Scandal in Skibbereen (A County Cork Mystery)

by Connolly, Sheila

  Ahead Maura could see a grouping of white-painted cast-iron chairs around a table laden with teapot, cups, and plates. One of the chairs was occupied by a small, white-haired lady, who appeared to be dozing and hadn’t noticed their approach.

  Harry called out, “Aunt Evie?”

  The woman gave a start, then focused on them. She stood up carefully, and Maura noted that while the cut of her flowered dress suggested another era, as did the long string of handsome pearls, her hair was neatly combed and her pearl earrings matched the string around her neck.

  “There’s no need to raise your voice, my dear boy. I heard you coming. Gillian, it’s lovely to see you again. And you must be the new American.” She extended a well-manicured hand to Maura, who shook it carefully. “Welcome to Mycroft House. I’m so glad you could join us for tea.”

  Eveline’s smile was warm, and Maura returned it. “Thank you for inviting me. You have a beautiful house.”

  Apparently she had said the right thing, for Eveline beamed at her. “Isn’t it, though? And you should see it when there’s a party, all the windows lit up—just wonderful. Harry, will you pour? I’ve been a bit stiff lately—it must be all the gardening . . . I asked Florence to set up out here—the weather’s been so lovely.”

  “The garden’s looking grand, Eveline,” Gillian said. “Would you mind if I came by and did a few pictures here?”

  “Please do, my dear. It’s no trouble.”

  With all this talk of the garden, Maura wondered if anyone was going to mention Seamus, but it seemed wrong for her to bring it up on this polite social occasion. She felt tongue-tied. What was she supposed to say?

  “I asked Florence to make us some fresh scones. Ah, here she is—she’ll tell you that scones are best eaten warm.”

  Maura looked toward the house to see a plain woman who appeared to be around fifty, plodding carefully in her sensible shoes, balancing a tiered silver tray bearing the promised scones as well as some other sweets. Florence set the tray down on the table and looked briefly at the group, without warmth. “Is there anything else you need, Eveline?” she asked.

  “No, thank you, Florence. I think we’re all set. I’ll let you know when you can clear the table.” Eveline turned back to Maura. “Please try a scone while they’re hot, Maura. Florence is an excellent cook. Tell me, how does a young American girl come to own a pub in a small Irish village?”

  Maura took a plate and helped herself to a scone and butter. The butter knife looked old—was it real silver? Not that she’d seen much in her lifetime. “It’s kind of a long story, but the short version is that my grandmother left here when my father was young, but she kept in touch with Mick Sullivan, and he left it to me.” Maura hesitated before adding, “You might have known my grandmother—Nora Sullivan?”

  “There was a young woman named Nora who was employed here, oh, some forty years ago, when we kept a full staff,” Eveline said thoughtfully.

  “That could have been her. She left when she got married.” Clearly there was nothing wrong with Eveline’s memory, at least for the past, if she remembered a housemaid who’d been here only a couple of years, decades earlier.

  “How very interesting. And here you are, back in Ireland after so long. Are you settling in well? I’m so impressed by you young girls today—you do so many things that we never would have considered when I was your age.”

  “I’m enjoying it, so far. It’s a beautiful country, although I haven’t seen a lot of it.” And after that, the conversation rolled forward smoothly. The tea was excellent, as were the scones and small sandwiches. Gillian seemed at ease with the older woman, and Harry was attentive to his elderly relative, which was nice to see. Maybe even a horndog like Harry had a good side.

  An hour slipped past. Maura realized she was enjoying herself: this was certainly another way of life, or what was left of what it had once been. Kind of a time warp. Eveline dominated the conversation, if gracefully, and Maura wondered if Harry had been right about his great-aunt’s hunger for new faces, people who hadn’t heard her stories. Much like Billy Sheahan, even if the setting was different. One of the minuses of a small Irish town: everybody had heard everybody else’s tales.

  Soon, though, Eveline’s energy began to flag—it was clear she had expended quite a bit entertaining her guests. Maura was pleased to see Harry notice; another point in his favor. Standing up, he said, “Well, Aunt Evie dear, we shouldn’t keep you.” He offered her his hand, but it took Eveline a moment to collect herself.

  “Well, if you must go, my dear, perhaps I’ll just take a little nap. Oh, have you shown Maura the rest of the house yet?” She turned to Maura. “I heard you were particularly interested in seeing it, though I’m afraid it’s a pale shadow of what it once was. Still, you might enjoy it.”

  “I’d love to see it,” Maura replied promptly. “And thank you for having me. You’ve been very kind.” She was touched that Eveline had made such an effort to entertain them.

  Harry, with Eveline’s hand tucked under his arm, led a slow procession back to the house and saw Eveline to the door of her own sitting room, near the front of the house on the ground floor. Maura doubted the old lady could have climbed stairs at that point.

  Maura and Gillian remained in the hall while Harry settled Eveline.

  “So we’re in,” Gillian said.

  “With an invitation, no less. How big is the house?”

  “I’ve never counted the rooms. Actually, though, this is on the small side for a manor, although this was only a minor branch of the Townsend family.”

  “If you say so,” Maura muttered.

  Harry emerged from the sitting room, closing the door quietly behind him. “She’s all tucked in. Let me have a quick word with Florence and tell her she can clear up in the garden, and then we can begin.”

  “Harry, can I do that?” Maura volunteered, and then she struggled to come up with an excuse, apart from curiosity about what went on “backstairs.” “I wanted to introduce myself properly, since we’re neighbors now.” It was lame but good enough.

  “If you want. The kitchen’s in the back, on the left. Oh, and warn Florence that we’ll be pottering around the place so she won’t think we’re burglars. I daresay she hasn’t been in some of the rooms for years herself.”

  “I’ll do that. Meet you back here.” Maura set off toward the back of the house and found the kitchen mainly by following the delicious odor of baking. When she arrived there, Florence was busy chopping something at a well-scrubbed wooden table. She looked up when Maura walked in. There was no sign of her husband.

  “Yer the new girl at the pub, eh?”

  “Yes, I am. We haven’t met. Maura Donovan.” She held out her hand, but Florence held up her own, covered with chopped onions.

  “I don’t hold much with drinking,” Florence said with a sniff. “Nor do we have the time fer hangin’ about the pubs, me and my husband. And now with Seamus gone . . .”

  “What a terrible thing to happen. He’d been with you a long time?” Maura asked.

  “Near as long as Tom and myself have been here at the manor—it’s too much to manage for only the two of us, so Seamus was a godsend, like. He loved his work, and he never asked for much.” She resumed chopping, looking away from Maura.

  “It’s a beautiful house. I don’t suppose you use all of it, if it’s just Eveline here now.”

  “She’s content with the few rooms—she doesn’t get around as well as she used to, but she does enjoy the sun in the garden. Although how she’ll manage now I do not know.” Florence shot a hard glance at Maura. “And why should I be telling you this?”

  “Harry sent me back to tell you that we’ve finished in the garden and he’s settled Eveline now. And now he’s going to show us the rest of the house.”

  “So that’s why he sent you, instead of telling me himself. Tell him to mind the dust,” Florence said, a touch defensively, Maura thought. “We keep the rooms Eveline uses nice, but the r
est’re shut up, mostly. Excepting ours and Seamus’s at the back.”

  “I haven’t met your husband yet.”

  “He’s somewhere about the place—he handles most of the work outside the house, and I do for inside. And don’t expect to see him at Sullivan’s, neither. We haven’t the money for drinking.”

  Definitely defensive, although Maura wasn’t quite sure why. She wondered if she should play the Gran card and decided it couldn’t hurt. “You know, my grandmother was in service here, before she married. That was a long time ago, so I don’t suppose you would have known her.”

  Did she sense a slight softening in Florence’s expression? “We’ve been here only the last ten years, since Harry asked us to look out for Eveline. Yer gran would’ve been here well before my time.”

  Time to play one last card. “She’s gone now. I wish I could have asked her what life was like here in the house when she knew it.”

  Florence unobtrusively crossed herself. “I’m sorry to hear that. So that’s what brought you back here?”

  “It is.” Maura decided her bid for sympathy had done its work. “Well, I won’t keep you, Florence. I’d better go join Harry and Gillian.”

  Florence definitely sniffed this time. “Harry could do worse than settle down with Gillian. Instead of messing around with some other people I could name.”

  Like Althea? Maura decided against getting into that. “I hope I’ll see you again. Nice to meet you.” She found her way back to the main hall, where Harry and Gillian were waiting, without any trouble.

  Chapter 12

  “So, did you two come up with a plan?” Maura asked.

  Gillian began, “If Harry’s ancestor was important, and he could afford to pay for a big-name artist, then it’s probably a life-size painting. So it’s big. It wouldn’t fit in a bedroom. It’s probably down here on the ground floor somewhere.”

  Harry agreed. “That narrows it down a bit, but not enough. There are quite a few large portraits lurking in dark corners here, though, so plenty of possibilities. But it may not be easy to make out a lot of them—they’re pretty dark now, from years of smoky fires, age, et cetera.”

  “I know that, Harry. I don’t suppose it would help to say it should be a ‘good’ picture?” Gillian made air quotes.

  “Oh, so now you want to debate aesthetics, do you?” Harry said with a smile. “What’s the man look like?”

  Gillian fished in her bag and pulled out a print of the sketch Althea had given her. “Here he is, in the oil sketch.”

  “Ah, this is nice,” Harry said.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Gillian said. “I’d say you take after him. This is a quick sketch, but it does capture the spirit of the subject. A formal portrait would be stiffer and more pompous. The whole goal was to impress the beholder with how important the sitter was. It was kind of a political statement. Does it look familiar?”

  Harry held out his hands. “How am I supposed to know? I’ve never paid any attention to the paintings until now, to be honest.” He squared his shoulders. “Right, so we’re looking for a big, dark portrait of a pompous rich guy, who may or may not be Richard Townsend, which may or may not look like this sketch. Well, let’s begin with the main hall—there’s a whole crowd of portraits there.”

  Maura and Gillian dutifully followed Harry back to where they had come in. The hall measured at least fifteen feet across, with an equally high ceiling, and as Maura had noticed, it was lined with time-darkened oil paintings in massive, ornate gold frames. Some were landscapes, and about half were portraits. As they walked down the length of the hall, Gillian muttered to herself, “Too late . . . Too late . . . So covered with dirty varnish that I can’t see a thing . . . Wrong clothes . . .” Once they’d completed the circuit, Gillian said to them, “No, it’s none of these. Where next, Harry?”

  “Follow me.” They wandered from one room to another, coming in one door and going out another, so that after a half hour or so Maura was completely lost—the place seemed bigger than it looked from the outside. She knew she had seen a conservatory at the back filled with lush plants—more of Seamus’s work?—and a music room and a drawing room, and there was a ballroom somewhere. And that was just the first—no, over here it was the ground floor.

  “Why did you never think of selling some of these, if you’re strapped? Even the bad pictures must be worth something,” Gillian asked.

  “I can’t do that to Eveline.” Harry raised a hand. “I don’t just mean by the terms of her father’s will, for all that she still owns everything, but knowing how sad it would make her if I started taking away the things that she’s always known and loved. There’ll be time enough for that. We’ll get by.”

  Maura’s estimation of Harry went up another notch. He seemed to be taking good care of his great-aunt, not just seeing to her physical needs but also respecting her wishes. Maybe that earned him the right to have a little fun now and then. Maybe he wasn’t as much of a jerk as she had thought.

  Maura’s general, admittedly uneducated impression of the place, beyond the sheer size of it, was of a hodgepodge of styles, varying from room to room, and sometimes within a room. Maybe that was what happened when so many generations lived in the same place, and each one wanted to leave his or her mark. And never got rid of anything. Maura had little experience with that kind of continuity. But overall she sensed a slight but pervasive seediness—frayed edges, chipped corners, and the dust of long neglect. Maybe nowadays that would be labeled “shabby chic,” but here it had come naturally, over centuries.

  “Are we done yet?” Maura asked, sounding to her own ears like a cranky child. Harry had made dismissive noises about the kitchen, the wine cellar in the basement, and the servants’ quarters up on the third floor under the eaves.

  “Attic?” Gillian had asked.

  “Too low for a major painting,” Harry said. “Besides, it leaks. If the painting was there, it’s probably destroyed. Heck, maybe they folded the damn thing up and stuffed it in a trunk.”

  “Heaven forbid,” Gillian said fervently. “But you’re probably right that the changes in temperature in the attic combined with the damp would probably have all but destroyed any painting kept up there.”

  “There’s only the library left, at the back. My father loved the room, probably because that’s where he kept the liquor. This way.”

  Harry opened the door and politely stood back to let Gillian and Maura pass. It was quite a dark room, its walls lined floor to ceiling with shelves filled with books in antique leather bindings, and heavy velvet drapes drawn nearly closed. Harry crossed the room and threw open the nearest set of drapes, sending up a cloud of dust in the process. Maura looked around the room with interest. She could visualize gentlemen retreating here after a six-course dinner and enjoying their vintage port and cigars—definitely not a room for the ladies.

  Gillian was staring at something over the mantel, carved from mottled dark marble that to Maura looked like salami. There was a large painting on the wall, maybe six feet tall by three feet wide, its gilded frame extending nearly to the fancy molded plaster ceiling, and Gillian approached it almost reverently, just as Harry opened more drapes on the opposite side of the room, throwing light directly on the painting.

  “Yes,” Gillian whispered, and then more loudly, “Yes!” She turned to her companions. “Look at it! This has to be it!”

  Harry came up to stand beside Gillian. “Good God, I think you’re right.”

  It was a three-quarters-length portrait, and the man in it was wearing a sumptuous suit of clothes, all satin and lace, but the face was the same as in the sketch, as was the air of arrogance, cockiness, and good humor. They all stared silently for several seconds.

  “Do you know, that painting’s always hung there, as long as I can remember, but I never paid attention to it,” Harry said.

  Maura turned to Gillian. “Is it—”

  “A Van Dyck? I won’t say no.” Gillian’s eyes were bright with ex
citement. “Althea would know more than I do, but the style is right, and the clothing, and it matches the sketch.”

  Harry looked pained. “I’m not sure I can bring Althea back, unless I smuggle her in, in a suitcase.”

  “You can work around Eveline’s schedule, or at least keep out of her way, can’t you?” Gillian said.

  “It’s not Eveline I’m worried about, it’s Florence O’Brien. The O’Briens are very protective of Eveline, and I don’t think they ever sleep. Maybe in shifts. We know that Florence had a run-in with Althea and didn’t take kindly to her.”

  “Harry, you have every right to bring someone into the house—isn’t it at least part yours? And by the way, if the O’Briens are so alert, how come they didn’t hear anything when Seamus was killed?” Maura demanded.

  “You know, I hadn’t stopped to think of that,” Harry said slowly. “I really can’t say. Tom’s been known to slip off to a pub the odd time or two, and Florence pretends she doesn’t know. They’re never both out at the same time. They take their job here quite seriously.”

  “So Florence would give him an alibi anyway? Swear they’d been together all night?”

  Now both Harry and Gillian were looking at her oddly. “What?” Maura said. “There’s been a murder. We’re standing in front of an important painting, possibly worth millions, that more than one person may want to get his or her hands on, and it may have something to do with the murder. If you tell us that the O’Briens keep close watch on anyone who comes and goes here, then why didn’t they notice something? I’m guessing you don’t have alarms and motion sensors and that kind of stuff?”

  Harry said absently, “Too expensive. You make a good point, but the O’Briens’ room is at the back of the building, and Seamus was found on the front lawn. Maybe they simply couldn’t hear whatever happened.”

  “Maybe.” Maura wasn’t convinced. “So what do we do now?”

  “First I’m going to get some pictures,” Gillian said, pulling a mobile phone out of her bag. She spent several minutes prowling around the picture, taking multiple shots, both up close and from a distance. Maura meanwhile wandered around the room, looking at books. She noticed that the dust layer was the same everywhere—on the shelves, the tables, and the floor. Florence hadn’t dusted in here for years, she guessed. The good news was, if someone else had been looking for the painting, they hadn’t been in this room, because the dust hadn’t been disturbed until they arrived. Nobody had visited this room for a long, long time.