Daughters of Castle Deverill (15 page)

‘Right, time to go, dear,’ said Mrs Goodwin, walking into Martha’s bedroom with the child’s crimson coat slung over her arm and her matching hat in her hand. ‘We
don’t want to be late for your party. Grandma Wallace has invited all the family to celebrate your big day. It’s going to be tremendous fun.’

Martha wrenched her eyes away from the mesmerizing whiteness and slid off the window seat. She stood before her nanny. The lady smiled tenderly and crouched down to the child’s level.
‘You look very pretty, my dear,’ she said, tweaking the blue bows in her dark brown hair and running her gentle eyes over the blue silk dress with its white sash and collar, which she
had taken great trouble to press so that not even the smallest crease remained. ‘I remember when you were a baby. Such a pretty baby you were too. Your mama and papa were so proud they showed
you off to everyone. They love you very much, you know. So
you
must be good for
them
.’

Martha put her finger across her lips in a well-practised gesture of conspiracy. ‘Shhhhh,’ she hissed through her teeth.

‘That’s right, my dear.’ Mrs Goodwin lowered her voice. ‘Your secret friends must remain secret,’ she reminded her firmly, helping her into her coat.
‘It’s not fun if you tell everyone. Then they’re not secret any longer, are they?’

‘But I can tell
you
, Nanny,’ Martha whispered, watching as her nanny’s fingers deftly fastened the buttons.

‘You can tell
me
, but no one else,’ Mrs Goodwin confirmed. ‘You’re blessed with a wonderful gift, Martha dear. But not everyone will understand it.’

Martha nodded and gazed trustingly at her nanny. Something caught then in Mrs Goodwin’s chest, for when she looked deeply into the child’s eyes she was sure she could see the
loneliness there. It wasn’t that Martha was lacking in love or company but that she seemed to carry an emptiness inside her that nothing was able to fill. She had come into the world with it,
this tendency to stare out of the window as if searching for something lost or longing for something only half remembered. She was a melancholy, dreamy, solitary little girl – strange
qualities in a child who had every material comfort to please her and drawers of toys to entertain her. Pam Wallace spoiled her only child unashamedly and anything Martha wanted she was given. But
Martha didn’t want much and little that could be bought attracted her interest. She preferred to sit with her imagination, to watch the clouds float past, to play with insects and flowers, to
talk to people no one else could see. In her more fanciful moments Mrs Goodwin wondered whether Martha could hear the echo of her homeland resonating in her soul or discern the vague memory of
having come into the world as
two
, yet set off on her journey as
one.

Mrs Goodwin should not have heard Martha’s parents discussing the child’s origins – and she hadn’t intended to. Goodness, if she had known what was to be gleaned, she
would rather not have eavesdropped. But as it was, she had heard and there was nothing she could do to
un
hear it now. It had happened when Martha was about two years old. Mr and Mrs
Wallace’s bedroom door had been left ajar and Mrs Goodwin had chanced to be in the corridor outside, having left the little girl asleep in her bedroom, at the very moment that husband and
wife were discussing Martha’s obvious loneliness and wondering what to do about it.

‘We should have adopted another child,’ Mrs Wallace had said to her husband and Mrs Goodwin had stopped mid-stride as if turned to stone. Barely daring to breathe she had lingered
there, motionless, her curiosity overriding her sense of propriety. ‘We should have adopted her brother as well,’ Mrs Wallace had continued.

‘It was you who only wanted one child,’ Mr Wallace had replied. ‘You said you couldn’t cope with more than one. And you wanted a girl.’

‘That’s because a mother never loses a daughter.’

‘Sister Agatha did try to encourage us to take both babies,’ he had reminded her. ‘After all, they were twins. We could always go back to Dublin and see if there are any other
babies up for adoption. I’d be very happy to give another orphan a home.’ An uneasiness had crept over Mrs Goodwin then as if she had suddenly realized that she was listening to a pair
of thieves reviewing a terrible crime.

‘If I had known how lonely Martha would turn out to be I would most definitely have taken her brother too,’ Pam Wallace had conceded.

Stunned and horrified, Mrs Goodwin had managed to lift her heavy feet off the ground and retreat back down the corridor to the little girl’s bedroom. She had leaned over the bed and stared
at the child with pity and compassion. Martha had a brother, a
twin
brother, Mrs Goodwin pondered, gazing at the sleeping toddler. What had become of
him
, she wondered? Did he
carry an emptiness in his soul too, as she was sure now that Martha did? Did they both know somehow, subconsciously, that they hadn’t always been on their own? And what of their mother? Why
had she given up her babies? Mrs Goodwin was certain that Mr and Mrs Wallace would never tell Martha that she was adopted – this was the first Mrs Goodwin had heard of it and she wondered who
else knew. As far as the world outside the Wallace family was concerned, mother and child looked very much alike. Both had dark brown hair, eyes the colour of peat and pale Irish skin. There was
nothing in their appearance to raise a question about Martha’s birth – and Mrs Wallace loved Martha, there was no denying that. She loved her dearly. But still, there was something
deeply wrong about splitting up twins as they had done – and the thought that Martha might never know where she came from, or indeed that she had a brother, was a very uneasy one.

Mrs Goodwin took Martha’s hand and accompanied her downstairs into the hall where her mother waited, fussing with her handbag. Pam Wallace was as pampered and precious as one would expect
the wife of a very rich man to be. Her dark hair was cut into a chic bob that rippled with self-conscious waves, her eyebrows plucked into thin arches that gave her a permanent look of surprise,
and her small mouth was painted scarlet to match her long fingernails, now hidden in a pair of long white gloves. She was tall and slender with a narrow frame so that the 1920s fashion of
dropped-waist dresses and flat chests showed her to her best advantage. In Mrs Goodwin’s day, for she was young at the end of the
previous
century, a woman had to have ample
embonpoint, but a voluptuous bosom was no good to anyone nowadays. However, Mrs Goodwin was no longer interested in men or fashion. After Mr Goodwin had left her widowed she had given her life to
children and she knew from experience that small babies needed something soft to lie against.

Mrs Wallace turned to watch her daughter walk down the stairs, holding her nanny’s hand in case she stumbled, and her scarlet lips spread into a satisfied smile. Martha did her credit, she
knew. Her long hair had been brushed until it shone, the ribbons neatly tied into two little bows, her crimson coat done up at the front with shiny red buttons, and her shoes, oh the dainty little
blue shoes, dyed to match the dress that peeped out at the bottom of her coat, were as pretty as a doll’s. Mrs Wallace was very pleased. ‘Well, don’t you look a picture,
darling,’ she gushed, holding out her hand. One could only just perceive her Irish accent, concealed beneath her American twang. ‘You look quite the birthday girl. You will outshine all
your cousins!’ Martha stepped forward and took her mother’s hand. Her chest swelled with pleasure for she liked nothing better than to please her mama.

Mrs Goodwin was about to put the hat on Martha’s head, when a white glove stopped her. ‘Let’s not ruin her hair,’ said Mrs Wallace. ‘You’ve tied those bows so
beautifully, Goodwin. It would be a shame to squash them. We’ll hurry out to the car and try not to get wet, won’t we, Martha?’ Martha nodded, glancing swiftly at her nanny who
smiled at her encouragingly.

Mrs Goodwin clutched the hat and nodded. ‘As you wish, Mrs Wallace.’

‘Come along now, let’s not dawdle. There are presents awaiting you, darling, and cake. Didn’t Grandma say that she was going to get Sally to make you the finest chocolate cake
you’ve ever eaten?’

Mrs Goodwin watched mother and child walk down the steps to the driveway where the chauffeur stood to attention beside the passenger door, his grey cap already thick with snow, his hands
probably cold inside his black gloves. She watched her little charge climb onto the leather seat followed by her mother. Then the chauffeur closed the door and a moment later he was behind the
wheel, motoring off towards the road, leaving fresh tracks in the snow. Mrs Goodwin wished the child had worn a hat.

Pam Wallace’s mother-in-law’s house was a short drive away. Martha enjoyed rides in the car and gazed out of the window at the pretty houses and trees, all covered in white. It
looked like a winter wonderland and she was enchanted by it. Pam sat stiffly beside her daughter. She was too consumed by her thoughts to notice the magic of the world outside the car, too anxious
about the afternoon ahead to even talk to the child. Her sisters-in-law would be there: Joan, with her four children aged between nine and fourteen, and Dorothy, with her two boys who were ten and
twelve. It made Pam bristle with competitiveness just to think of them and she hoped that Martha would impress them with politeness and good manners. If she didn’t, they’d simply say
that Pam had acted unwisely and bought a child with bad blood.

Ted and Diana Wallace’s home was a large red-bricked house with white shutters, a grey-tiled roof and a prestigious-looking porch supported by two sturdy white columns. It was the house in
which Larry had grown up and lived with his two elder brothers until he had married Pam at the age of twenty-five. Larry was everything Pam’s Irish Catholic parents had wanted for her: old
American money, a fine education and a respectable job in the Foreign Service – well,
almost
everything; Larry Wallace wasn’t Catholic. He was well-mannered, extremely
well-connected, impeccably dressed, good at sports, distinguished-looking and, most importantly, rich, but the problem of his religion was insurmountable to Pam’s father, Raymond Tobin, who
did not attend the wedding. Having left their home and farm in Clonakilty after their son, Brian, had been murdered by the IRA in 1918 for having fought for the British in the war, Raymond Tobin
was not prepared to compromise when it came to religion. ‘The Tobins have married Catholics for hundreds of years. I will not give Pamela Mary my blessing to go and marry a Protestant,’
he had said and he had cut his daughter loose. Hanora, Pam’s mother, put aside her reservations for the sake of her youngest daughter, and did her best to accept the man Pam had chosen for
love. If losing her son had taught her anything it was that love was the only thing of real value in this world.

Pam had married Larry at the age of twenty-two after a six-month courtship. They had been blissfully happy at the beginning and Pam’s efforts to win acceptance from this very East Coast
American dynasty, who had also had their reservations about their son marrying a Catholic, had begun to pay off. But after two years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive, Pam’s doctor had
confirmed her greatest fear: that she would never bear children. The agony of childlessness had propelled her, in desperation, to look into other options. Adopting a child was most certainly
not
common in the Wallace world. Ted Wallace said that one would never buy a dog without knowing its pedigree so why would one buy a child without knowing exactly where it came from? Diana
Wallace worried that it would be hard to love a child who wasn’t one’s own flesh and blood. But Pam was determined and Larry supported her in the discussions that flared into heated
rows around the Wallace dining-room table on Sundays. Pam’s father, Raymond Tobin, agreed with Ted Wallace, although the two men had never met. ‘You won’t know what you’re
getting,’ he told his daughter. ‘Buy a son, Pamela Mary, but he won’t be a Tobin or a Wallace, whatever name you give him.’ Her mother, however, understood her
daughter’s craving for a child and whispered that it would be nice to give a chance to one of those poor Irish babies who were born in convents to unmarried mothers too young to look after
them. With her mother’s help Pam found an adoption agency in New York who had links with the Convent of Our Lady Queen of Heaven in Dublin. Larry arranged to be sent to Europe to set up and
advance diplomatic links with America and they went to live in London for two years – sailing over to Ireland in search of the baby they wanted so badly. Aware that what they were doing was
unconventional they had made every effort to keep it secret. Only Larry’s family and Pam’s parents knew, for it would have posed too great a challenge to pull off such a deception in
families as close as theirs.

Martha was everything a privileged and pampered little girl should be. She was pretty, polite and charming, her features were refined and, in Pam’s opinion, aristocratic. Hadn’t
Sister Agatha said that the baby’s mother was well-bred? On top of all that, Martha was the apple of Grandma Wallace’s eye. This was the first time Diana Wallace had ever thrown any of
her grandchildren a birthday party. Pam should have been proud, but she was too worried to enjoy the moment. Joan and Dorothy would be there with their immaculate children who were small clones of
their parents and destined to continue the bloodline, which was so important to Pam’s father-in-law, Ted Wallace. Who knew what Martha’s bloodline was? Pam turned to her child and there
was a warning tone beneath her question. ‘You’re going to be a good girl today, aren’t you, Martha?’

‘Yes, Mother,’ Martha replied dutifully. Sensing her mother’s nervousness, she began to fidget with her fingers.

When Pam arrived, Joan, who was married to the oldest Wallace boy, Charles, was already there, perched on the sofa in the drawing room beside Dorothy, who was married to the middle son, Stephen.
Their mother-in-law, the formidable Diana Wallace, was holding court in the armchair. Joan’s slanting green eyes swiftly assessed the competition, then relaxed into a lazy gaze as she rated
herself the better dressed of the three Wallace sisters-in-law. Her short auburn hair curled into her cheekbones like two fish hooks. Her pale lilac-coloured dress was fashionably low-waisted and
worn beneath a long cardigan in the same colour as her hat and adorned with a large knitted flower just below her left shoulder. The impression was one of studied glamour for even the black shoes,
with their T-bar strap, burgundy stockings and the long string of blue beads that dripped down to her waist had been carefully selected according to the trends of the day. Dorothy, who took her
lead from Joan in everything, had tried and failed to create the same effect and simply looked dowdy. Pam, whose glamour was as equally contrived as Joan’s, only managed to look stiff and
plain by comparison.