriage.”

  “Did you find her, laddie?”

  “I am afraid not, Grannie,” replied Percy. He turned toward Codnor Barrie. “Perhaps you should explain the rest of it, Codnor,” he said.

  Barrie nodded. The others waited as he collected his thoughts then turned toward Gwyneth. “I always told you, lassie,” he began, “that you were born across the water from where we lived—that you were born here in Ireland. But you never knew why I was here. There came a time, you see, when the mine in Wales had to close. Parliament was trying to improve on safety everywhere, and the labor movement was gaining strength. So they closed the mine to make changes and make working conditions safer than before. I was a young man at the time, not as adventurous as some but with my own share of the adventurous spirit. There was talk of work in the shipyards of Arklow on Ireland’s east coast. So I came here for the work. In the shipyards, I met an Irishman who had come south to the town for the same reason when his family fell on hard times in the years before the famine. He had brought his family with him, though that was years before I met him, which included his mother-in-law and her granddaughter. The girl was the man’s niece. She was a beauty, with bright red hair and white skin that looked like an angel’s face, tall and slender. She stood five inches above me, and I fell in love with her. She was your mother, lassie, and she was the best woman in the world. Her name was Morvern.” He paused and smiled sadly as he remembered. Slowly he sighed as he allowed his thoughts to linger fondly over the memory. Then he continued. “But Morvern’s grandmother didn’t like me,” he said. “She did not want us to marry.”

  “Why, Papa?” said Gwyneth with the simplicity of a devoted daughter. “Who would not like you?”

  “It was because I was a Welshman,” Codnor replied. “Morvern’s father, you see, was also a Welshman, and he had deserted them after she was born. That’s why Morvern lived with her grandmother, because her own mother died when giving birth, and her father promised to come back to provide for her and take care of her but never did. Then they fell on desperate times, and she became yet more bitter at the father for leaving them in such straits.”

  “What did you do, Papa, if Mama’s mother didn’t like you?”

  “Morvern and I married in spite of her,” Barrie replied. “Maybe it was wrong. Perhaps we should have waited. I was young, and sometimes the young are not as wise as they think. But I determined to be the best husband and father a man could be and to win Morvern’s grandmother over. I would prove to her that I was a good man and wasn’t like the man who had married her daughter. I would provide for her granddaughter, and for her, too, if she would let me. A year later you were born, Gwyneth. But your white hair frightened people. They thought a curse was on you. It was only the curse of goodness, though that was the last thing they could understand. They began to say cruel things about you and about me. Even my friend, Morvern’s own uncle, said that I had brought evil to their family. I couldn’t let my wife and daughter be spoken of in that way. By then the mines were operating again in Wales. Morvern and I made plans to sail from Ireland and begin a new life in my own country where we would be free from people thinking evil of us. So you and I and your mother sailed for Wales. But a terrible storm came up in the Celtic triangle on the day of our sailing, and your mother was swept overboard—”

  He drew in a shaky breath and looked away, wiping at his eyes. “I never forgave myself for sailing that night.” He struggled to go on. “I was only twenty-five at the time, heartbroken with grief and left alone with an infant daughter. When we arrived in Wales, there was nothing I could do but try to make the best of it for you. If I had gone back to your Irish kinfolk, they would have hated me all the more for bringing Morvern’s death upon her. The poor family—they lost two daughters who married Welshmen. What else could they do but hate the Welsh? So I stayed where we were. I tried to be a good father—”

  “You were the best father a girl ever had, Papa,” said Gwyneth, rising and going to him. She knelt beside him and took his hands in hers.

  He gazed down upon her, his eyes full of tears. “That’s all I knew of it, lassie,” said Barrie after a moment. “I tried to be a faithful man, and I sent what money I could to Mrs. O’Sullivan, who was your great-grandmother, until I was sent word that she had died. But I never heard anything from her or the rest of the family after that. You grew up into a fine girl. The other children were cruel to you, but you made the best of it, with Grannie’s help. I doubt it’s done you any harm. For the sticks and stones of hurtful words injure us no more than we let them. And like Grannie always told you, they make us into better people if we use them to learn to forgive.”

  “They did not hurt me, Papa.”

  “Then came a day,” Barrie continued, “when I received a surprise visitor at the cottage. It was the viscount, Lord Snowdon himself. He asked if he could speak with me privately.”

  “I think I remember it,” said Gwyneth. “I was with my animals behind the cottage. I thought he had come for his rent.”

  “The rent was the last thing on his mind that day,” her father went on. “I invited him inside, and we had a long talk. He was curious, he said, about my past. I didn’t know why. He asked if I had ever been in Ireland. I told him about my time there, that I had gone looking for work and had married there. He asked about you, Gwyneth. I told him you were born in Ireland. He asked my wife’s name. I replied that it was Morvern O’Sullivan. He seemed taken aback but then asked me where she was now. I told him she was dead. He was silent for a time, then rose, thanked me, and left.

  “I thought the thing strange but could make nothing of it. Then came another visit, three or four years later. Gwyneth, by then you were growing into a beautiful young woman and you were working at the manor for his wife and daughter. That’s when the viscount came to me again when you were away from the cottage. He was more serious now. He spoke to me like we were old friends. He told me he had been thinking much about our earlier conversation. He now had something to confide in me that I must never tell another soul. I replied that I would agree so long as my conscience allowed. He nodded and added that he did not think what he had to say would place a constraint on my conscience. Then he proceeded to tell me about his own past, how he, too, like me, had gone to Ireland as a young man and had fallen in love with a red-haired Irish beauty. Her name was Avonmara O’Sullivan.”

  Now for the first time, both Gwyneth and Grannie recognized the name O’Sullivan. Their eyes widened as Barrie continued.

  He saw their reaction and smiled. “I see that you remember the name,” he said, nodding. “I was shocked as well. In what seems a remarkable coincidence, the child that was born to the viscount and Avonmara O’Sullivan was a girl called Morvern. She was, in fact, the very same Morvern O’Sullivan I had fallen in love with and married �
�� my own wife … and your mother, Gwyneth.”

  The room was silent as Gwyneth sat absorbing the stunning fact.

  “You cannot be saying … but does that mean,” she said slowly, “that Avonmara O’Sullivan was my grandmother …” She paused, hardly able to bring herself to complete the thought. Unable to believe she was saying the words, she slowly added, “And Lord Snowdon was my grandfather?”

  “That is exactly what it means, my child,” said Barrie tenderly.

  Again the room was silent as Gwyneth struggled to take in what he had just said. “I always thought he looked at me strangely,” she said after a moment. “There were times I saw him in the village, and he simply stared at me.”

  “It was one of those occasions,” rejoined her father, “that prompted his first visit to me. He suddenly recognized in your face the very face of his young love. It was after that he came to talk to me. As you grew older, and after you were at the manor and he saw more of you, the conviction grew on him all the more that her eyes, the eyes of Avonmara O’Sullivan, had been passed on to you.”

  “What happened to her?” asked Gwyneth seriously.

  “She died when your mother was born. After her death, the viscount returned to Wales. He planned to come back for his daughter. But by the time he returned, she was gone from the village where her family had lived, and he never saw his daughter again. He was devastated over the guilt he felt at having waited too long. And then, when you were older, as I say, he came to me again. He had reason to believe, he said, that you were his granddaughter. That had been the reason for his curiosity about my past. Now he realized that he wanted to do something for you. But he could not openly acknowledge that he had had a child before meeting his wife, Lady Snowdon. He did not want to hurt her or jeopardize her standing in the community. He saw no need for his past to come out. If he was to do something for you, provide for you, in acknowledgment of his love for your grandmother and mother, he must do so in secret. He was not a wealthy man, he said, but he would give us what money he could. Only I must agree to leave Llanfryniog in secret, telling not a soul the reason or where we were going. He did not even want to know himself, he said. We must simply disappear. If I would agree, then he would provide the means for us to have a good life.”