Chapter Two: Baldoyle, Co. Dublin July 1909

Molly Clennaghan strode down the hall and out the kitchen door in mucking-out clothes nicked from her brother, ignoring the display Mrs. Lymon, their cook, made of her attire. She was as bad as Mummy, that way. What was wrong with old trousers and Liam's shirt, after all? It's not as though she would wear them to Dublin.

The stable yard was placid, and the cool grey dimness of the stable itself a freedom from the stiff atmosphere within the house. Joe, their groom, was already at work in the yard with buckets and brushes, brightening up Painter for his go at the races. Molly liked the grizzled old man, who had been with them as long as she could remember; he knew more about horses than any person living, next to Liam.

"H'lo Miss," he said as she led Chestnut out into the yard and tethered her. "A fine day for it."
"Yes it is," she agreed shortly, busy with combing down the horse. She squinted as the kitchen door banged shut.
"Liam, you lazy thing!" she called across her shoulder. "Are you joining us in the dirty work?" She grinned at him. He looked like a farmer in old clothes and older boots. "Furley's waiting for you."

"No thanks to you, raiding my cupboard," Liam complained. "I had to dig this out of George's trunk, and it stinks of mould." Their brother had died five years before in a hunting accident. "You should get your own gent's attire."
She laughed at him when he came out again with Furley. "I can just see Mummy's face when I walk into Brown Thomas and order up a suit of men's clothes in my size! She'd think I've gone mental, send me to those quacks in Harley street again." So saying, she soaped down the horse from the bucket Joe had filled. They spent the morning bathing and grooming their five charges - the two each of her father and brother's and her own chestnut half-bred - larking about with each other, throwing sponges and the like, and listening to Joe Moran's tales of hunting seasons and race meetings past, some of which were plainly fantastic but good fun nonetheless.

She had not always been so merry about her visits to Harley street, that famous address of London physicians; two years before she had spent six months in London and her mother's family's house in Cornwall, back and forth to the doctors' offices, with a bout of tuberculosis that flared up when she was at school then vanished again with little help from all their noxious treatments. They had talked of opening up her chest to assess the damage when no treatment proved useful, but Fa's Catholicism prevailed; he would not allow her to be a science experiment, he said. So she had come home, weak and more ill than before. So they sent her to her father's people, the MacLenaghans, in Cavan for another six months and there the country air had made her a cure.

Sixteen had been a horrid age, and it was after that she had been presented at the Viceregal court in Dublin, with nary a word about her illness. Her mother let out that she had been abroad to finishing school. Finishing school! Let Grace have endured what she had at the hands of those men of science, and let her call it a finishing school indeed! How she had longed to give lie to that bloody fabrication! She loved the parties and the gowns, and seeing her old friends from school and the hunting society but the lies that her mother told to keep her on the marriage market left her cold.

They had a terrible row in the Shelbourne hotel one afternoon before they were to luncheon with Lord Athlone and his wife. Grace was aflutter because they were cousins of the Royal Family, and some cousin of the Viceroy's was staying with them, an unmarried titled cousin, on whom she had hopes of palming Molly off. Molly had no intention of furthering her mother's social ambitions, particularly as these rested on making a lie of the last year and a half of her life. She had never been a wonderful liar, and resented being coached endlessly on the story as they travelled from one grand house to another in the car. This was the cause of the row: Molly had just come out of the bath and was clambering into combinations and her stays when Grace came up and examined the odd convexity that her breastbone had developed with the disease.

"Wear a scarf over this, won't you, dear, or something else with a high neck. It's a dead give-away," Grace murmured.
"Oh, Mother, for pity's sake!" Molly exclaimed. "I doubt very much the Athlones or their idiotic relation will know the difference! And," she continued, flinging away her waiting maid Nancy's hand impatiently and fastening the buttons of her frock herself, "if you persist, I shall stay here and have my luncheon with Nancy!"
Grace's lovely face darkened in rage, "You must go," she insisted," for this is our best opportunity! Who else will want a diseased consumptive, did they know! God knows I do not! Thank god for Patsy!" Patsy was her sister - Anne Vera - who was eight years younger. It was the first time Grace had ever admitted that she had not wanted her, born so close after Liam that many people thought they were twins. The words spoken at last, they stood staring at one another in mutual shock.

"I will go, Mother," Molly said tautly into the long pause. "But I will thwart your every effort, so help me!" Her voice rose, and she was shaking." I will not marry. I will become a pianist, look after myself, and you can go to hell! I hate you." With that, she had swept from the room, and they did not speak privately for two days. The Athlone luncheon - at the Viceregal Lodge - was a disaster insofar as the cousin was concerned; he was forty, insipid, far more interested in nattering on about shooting than paying any mind to "a slip of a gel," as Lord Aberdeen called her. The Athlones were ordinary, kindly, and dull. They rode, which was well, for it gave them all something to discuss, but they were in no way the Cowes yacht fanatics Grace had hoped for; they were of course intimate with the King and Queen, being their in-laws, but they spent in fact a good deal of their time in Ireland. Grace was thus bitterly disappointed, and Molly was secretly pleased.

But then there was Vincent. She met him at the Grand Ball in the St Patrick's Room at Dublin Castle. Twenty-five, a Naval Lieutenant in his last days of service, he was tall and blond and handsome, utterly charming. She fancied herself in love with him then, as he swept her up in an almost instantaneous proposal and the whirl of wedding plans. Now, almost a year after his death, she doubted that feeling was real, a schoolgirl hope only, founded on daydreams amongst her girlfriends in the dormitory at school. Was he not every thing she had been taught to expect in a suitor, and therefore convinced herself that she was in love with him?

In the last year she had sought solace in music and horse breeding with her brother, and found a kind of peace. She had formed the ambition of concert playing out of spite, for while she loved it, it was the one thing a lady did not do, and her mother's people were in the House of Lords. She enjoyed the idea of being a renegade against all that because it was galling to her mother. For herself, she had no real ambition, no purpose of life. She genuinely did not wish to marry, not after having lost a fiancé in such a ghastly manner. No, she would not risk it again. Only the horses gave her perfect peace. Riding round Howth Castle and the countryside, whether hacking or hunting, she was only wind and horse, rain and sun. Mucking out the stables, going to races, plotting bloodlines with Liam or assisting matings or births made her perfectly happy. It was not much for a life but it could be enough, though she endure forever her mother's scorn about the Aunties, the four Jacobs sisters who lived in Tallaght and never married.

Hers was a mixed family, as her mother's brother Jocelyn was like to call it. The Jacobses were Barons in Cornwall from the middle of the 17th century, a bought position as reward from the Crown after the restoration of the monarchy. Their seat, Tregwelyn, was at the southerly end of the Bodmin Moor in a wilderness of half-fallow fields littered with stone and old broken-down mines near to the coast, with dottings of depressing grey habitations and a greyer peasantry. The gambolling Jacobses had not well regarded their Irish cousin on her supposed health-giving visit to them; only Emily, her aunt and the second wife who was likewise an outsider, had been kind. Molly saw there that her mother was just like her brother the Baron, for he was profoundly reserved, not to say icy, a studious man with hardly a word for anyone, let alone a kind one.

It was hardly credible that their father had been such a go-getter, such a bounder, but perhaps their rectitude sprang from his dissolute ways. Arthur Jacobs was the second son of George Jacobs, Baron Tregwelyn, and being the second son was slated for a career in the army. Like many at the time, he was sent to Ireland to spend his army career lolling in the halls of the Viceregal court, turning out for Victoria's visit, and doing very little actual military work, which suited him just fine. He was fond of brandy and cigars, cards and the upper-class daughters and wives of the gentry. He married one of them, Caroline Tanner of Co. Wicklow who was a cousin of the Talbots. She bore him six children, five girls and a boy in quick succession, and promptly died of consumption. A photograph of her taken the year before she died in 1870 showed a handsome, plump blonde creature with enormous grey eyes (so the Aunties said of the colour, like Molly's) and swags of heavy hair. She seemed serious rather than merry, no match for her husband. He was hardly disconsolate, the story went, but lived his life as a gay bachelor from thence onward, living out of his club and the barracks and leaving his children to be raised by governesses in a dreary grey house on the seashore in Killiney in Co. Dublin. His photograph, made the same year as that of his unmourned wife, showed a man with blazing pale eyes and great moustaches, his dark hair well oiled and curling down into the collar of the impressive dress uniform of the Royal Irish Fusiliers. His only son Jocelyn hated him profoundly, and was only too happy to be schooled in England, where he did a desultory two years at Cambridge before dropping out because in a few short months both his unmarried cousin -heir to the Barony- and his dear old pater dropped dead, leaving him the heir to title and fortune at the age of twenty-two. So he bid farewell to sisters and Ireland forever with barely a backward glance.

The sisters - Margaret, Anne, Vera, Caroline, and Grace - were not left penniless, but lived well enough off an endowment from their mother's family once they came of age. It required frugality, but they had their little extravagancies and were happy in the house they had grown up in. They took a holiday with Gracie the year of her coming-out, which was modest as befitted both true gentility and their slender means, to Lisdoonvarna, where she met a young man; a rather sad case, as Caro called him. His name was Charles MacLenaghan and his family was in mining and mercantile near Virginia in Co. Cavan, quite well to do, but unfortunately Catholic. Poor Charlie had mangled his leg in a riding accident several months before and it had not healed properly; he was still walking with a cane, so had come to take the waters.

The second son of the house with no clear idea at twenty-three what he was to do with himself, this dark-haired Celt was plumpish, rather shy in company, mad about horses, and swept off his feet by their Gracie. She, who with her great beauty, elegant manners, and caustic wit, had charmed the Viceroy himself. But she would not accept that man's indecent proposal, however propitious for the family. No, she would marry and well. Her aim was for her Talbot cousins, or the Butlers or Fitzgeralds, who were friends in the Viceregal set. She paid Charlie such pointed scant attention that it was embarrassing, considering how he flung himself in her way at every opportunity. Finally it was Caro who sent a telegraph to their solicitor enquiring about him. The word that came back was pushed under Gracie's nose at breakfast with a triumphant smile, and she did have the manners to blush: his family owned half of the county and vast interests in England and abroad. So he wasn't the Cowes set, but Gracie, he adores you, will you wait forever? Maybe you would prefer to be the light piece of the Viceroy- this from Aggey with silver venom. She went walking with him that afternoon, agreed a month later to marry, and within a year they were living in Dublin in a grand old Georgian house, expecting a child. Charlie had dropped the "Mac" from his name, taken a position in the estate office of the Bank of Ireland, and they found themselves in the Royal Dublin Society whirl for the rest of their lives. Charlie never knew how much his sisters in law had to do with bestowing on him his beloved Gracie.

Nor, after they moved out of the city into a country house after the birth of their third child in 1891, how unhappy she was. She presented him always with a smooth, ladylike cheerful face, but she hated the country and the horsy set that made up their life. She had been happiest in Dublin with the Opera and the Royal Theatre and the Viceregal Court, happy with only George, their eldest child, accepting of William, their next, but vastly unhappy to find herself expecting another with indecent haste. Not only was she losing her figure, but her happy social life to babies. She had what she had always wanted within her grasp and now she was losing it. Before too long she would be too old to enjoy such pleasures. All because Charlie wanted a girl! Well, he had his girl, but that was all he would have. She left Mary Margaret to the nanny and the governess from the beginning. Nor did he ever know that the artist he hired to paint her portrait eight years later left them more than the picture; she would go to her grave with that guilty secret. She would never make Charlie so unhappy as to tell him that truth, as for all her unhappiness she did in her way love him. And she felt so sorry for him after Geordie died. It took the life right out of him. Though neither it never put him, no nor any of them, off hunting. They were all horse-mad, Molly included. Gracie watched them from the comfortable safety of her chair, and was glad that at least they weren't interested in aeroplanes or any such nonsense. But she never understood them, not Charlie nor any of his breed.

Molly came into the house in wet clothes and muddy boots, knowing well enough not to disturb her mother as she sat with her endless needlework in the back parlour. Her father was off at the Bank, and Patsy was she cared not where, the little imp. After a bath, weary she sat down at the piano in the downstairs parlour. She had a concert upcoming at the Ancient Concert Rooms at Rotunda Hospital, which was the outpost of culture apart from the Abbey; but they only put on Irish plays in which she had no interest.
She went through the first piece on her programme of four, the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata in C# Minor. The meditative, somnolent chords echoing through the house, the house itself dissolved beyond her closed eyes or distracted gaze; for when she looked, she saw not her mother's parlour but Vincent Magilloway's funeral in Dundalk, where she, the bereaved and bewildered fiancée had been subject to such a manner of cosseting by his female relations as to be unbearable. It was worse than his death, for no woman of her own family, apart from her cousin Dorothy in Cavan, could she truly count a friend. She did not weep. She had never wept a tear at his passing, nor in all the time since, but held herself in stern stoicism. Only in the music did her soul give lie to the pose, only in the music could she let her heartache out, and she knew that she had indeed, really loved him. He was fun and frolic, and her freedom from the awful closed world of boarding school and weekend visits home, of illness and seclusion, in which she had lived. And now that freedom was gone. She would have to find her own way out, and she did not know how. Her spirit was not of a calibre to ask for help, nor to lament that she was but eighteen years old. In her way she was as closed as her mother, reluctant to show her pain to the world. She could live at a remove from her emotions for the most part, except in the music.

She played for three hours; Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt's Hungarian rhapsody, passionate, soaring, searing music that let her soul, trembling, out of its confines to fly. No one ever disturbed her at her music. They might criticise everything else she did, but they gave her this, and she was grateful. When she was done, she gave a quick glance behind her into the room, her mother's posh parlour with its Directoire furniture that was the height of London fashion. She touched the piano keys with a light caress and whispered, "Good night, Vince.”

The next evening her parents hosted a supper party. Molly was in her room with Nancy, the waiting-maid she shared with her sister, finishing the last-minute details of toilet when they heard a roar from the next room. Liam, or Willie as their mother called him, was stomping down the hall. He flung open her door without a knock.
"Molls," he cried, holding out an offending necktie.
She smiled at Nancy, and said to him, "Whatever is the matter?"
"This damn thing," he growled, shaking the tie before him. "I can never tie the bloody thing, and oh you know how I hate these stupid affairs! All sorts of nasty insincere people pretending to like each other. All they want to do is drink our liquor and be sick on the carpet."
"Look who's talking about the carpets," she teased him with a smile. "You're the one ruined the hall carpet at Easter and gave the mother fits." She turned to powder her arms in the mirror, saying to Nancy, "O fix his tie, won't you, he's such a baby.... Besides," she said to Liam, "it's not as if you dislike everyone here. Major Russell is expected, and didn't you want to speak to him about the Lady Harriet deal?" She turned from the mirror to look at him. Nancy had finished with his necktie and was straightening the room from the bath.

"I suppose you're right, I had forgotten that," Liam sighed, but his face remained petulant. "Oh, but I hate having to dance with so-and-so's ugly daughter, obliged to make compliments that are the most outrageous lies else otherwise it will reflect badly on Them." His glance took in their parents' room down the hall.
"Poor dear," Molly patted his cheek as she went past him for her gloves. "So much is expected of you!" She clucked and shook her head with a twinkling eye.
"It's not funny!" he complained.
"Well, darling you can't get mad at me," she said, struggling to get into the gloves with Nancy's help.
"No,” Liam said, following her into the hall, "you like these affairs, with the men hanging on your every word and all your girlfriends scrutinising the latest frock," he accused.
She laughed at him over her shoulder as she went down the stair. "Of course I do. Oh Liam, don't be such a pill! It will all be over by midnight and then you won't have to do another until after the hunting season." He grumbled in agreement, and she hurried down the stair to help her mother in the receiving line, more due to the car she had seen in the drive than from any real sense of social duty; just arriving was her best friend Lizzie Butler.
"Dizz!" she exclaimed. "What a charming frock! Lady Butler, Sir, good evening," she said, making a curtsey to Lizzie's parents, and scurried away with her friend to the front parlour, pulling her down onto the sofa. "So, did he give it to you? Oh, do let's see!"
"Oh Gerry, just look!" Liz exclaimed, holding out her hand to show her new engagement ring. . The sapphire-and-pearl sparkled not half so bright as Liz's brown eyes, for George Talbot - a third cousin of Molly's - had been considered quite the catch, though Liz was no dairymaid. The announcement had been expected in the last week and Molly had anxiously scanned the papers, but to no avail. They squealed together in schoolgirl delight, falling on the sofa giddily embracing and it was like old times. Molly's nickname, "Gerry", came from Susanna Herrick, who had remarked on her arrival at school, "Why she's as tall as a giraffe!" Giraffe had been subsequently shortened to Gerry - they thought it terribly clever as it rhymed with Mary - and stuck.
"The announcement was made yesterday," Liz said, blushing. "I was dying to ring you, but Mummy and Daddy made me keep it an absolute secret, and today we were so besieged that I hadn't the chance."
"Oh, Lizzie darling, it's beautiful!" Molly exclaimed. "All this and George Talbot to boot! What a lucky thing you are!"
"Mary," Grace's voice came to them from the hall door. She stood there, tall and beautiful in her dark-blue, feather-trimmed frock. "There you are. Why are you girls sitting in the dark, dear? Never mind. I must speak to Lymon. The Hudsons have just rung and they must bring their nephew; it will upset the laying of the table. Do be a dear and receive for me." It was not a request, but a command, Molly knew.
"Yes, ma'am," she murmured and rose reluctantly from the sofa to follow her mother into the hall where she took her place just inside entrance hall for a quarter of an hour while Grace oversaw the relaying of the table with Mrs Lymon and the maids.
When she was finished with this duty, she wandered into the hall proper, taking a glass of champagne from Bridgie's tray as she went by, and laid her hand on Phillip Ellwood's arm as he stood talking with Liam, saying,
"Too bad for you Phillip darling that you bet on old Marchant's Bounty at Ballsbridge. If you had listened to us and not put all your lovely guineas on a nag, you could have come away with us and Sweetwillow." She smiled at him.
"Yes," Phillip grumbled. "Salt the wounds, won't you Molls? How the devil was I to know it wasn't all Willie's braggartry?"
"I never brag," Liam said, tossing down the last of his champagne and changing glasses as Ellen came by. His hair fell forward into his eyes, and he tossed it back as carelessly as the bubbly.
Molly tapped Phillip's cheek, with a sly glance for her brother. "Yes, you should know better than that. Liam's the best rider in the whole of Leinster."
"And he has you for the best agent, I suppose?" Phillip retorted, for he had lost 200 guineas. "You two really are a pair." His tone made this no compliment.
"Yes," Molly smiled again.
"When we're sober," Liam said, taking another champagne as Bridgie made another pass through the hall.
"Where's John Russell?" Molly asked her brother, to divert his drinking too much before dinner. "I see Maud... Don't say he's made her come by herself..."
Liam shook his head. "No. He's in the library with Fa at the whiskey. I spoke with him already."
She was surprised he had made the time between drinks to conduct their business.

"Good!" She turned back to Phillip. "Must dash, darling," she kissed his cheek airily, "But you must promise to dance with me or I'll come and pour champers all over your lovely new tie." He was wearing a beautiful affair of China silk. "You know you're the only decent rag-step here."
"Ever the charmer, aren't you, Gerry," Phillip said coolly, his blue eyes going cold. He was a handsome young man, as tall as she was, with soft wavy brown hair; his family, like theirs, were industrialists come down from the North. She had spurned many an advance of his at house-, garden-, and beach parties in the last three years. "You only want me to show off your frock to advantage and I'm the only one tall enough. Don't worry, Molly ducks, let the dowdies have their waltzes and then we'll kick up our heels."
He smiled at her, a thinly veiled sneer of bitterness, but she was serene and merely patted his cheek again, picked up her train and wandered through the house, avoiding adroitly the arrival of a drunken barrister, and her mother's consequent distress.
She was meandering down the hall when Ellen was showing Richard Eustace into the downstairs 'loo under her mother's disdainful eye, and she slipped into the back parlour just as Grace was turning in her direction. She passed through the crowded room and went out by the open French doors to the light-strung garden south of the house, where she found Lizzie with Susanna Herrick and Sarah Berry - the rest of the infamous school quartet - sitting on the iron bench in her mother's rose-border.
"Darlings, you're missing all the fun!" she exclaimed. "Dicky just drove up, and drunk as a lord. It's a wonder he didn't run the car into the paddock fence! My mother's asked the cook should we wring him out before he falls into the soup. He's in the downstairs lavatory this minute being put to rights because Mummy didn't want him falling down the stairs. What do you think of that? Should we ring up the papers? It would be hell to pay for him in the morning." He had a respectable Dublin practice, and his father a JP. It would not go well for him to have it publicised that he was roaming the countryside drunk at night endangering decent law-abiding citizens in a motorcar. She would never do it but she enjoyed the impish plan. Richard was very eligible, but also rather wet. He collected butterflies, for heaven's sake!
"Gerry, you're wicked," Susanna declared enthusiastically. She had set her cap for Richard several months ago at a house party, but she was not above a little fun; Molly had given her an enamelled butterfly pin as a joke, which she wore constantly now. It naturally attracted Dick's attention, which made it all the funnier.
"Diz was just telling us all about her engagement parties," Susanna said, not without envy.
Molly hurried over with a chair to sit beside Sarah at the other side of Liz. "Ooh, do tell! Tell tell!" She had been at the Butlers' country house in Kilkenny many times and at the Castle on two formal occasions, though they were deadly dull; but it would be fine to swan there with Liz. They had skated on the marble floor of the Gallery in their silk stockings in the small hours after a fete during the season while the illustrious Butlers looked down their painted noses from the walls. No one had troubled them for the place was supposed to be haunted and most of the servants were reluctant to creep about in the dark of night. As for the current Lord, he was a timorous, bookish man, who preferred London or America to the chill dank of the ancestral pile.
Liz was counting on her fingers. "We have one at the beginning of next month at the estate - the invitations went out yesterday, so you should have them soon - a garden party; Mummy and Daddy have one at the house after that; another in September at the Talbots." Her brow puckered. "I shall have to spend a fortnight at the dressmakers... And millinery! Do you know that the old lady has never been seen in the same hat twice? Geordie told me that. She gives them away to charitable societies. As if the lower orders would wear her hats, they're monstrous!" She was speaking of George's mother, the Viscountess Fitzalan, or as she was commonly known, the Dragon lady of Malahide Castle. She was the good friend of Lady Aberdeen and Countess of Fingal, which was no recommendation. "Ghastly" and "Monstrous" were the two words associated with her and most of her generation by the young ladies. Liz's mother escaped their tarry brush only because she was a no-nonsense horsewoman; the rest they found positively mediaeval.
To go among them in society was to challenge their tidy, staid world, enliven it with pranks and ragtime and outrageous behaviour, which earned them deadly glances at most. To become one of them by marrying was unthinkable. It was exciting to marry - never again would they have such parties, clothes, and attention lavished on them - but they had solemnly sworn over a filched bottle of champagne late one night at the Shelbourne during their debutante days never to decay into the immobile bastions of their mothers' generation (Liz's mother excepted.) They would limit their children to "an heir and a spare" and play tennis, travel, and gad about as long as they pleased. It was 1909, for goodness sake. They would have none of their parents' dour lives of rote and duty.

They had a nice time at their gossip before the strains of music sent them flying inside to the dancing. Molly watched the sedate waltz of her parents - Fa at eye-level with Mummy’s earrings - with the puzzlement she always had to see them together in public. She had heard their story from the Aunties, but it all seemed so improbable; Fa was so bumbling and kind, and Mummy so cold and proper.
She looked over at Dicky Eustace, who had come up on her left and was weaving ever so slightly on his feet. He looked rather green still, and she felt sorry for him.
"Dicky, if you don't stop falling into me," she murmured, "you'll have to dance with me or cause a scandal, then what would your father say?"
He looked at her slowly, with slightly unfocused brown eyes. "That must be the subtlest request I've ever heard," he replied dryly. "Come on then, save a man from disgrace."
She followed him into the dance floor, and as they joined the dance she looked over his shoulder, remembering other waltzes and a handsome young officer.... No, that was too aching. Firmly, she turned her mind to the present and she caught Susanna's eye in the whirl. "We'll make Sue jealous," she said.
"What?" He was not paying attention.
"I say that Susanna will think you're sparking me," she said and turned to look at him directly. They were of a height. He looked awful.
"Why should she care?" He asked in surprise.
"Really Dicky, you're hopeless!" She shook her head in disgust.
"What d'you mean?" There was a sheen of sweat on his brow. She hoped he would not be sick. She only shook her head and turned her gaze over his shoulder again. She would have Liam tell him; it would seem odd coming from her.
Dicky's balance gave way as they turned and he stepped on her foot.
"Sorry," he mumbled.
"Steady on," she murmured. "What were you drinking, anyway?"
"The native stuff. But a lot of it."
"You're an idiot."
"I know," he intoned in the voice of a martyr. "But it got me to dance with you."
"You'd have done that anyway," she said coolly. She didn't much care what his reasons for drinking were, and he wouldn't have told her if she did. Whatever they were, she found his inebriation distasteful. It spoiled the evening with rude unpleasantness.

Eustace was not the only one drinking to forget the unspeakable that night. She buttonholed her brother on the way into the dining room, which gave their mother fits as it left their respective partners adrift. Liam was clearly, if more pleasantly, drunk, and regarded her with a fixed, jovial expression, as if once put on for the evening he could not take it off.
"You look an idiot," she told him. "Stop grinning like that."
"My loving sister," he murmured mockingly, with a little bow. "I can't. I'm the toy soldier performing his mechanical duties. Wind me up and I fete all the ladies for seven hours at a stretch, perfect smile, and perfect manners. A boon for all social occasions. No feelings to get in the way."
"You're being absurd."
"Quite." He agreed with the same false pleasantness. "Care to join me?"
"How much have you had to drink?"
"I can't remember." He grinned at the face she made. "Not-to-worry! I'm celebrating!" He flung his arms wide, attracting attention to them.
"Shh!"
He lowered his voice, comically, leaning conspiratorially toward her though she was as tall as he was. "Russell agreed to a better price than I had hoped for with Furley, so there. You shall have your profit-margin increase duly. You can buy a new hat," he waved his arm. "Or whatever fal-lals you like."
"Well, go lightly for heaven's sake!" She murmured, glancing round. "I have no intention of helping pour you into bed, nor of listening to your complaining in the morning."
He leant and kissed her. "You're such a dear. What would I do without your tender mercies? Now run along. Phillip is looking stranded over there by the potted palm, and by his expression I don't think it's a very entertaining partner."
"Oh bother," Molly said, and strode off as quickly as her train and propriety would allow.
They had their rag-step dances after dinner when the older set were too full of brandy and Dublin Rock to protest the gramophone’s scratching. But by then the ensemble had had their dinner and the company was rested and ready for another go.

The last guest departed at half-three in the morning and Molly, Susanna, Sarah, and Lizzie fell into bed upstairs, whispering of gowns and wedding-tours until sleep overtook them. Liam was not seen until tea-time the next day, by which time the girls had been packed off to Dublin after luncheon and Liz’s borrowing of a frock of Patsy's because she had left her day dress behind in the car her parents had taken and it was the only thing that would fit. She could hardly gad about Dublin in the middle of the day in her evening gown; although they considered it. Liam Molly tormented at tea-time by rustling the pages of the magazine she was reading unnecessarily as she sat curled in the big chair in the back parlour where the family customarily gathered for informal tea. At length he threw his napkin at her, knocking the magazine into her lap, and buried his head in the sofa cushions.
"Children," said their mother mildly, shaking her head in dismay, unconscious of Liam's hangover. "Really!" Fa said nothing at all, but winked at Molly over the newspapers.
On the Wednesday morning next, she was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her room, cutting and pasting clippings from the newspapers and society magazines into her scrapbook. There was Liz and George's engagement announcement from the Times, both London and Dublin, as well as assorted gossip from The Tattler and The Spectator. There was a snippet about her which Hobbles would certainly not like, from a house-party at the Eustaces a month ago: "...also present was Miss Mary Clennaghan of Baldoyle, seen in company with the most eligible young barrister. Has the dashing Mr. Eustace erased the memory of the tragedy of last season? Miss C was in high spirits, but only the heir knows for sure..." It was absurd, she and Dicky! He was not in the least dashing, but wet as could be, a plodder, and she had no interest in him beyond friendship, even if Sue were not in love with him. She wished that the society moles would stop referring to "the tragedy of last season". Bad enough that her name had been mentioned in connection with Vincent's death in the Irish Times, let alone to be hounded forever after in society pages. How did they ever expect her to forget if they were always speculating on whether her heart had mended?

She turned several of the stiff pages back and looked at their engagement announcement. The dignity of the Times would not suffer photographs, but the Independent had no such lofty airs and above the announcement there was the photograph they had had made in Grafton street for the occasion. Very formal, with Vince in a dark suit and she in a silk waist, each at three-quarters, turned toward each other but facing the camera. It had taken an hour, and afterward they had gone for a champagne luncheon at Dublin Castle, sponsored by "the chaps in the corps." How they had flirted with her! Outrageously, and Vince had taken it in good humour, saying not-to-worry, they would be in Vienna before any of them knew it, and the girl all his alone. Such gallant twaddle. She had the original on her bureau, behind her hairbrushes, and where she looked at it every day.
She looked down now at the obituary from the Times, with its staid, terse description of his life and death. Honours in Mathematics at TCD. Trained as an engineer. An honourable service in HM's Navy. Cadet in the Diplomatic Corps. Unknown assailants. Survived by his parents... and fiancée, Miss Clennaghan of Baldoyle, Co. Dublin.
It was as if it had happened to someone else.

She looked up at a knock at the half-open door to find Liam standing in riding clothes. "Yes?" She closed the book and wiped her sticky hands on the towel beside her.
"Are you busy?"
She shook her head, setting aside the scrapbook. "Not really. What d'you want?"
Liam tossed his hair back from his face. "Russell wants me to bring Furley out to have a look at him with the Lady, and I wondered if you were on for coming with me. It's an awfully boring ride alone -"
"Not to mention that you have to manage Furley as well," she said, calculating the fractiousness of the horse. "Of course," she nodded, getting off the bed. "Let me change and I'll be right with you."
"Thanks," her brother said, and went out again.
They took the horse out to the Russells' in Woodbrook and settled the deal there to service Russell's prize mare. On the way back they rode along the long stretch of Sandymount strand together at an easy pace until they came to their favourite racing spot north of the Grand Canal, and glanced at one another sidelong.
"Ready?" Liam asked.
"Before you!" Molly shouted and nudged her horse forward. She shot out ahead of Liam who came galloping after her, shouting,
"Cheat! Blackguard! You're supposed to wait!"
She laughed into the wind and touched the crop to her Chestnut, who needed no urging, murmuring, "Come on, my old beauty."

As they rounded the northerly turn in the long horseshoe-shaped strand Liam came close to closing her advantage and, looking behind her, she urged her horse to greater speed. But a full gallop into the softness of a sinkhole sent them both tumbling into the water, Molly flying over the horse's neck, putting paid to the idea that one could not be thrown from a side-saddle. She came up, spitting salt water, sand, and hair from her face, bruised likely but otherwise unharmed, to watch the horse limp, with a terrible moan, onto the solidness of dry sand.
Liam jumped off his Painter and lunged for her hand in the incoming wave. His face was white as death, for he had been behind their brother George when his horse balked at a fence and he was thrown head over ears, breaking his neck; he was the first person to come upon him. That it would have been a mercy had he died instantly was all Liam would ever say about the scene. Now, she clasped his outstretched hand and was hauled to her feet. Her ribs hurt, and her habit was sticking to her uncomfortably, weighing her down with its weight, but she was not dazed.
"Are you all right?" Liam was shouting at her in the crash of waves. Passers-by were staring at them.
"Yes!" she shouted back, climbing laboriously with him out of the water. "But not poor Chestnut." She raised her arm, pointing. "Look at that!"

They went over to the limping mare and Molly took the bridle in hand while Liam knelt and felt the sore fetlock with an expertise that would have done credit to a veterinary. Nevertheless, the horse gave a whinny of pain.
"Easy, my girl," she said, stroking the velvet nose. "Will it spavin, do you think?" She asked her brother.
He looked up at her, frowning in concern. "I don't know. I hope not." He rose and patted down the afflicted animal with care, but there were no other major injuries. "She can't be ridden, that's certain," he said at last. "You'll have to lead her."
"All the way to Baldoyle!" She exclaimed. It was seven miles. "She'd never be able to walk that far."
"Well, then, just a minute," Liam said, and went to fetch Painter, who was annoying a group of bathers with his curiosity. He came back with the horse and said, "Let me give you some money." He dug into his pocket and produced a guinea and odd change. "I'll take Painter home and bring the trailer back for you and Ches. Get yourself something hot to drink," he directed, nodding at the concessions stand a few hundred yards away, "and stay out of the wind. I should be back well before dark. If you have any trouble, stay near others and find a constable."
If the situation hadn't been so tragic, she could have smiled at his mother-henning. He made it clear in times like this who the big brother was.
"I will," she promised, taking the money from him. She watched him mount his horse and ride off. When he was out of sight, she led the injured mare farther away from the water's edge and tied off the reins on the handrail of the sea-wall stairs.
"Poor old dear," she said in sympathy. "You're such a loyal old girl. I didn't intend for you to hurt yourself." She flung her arms about the horse's neck in affection, and shivered in the cold wind.