The Last Secret of the Deverills Read online

  He was uncharacteristically nervous. He knew he was considered handsome even by those who weren’t normally attracted to men with red hair, and his half-sister, Kitty, who had raised him in the place of the mother he didn’t have, never ceased to remind him of the Deverill charm in his Deverill smile so that he had grown up believing himself special simply for being a Deverill. But suddenly, in the face of actually caring what another person thought of him, he doubted himself.

  The small, inexpensive hotel where Mrs Goodwin and Martha were staying was not far from the Shelbourne, but when JP reached it he was out of breath from having walked so fast. The rosy-cheeked receptionist looked up from behind the desk and smiled at him warmly, her eyes brightening behind her glasses at the sight of such a tall and fine-looking gentleman. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, feeling a little foolish for carrying a bouquet of roses. ‘I’m after a Miss Wallace,’ he said, leaning on the top of the desk. The receptionist didn’t need to look in the book for she knew very well who Miss Wallace was. The young lady and her friend had enquired about the Convent of Our Lady Queen of Heaven that morning and she had given them directions.

  ‘I’m afraid she and her companion are still out,’ said the receptionist in her gentle Irish lilt, dropping her eyes onto the flowers. ‘Would you like me to put those in water for you?’

  JP’s disappointment was palpable. He tapped his fingers on the wood impatiently. ‘But they will be coming back?’ he asked, frowning.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ the receptionist replied. She knew it was incorrect to divulge any more of their arrangements but the young man looked so sad and the gift of flowers was so romantic that she added quietly, ‘They’ve changed their booking and will be staying another day.’

  At this he cheered up and the receptionist was pleased to be the cause of his happiness. ‘Then I shall leave these with you. May I have a piece of paper so I can write a note?’

  ‘I can do better than that. I can give you a little white card with an envelope. Much more elegant,’ she said with a smile. She turned round and pretended to look through a pile of letters to give the gentleman some privacy. JP tapped the pen against his temple and wondered what to write. He was good with words usually, but suddenly he didn’t even know how to begin.

  What he wanted to say was most definitely too forward. He didn’t want to frighten off Martha before she had even had the chance to get to know him. He wished he could remember a line from a poem, or something witty from a novel, but his mind had gone blank and he remembered nothing. Of course his father would know exactly what to write but he was at the Kildare Street Club, where he would no doubt be discussing racing and politics with his Anglo-Irish friends, as was his custom when he came to Dublin. Kitty would know what to write too, but she was back at home in Ballinakelly. JP was on his own and he felt useless.

  Mrs Goodwin and Martha returned to the hotel a little after seven that evening. They had spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the city enjoying the sights before settling into Bewley’s in Grafton Street for a cup of tea. With its sumptuous crimson banquettes, stained-glass windows and warm, golden lights the café had a distinctly European feel which delighted the two women, tired from walking in the cold. They warmed up on tea and restored their energy with cake and watched the other people with the fascination of tourists in a new city who delight in every new flavour.

  JP Deverill dominated Martha’s thoughts, but every now and then she’d turn a corner and find herself wondering whether the elegant lady walking on the other side of the street, or the one sitting on the bench, could possibly be her mother. For all she knew she could have passed her a dozen times already. A small spark of hope that perhaps Lady Rowan-Hampton was looking for her ignited in her heart and her thoughts continually drifted off into the cliché of an emotional reunion.

  The receptionist smiled when they stepped into the foyer of their hotel. ‘Good evening, Miss Wallace. A gentleman came by this afternoon with flowers for you.’ She turned and lifted them off the floor. ‘I took the liberty of putting them in water.’

  Martha caught her breath and pressed her hand to her heart. ‘Oh my, they’re beautiful!’ she exclaimed, reaching for them.

  ‘They certainly are,’ Mrs Goodwin agreed. ‘My goodness, what a gentleman he is.’

  ‘He wrote a note to go with them,’ said the receptionist, thinking Miss Wallace the luckiest girl in the whole of Dublin.

  ‘A note!’ Martha declared excitedly, lifting the small envelope out from among the roses.

  ‘What does it say?’ asked Mrs Goodwin, leaning over to smell the flowers.

  Martha pulled off her gloves and put them on the reception desk, then slid out the card with trembling fingers. She smiled at his neat handwriting and because she now had something of his to treasure. ‘Dear Miss Wallace,’ she read. ‘I am usually good with words but you have rendered me hopelessly inept. Forgive my lack of poetry. Will you allow me the honour of escorting you around our beautiful city? I shall call on you at your hotel tomorrow at ten. Yours hopefully, JP Deverill.’ Martha sighed happily and pressed the card against her chest. ‘He’s coming tomorrow at ten!’ She widened her eyes at Mrs Goodwin. ‘I think I need to sit down.’

  Mrs Goodwin accompanied Martha up to their room, carrying the vase of red roses behind her like a bridesmaid. Once inside Martha sank onto the bed and lay back with a contented sigh. Mrs Goodwin smoothed her grey hair and looked at her charge through the mirror which hung on the wall in front of her. ‘Of course I will have to come with you,’ she said firmly. Her soft heart did not in any way undermine her sense of responsibility. Even though she was no longer in the employ of Martha’s parents, it was her duty to look after their daughter as she had done for the last seventeen years. Nonetheless, she felt as if she and Martha were a pair of fugitives running from a crime scene and was determined to see that, once Martha had found her birth mother, she was returned safely to the bosom of her family in Connecticut.

  Martha giggled. ‘I want you to come with me, Goodwin,’ she said, propping herself up on her elbows. ‘I want you to witness everything. It will save me having to tell you about it afterwards. What shall I wear?’

  Mrs Goodwin, who had unpacked Martha’s trunk, opened the wardrobe and pulled out a pretty blue dress with a matching belt to emphasize her slender waist. ‘I think this will do,’ she said, holding it up by the hanger. ‘You look lovely in blue and it’s very ladylike.’

  ‘I shan’t sleep a wink tonight. I’m all wound up.’

  ‘A glass of warm milk and honey will see to that. If you want to look your best for Mr Deverill, you must get your beauty sleep.’

  ‘Mr Deverill.’ Martha lay down again and sighed. ‘There’s something delightfully wicked about that name.’

  ‘Because it sounds like “devil”,’ said Mrs Goodwin, then pursed her lips. ‘I hope that’s the only similarity.’

  Even after a glass of warm milk and honey Martha was unable to sleep. Mrs Goodwin, on the other hand, had no such difficulty and breathed heavily in the next-door bed, her throat relaxing into the occasional snore, which grated on Martha’s patience.

  Martha climbed out of bed and went to the window, tiptoeing across the creaking floorboards. She pulled the curtains apart and gazed out onto the street below. The city was dark but for the golden glow of the street lamps, and she could see a fine drizzle falling gently through the auras of light like tiny sparks. It was quiet too, and above the glistening tiled roofs the clouds were heavy and grey. There was no moon or star to be seen, no tear in the sky through which to glimpse the romance of the heavens, no snow to soften the stone, no leaves to give movement to the trees which stood stiff and trembling in the cold February night, but the thought of JP Deverill rendered everything beautiful.

  Mrs Goodwin had suggested she write to her parents to let them know that she had arrived safely in Dublin. Dutifully, Martha had set about the task with a mollified heart. As she crossed the Atlantic she had had time
to think about her situation and her horror at having discovered that she was not her parents’ biological child – unlike her little sister Edith who had taken such pleasure in telling her so – had eased and she now felt nothing but compassion. Her parents were simply two people who had longed for a child. Unable to have their own they had adopted a baby from Ireland, which was where her adoptive mother Pam Wallace’s family originally came from. As perhaps any loving parents would do they had kept it secret in order to protect Martha. She didn’t blame them. She didn’t even blame Edith for spilling the secret. However, she was hurt that her aunt Joan could give such a sensitive piece of information to a child who was too young to know how explosive it was.

  So, Martha had written a long letter on the hotel paper, laying bare her feelings, which her first note, left on the hall table in the house for her parents to find after she had gone, had failed to do. Now she believed they needed more of an explanation. She couldn’t have confronted them about the truth of her situation because it was too painful. She loved them so much that the reality of not really belonging to them was like a knife to the heart. It was unspeakable – and until she came to terms with it she would not talk about it to anyone else but Goodwin. Had she asked them for permission to go she doubted they would have given it. There was talk of a possible war in Europe and Pam Wallace was notoriously overprotective of her two daughters. I need to unearth my roots, whatever they may be, she wrote. You will always be my mummy and daddy. If you love me back please forgive me and try to understand.

  Now she reflected further on her predicament and a tiny grain of resentment embedded itself in her heart like a worm in the core of an apple. She reflected on the pressure her mother had always put on her to be immaculate: immaculately dressed, mannered, behaved and gracious – nothing less would do, and often being immaculate was somehow not enough to satisfy Pam Wallace. When she was a little girl her mother had minded so badly that she impress Grandma Wallace and the rest of her husband’s family that she had turned her daughter into a sack of nerves. Martha had barely had the courage to speak for fear of saying something out of turn. She remembered the horrible feeling of rejection one hard stare from her mother could induce if she fell short – and most of the time she wasn’t even sure what she had done.

  Even now the memory of it caused her heart to contract with panic. It hadn’t been the same for Edith. Martha’s sister, six years her junior, had come as a surprise to Pam and Larry Wallace and now Martha understood why; they hadn’t thought they could make a child. Consequently, Edith was more precious than Martha and her birth had been celebrated with such exhilaration it could have been the Second Coming.

  The truth was that Pam Wallace had to mould Martha into a Wallace, but Edith didn’t require any moulding because she was a Wallace. That was why they had been treated differently. It all fell into place now. Martha’s adoption was the missing piece in the puzzle that had been her childhood. Edith could behave with impunity and Pam did nothing to discipline or reprimand her. The two sisters had been treated differently because they were different. One was a Wallace and the other was not and no amount of moulding or hard stares could ever make Martha into what she wasn’t. As a seventeen-year-old girl with little experience of the world this fact convinced her that her parents loved Edith more – and from her lonely contemplation now by the window that conclusion was indisputable.

  Martha wondered about her real mother, as she had done so often since finding her birth certificate at the back of her mother’s bathroom cupboard. Lady Rowan-Hampton was her name and Martha had constructed a character to match. She imagined her with soft brown eyes, much like her own, and long curly brown hair. She was beautiful and elegant as an aristocratic British lady would most certainly be, and when at last they were reunited her mother would shed tears of joy and relief and wrap her arms around her, whispering between sobs that now they had found each other they would never be parted.

  Suddenly Martha began to cry. The surge of emotion came as such a surprise that she put her fingers to her mouth and gasped. She glanced at the bed to make sure that she hadn’t awoken her nanny, but the old woman was sleeping peacefully beneath the blanket, which rose and fell with her breath. Martha threw her gaze out of the window but her vision was blurred and all she saw was her own distorted reflection in the glass staring forlornly back at her. Who was she? Where did she come from? What kind of life would she have had had her mother not abandoned her at the convent? Would she ever know? There were so many questions, her brain ached. And she felt so rootless, so alone. Only Mrs Goodwin was who she claimed to be. Everyone else had lied. Martha’s shoulders began to shake. One moment she had been a young American woman from a well-connected, wealthy family, secure in the knowledge of her family’s love, dutiful, biddable and obedient. The next an outsider, purchased from a convent on the other side of the world, rebellious, disobedient and defiant. Where did she belong and to whom? What could she believe in any more? It was as if the structures within which she had grown up had collapsed around her, leaving her exposed and vulnerable, like a tortoise without its shell.

  She wiped away her tears and closed the curtains. Mrs Goodwin sighed in her sleep and heaved her large body over like a walrus on the beach. Martha climbed back into bed and pulled the blanket to her chin. She shivered with cold and curled into a ball. As she drifted off to sleep at last it wasn’t her mother who played about her mind or the unanswered questions that had so depleted her energy, but JP Deverill emerging through the fog of her bewilderment like a dashing knight to rescue her from her growing sense of rejection.

  Chapter 2

  JP had barely slept. He was a sack of nerves. All he could think about was Martha Wallace. Everything about her fascinated him, from her mysterious reserve to her shy and bashful smile, and he could only guess at the life she had lived on the other side of the Atlantic. He wanted to know everything about her, from the mundane and trivial to the big and important. Their chance meeting in the tea room at the Shelbourne had been so momentous it was as if the very plates beneath the earth’s surface had shifted, changing the way he saw himself and the world. Ballinakelly had always been the centre of his universe, yet now he felt as if he had outgrown it. Martha smelt of foreign lands and sophisticated cities and he wanted her to take him by the hand and show them to him.

  He breakfasted with his father, who was always up early. Bertie Deverill was a busy man. Ever since he had sold Castle Deverill and given most of what he had to his estranged wife Maud – who had swiftly bought a sumptuous house in Belgravia from where she entertained lavishly with her portly and exceedingly rich lover, Arthur Arlington – he had set about exploring new ways to make money. So far nothing had quite come off but Bertie was always cheerful and enthusiastic and confident that, in time, one of his schemes would eventually succeed. Looking at him now, sitting in regal splendour in the dining room of the Shelbourne, one would not have imagined that he had a single financial concern.

  ‘You look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning,’ he said to his son. ‘I don’t suppose it has anything to do with that pretty girl you met yesterday?’

  JP grinned and the freckles expanded on his nose and his grey eyes gleamed. ‘I’m going to show her the sights,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, so you took my advice, did you?’

  ‘I did. I left flowers at her hotel with a note. I hope to meet her at ten.’

  Bertie took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket. He had to hold it out on its chain in order to see the little hands for his eyesight was deteriorating. ‘You have two hours to kill, JP.’

  ‘I know, and they’ll be the slowest two hours of my life.’ He laughed and Bertie shook his head and put his teacup to his lips.

  ‘It doesn’t feel so long ago that Maud made me feel like that.’ He took a sip and his eyes misted. ‘Hard to believe now, isn’t it?’ JP had noticed that a certain wistfulness had begun to seep into his father’s recollections when he spoke about his wife. From
the little JP had gleaned from listening to his half-sisters Kitty and Elspeth, Maud was snobby, cold-hearted and selfish and their marriage had been a desert for years. Maud hadn’t forgiven Bertie for publicly recognizing JP, the bastard child he had spawned with one of the housemaids, or for selling the castle, which was their own son Harry’s inheritance. She had stormed off to London and, as far as JP could tell, everyone was very relieved, especially Kitty and Elspeth. But recently Bertie’s attitude towards Maud had begun to change. A thawing seemed to be taking place. A melting of old resentments. A healing of wounds. Her name was creeping into his sentences and the sound of it no longer jarred.

  JP rarely thought about his birth mother. He included her in his prayers every night and he sometimes wondered whether she was in Heaven, looking down on him. But he didn’t really care. Kitty had always been a mother to him, her husband Robert rather like a stepfather. JP considered himself lucky to have two fathers. So many had none, for the Great War had done away with almost an entire generation of men.

  He wasn’t nostalgic about the past or romantic about the story of his birth. He knew he had arrived in a basket on the doorstep of the Hunting Lodge, where his father and Kitty lived, with a note that asked Kitty to look after him as his own mother had died. He wasn’t curious to know more. He didn’t feel inadequate as others might for he was confident that Kitty loved him as if he were her own child and he had never desired more; it wasn’t in his nature. JP was a happy, positive young man, living fully in the present; a man whose heart was spilling over with gratitude.

  ‘I’ll meet you back here at 5.30 then,’ said Bertie. ‘We’ll take the evening train down to Ballinakelly. I told Kitty you’d be back in time for supper.’

  JP’s face fell. ‘I was rather hoping I might stay an extra night,’ he said.