‘Hear your confession?’
‘Yes. Confession was always important to me, I was schooled in a convent and took it seriously as a girl.’
‘Confession brings pardon and peace,’ he said. ‘We all need it. St. John says, If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’
‘It’s all right then, to speak…’-she seemed dubious-‘my heart?’
‘God asks us to do it. But you know I can’t grant you absolution.’
‘I know. But you’ll hear me?’
‘I will.’
‘Liam’s mother was always after the gin, and sometimes she would be… out of her head with me. She never cared for me, though I worked very hard for her. By the time she learned who I was, she had come to depend on me, but despised me even more for what she called my wicked deception in not telling her I was William Donavan’s daughter.
‘Liam used to come home at the weekends, and I fell in love with him altogether-I couldn’t imagine how he turned out to be such a lovely man with such a deep spirit-he’s like his father, they say. She was always angry with Liam for his admiration and love for his father-she wanted her boys to love only her. And yet, she couldn’t feel love, Reverend, she couldn’t feel anything at all.
‘She hated me for loving him-Paddy says she could never get on with women who love her sons-but I wouldn’t let her hurt me, I shut myself from her so coldly that I hardly had any feelings left. I turned my own heart to stone.’
She rose from the table and walked to a window, her hands plunged into the pockets of her loose dress. ‘Sure, she had a terrible blow when she was young, a tragic accident in her family, but that’s no excuse, Reverend, for inflicting her outrage on others, it doesn’t give one license…’ She turned to him. ‘Not at all.
‘I held myself away from Liam for more than a year; it was a torment to us both. I held myself away because…
‘My da met Evelyn McGuiness in Collooney, when he was just a lad trying to earn his way as a boxing champion. It was a brutal sport, and he was very brave and hardworking and determined to make something of himself, a boy with hardly a shoe to his foot. At the time he met her, he was just beginning to get a leg up, as he says, and was soon traveling all over Ireland, then England, and up to Scotland. When they fell in love he promised her he would come home again and marry her. And he did come home again, but ’t was seven long years that had passed, and she had seen two sisters and her mother die a horrible death and no one to turn to in her grief. She had married Mr. Conor-Mr. Riley, we all call him-and they had a son, Paddy. She had been nursemaid at Catharmore to Mr. Riley’s first wife who died of cancer.
‘She was very bitter towards Da for not coming for her as he promised, and he was bitter towards her for not waiting, though heaven knows he had handled matters in a gormless way. So off again he went to Dublin, and then, some while before he married my mother, he came back and… there was something between them. Da would never say what, he refuses to talk about it, but Paddy thinks…’
She wrung the bandanna in her hands. ‘Nine months later, Liam was born.
‘And so I held myself from Liam. ’t was agony to find myself in love with my halfbrother-’t is against the church and against the law, a misbegotten thing. And yet I loved him so, I thought I couldn’t bear the pain.
‘To his mother, I was but a lowly servant girl, just as she’d been when she worked for Mr. Riley’s first wife. For Liam to love me was a deep sting to her, and because she couldn’t hurt me with her tormenting, she tried to hurt Liam, instead. One night when she was very drunk, she told me something that was-in its way-as…’
Her face colored with an old fury. ‘She told me Mr. Riley wasn’t Liam’s father.’
‘She confessed to you, then.’
‘But ’t was another heavy blade entirely. She said Liam’s real father was Mr. Riley’s business partner… someone who came here for fishing parties.’ She caught her breath sharply. ‘He’s in the pictures in our library, God help us.’
She came and sat at the table. ‘I don’t know if it’s true, there’s no way to know. She often said crazy, mindless things.’
‘Why do you think she told you this?’
‘I think she believed I would tell Liam in one of the dreadful fights he and I had in those days. But of course I would never tell him such a terrible thing.’ Her voice shook with the trembling in her. ‘The truth is of no importance in the end, Reverend, because Mr. Riley loved Liam very much. I’m sure he never knew he wasn’t Liam’s father.’
‘How did you feel about what she said?’
‘I felt suddenly free… that maybe it was all right for us to love, maybe it was God’s way of giving us permission.’ She drew in her breath. ‘I decided to take the risk.
‘I left Catharmore and Liam came with me, and we were wed in the library with the roof nearly gone above us. He began helping me resurrect Broughadoon. He worked so hard and is gifted in so many ways; ’t is all because of him that we have such a lovely place.’
‘He gives the credit to you.’
‘Aye, he would.’ He saw for a moment the light in her eyes. ‘I love my husband.’
‘Your husband loves you.’
‘I’ve lived all these years knowing the truth, and the hatred I feel for her is so cruel, it devours me even yet. Sometimes I feel as if my heart would break for Liam-knowing the truth doesn’t always set us free, Reverend.’
Not always, perhaps, but often. Learning he had a brother from his father’s intimacy with the dark-skinned woman who helped raise him had been, after the initial shock, liberating-scary, but liberating. He had a brother now, that was the important thing, and he and Henry had the rest of their lives to puzzle out the mystery of it, to give thanks for it.
‘Liam loves Bella as best he can, he wants to be a good da to her, but she shuts him out. And there’s a coldness in Liam towards Da, though he tries to hide it from me. I think he resents that Da was allowed to buy his birth-right. All around us, there’s a shutting out of love, so.’
‘I sense there’s hard feeling still between Evelyn Conor and your father.’
‘My da bought Broughadoon anonymously, after Mr. Riley died and she came up against it. Perhaps Da was trying to make up for his misguided ways and help her; perhaps he was only bitter, and bent on taking away something she loved-I don’t know. But when she found it was Da who owned what had been hers, things went to pieces altogether.
‘And then there’s Paddy, always after Liam to give a hand with the roof, the gardens, the guttering, to loan him money-and Bella with such a fierce and dangerous rage, and myself thinking she got it from me, after all, that it’s in the blood, this brutal fury, perhaps I’m the one who…’-she put her hands over her face and sobbed-‘infects others with it.’
He waited.
‘I confess, Reverend, my weakness of faith, my hurtful selfishness, the sin of this consuming hatred that withers my bones. I want to let it go.’ A long keening came out of her. ‘I want to let it all go.’
He looked at the grainy light slanting across the floor, and wondered where Ibiza might be, that place for which the Irish yearn when it rains.
Twelve
‘Wicked-looking stuff, his art, collected when he lived in New York.’
‘Did you visit New York?’
They were driving up the hill in the Rover.
‘In my late thirties,’ said Liam. ‘I couldn’t wait to get home. Don’t like a lot of frizzing about, horns blaring, that sort of thing.’
‘A bumpkin like myself.’
‘And our father’s gardens have run riot, of course. Seamus is no hand with a spade, nor Paddy, either.’
‘Gardening is civil and social, Thoreau said, but it wants the rigor of the forest and the outlaw.’
‘This one’s all outlaw. I’d love to get my hands on ’t, but there’s no stoppin’ th’ force of a goin’ wheel-I’d be up to my eyeballs, an’ Broughadoon runnin’ wild.’