Chapter 36
The Tarrymore village library was a small but stately building of creamy marble, in Georgian Revival style.
It was easily the grandest building in this humble village.
Carved into the lintel above the door was the now-familiar Rossington family coat of arms, and the inscription Magna est fedes nostra.
Therese pointed to the inscription. “I flunked Latin. What’s that mean?”
“It means ‘mighty is our faith.’”
They heard footsteps approaching rapidly from behind and turned to see the Goth girl from the teashop running in their direction.
“Were you wanting to get into the library?” she asked, looking flustered.
“Yes, please,” Maeve said. “Do you work here?”
“God, no,” the girl replied. “It’s my gran’s day to volunteer, only she’s down with her arthritis, so I promised I’d come open up.”
She fished around in her knitting bag, finally extracting a circlet of keys, one of which she fitted into the lock.
“You’re not local, are you?”
“We’re from the US, and we’re trying to research our family history,” Maeve said.
“Oh yeah, Gran says they get a lot of that.” The girl held the door open. “Come on in, then.” She turned a switch, and a row of brass chandeliers illuminated the room.
A carved wooden checkout desk was directly in front of them, and beyond that were rows and rows of bookshelves.
A line of clerestory windows brought weak daylight into the room, and brackets above the bookshelves held a series of marble busts.
The ceiling was adorned with elaborate plaster moldings.
At the rear of the room was a marble fireplace, and above that hung a portrait of an auburn-haired woman in a gilt frame.
Therese pointed at the painting. “Who’s that?”
The girl had settled herself behind the checkout desk, and was powering up a boxy, outdated desktop computer. She looked up to see where the visitor was pointing.
“Oh, that’s Lady Delia. One of them Rossingtons. Rich as anything. I think she gave the money to build this library. Dead now, of course, but my gran says she was murdered. Can you believe that? A murder in this poky little town?”
The sisters exchanged a glance.
Maeve was already walking toward the bookshelves.
“Oh, miss,” the girl called, “I’m very sorry, but since you’re not a local and you don’t have a library card, I’m not supposed to let you check anything out.”
Maeve ran her fingertips over a row of leather-bound volumes.
She inhaled and smiled. The room smelled like leather, and old books, and yes, an intoxicating elixir of dust and mildew.
It reminded her of the Carnegie Library at home in Savannah, where she’d spent many happy hours of her childhood while Mary Helen was at work at the drugstore.
She doubled back to the checkout desk. “My friend tells me that this building also houses the local historical society?”
“Erm, yeah, it does. But they’re sort of separate from this. The library gave them the old conference room to set up their stuff. I think it’s only open, like, by appointment.”
“If we promise not to take anything, can we go in and look around?” Maeve asked.
The girl looked alarmed. “Oh, I don’t know if that’s allowed. I’d need to ask Gran, but she’s sleeping. Maybe you could try back next week?”
“Next week?” Therese the actress assumed her damsel-in-distress persona. “But we head back home tomorrow. We’re flying out of Dublin, and this is our last stop. Please, couldn’t you make an exception, this one time, and let us look around?”
“I don’t know,” the girl demurred. “It’s awfully fiddly back there. Big books made up of old newspapers, they practically crumble if you look at ’em. And rare things. Historical stuff, you know.”
“We’d be really, really careful,” Maeve pledged. She pressed her palms together prayerfully. “It would mean an awful lot to us.”
The girl looked around the empty room, then shrugged and pulled out the key ring again.
“My gran could get sacked if anything happens to this dusty old stuff,” she warned, after unlocking the door.
The conference room walls were covered with enlarged and framed black-and-white photos tracing the history of the village.
There were vintage photos of local dignitaries posing in front of what the sisters assumed was the courthouse, proud farmers pinning ribbons on sheep at an agricultural fair, dour-looking priests and nuns in front of a school, and classroom pictures of children that looked to date back to the 1940s.
“Look,” Therese said, chuckling. “Those girls are wearing practically the same kinds of plaid jumpers we had to wear at St. Mary’s.”
She moved along to the next photo, which showed a ruggedly handsome man wearing 1950s garb, leaning down to shake hands with a little girl. “Is that who I think it is?”
Maeve peered at the photo, and the tiny caption handwritten across the bottom. “Oh my God. It is John Wayne. According to this, he and Maureen O’Hara visited Tarrymore in 1951, when they were filming The Quiet Man movie over in Galway.”
“That was one of Mom’s favorite movies,” Therese said.
“I know. I just threw out her VHS tape of it when I was cleaning the house,” Maeve said.
A large glass-enclosed display case in one corner of the room held a mannequin wearing a delicate satin-and-lace wedding gown with a dropped waist reminiscent of the flapper dresses of the 1920s.
Maeve read aloud from a brass plaque. “‘Wedding gown worn by Miss Maud Followell at her nuptials to Charles, Lord Stephenson. Given by her son, Richard.’”
A table held a diorama of the village, crafted from wood in minute detail by a local craftsman, and another glass case held tarnished silver trophies and faded fair ribbons. A nearby bronze plaque listed the names of the village’s brave soldiers who’d lost their lives in two world wars.
Therese went straight to a shelf of bound newspaper volumes, each with a date stamped on the spine. “These don’t start until the 1930s,” she reported. “They won’t do us any good.”
But Maeve had found a more compelling book that was displayed on an oak lectern.
The binding was of tooled burgundy leather, with the title stamped in gold. A SMALL HISTORY OF THE ROSSINGTONS OF TARRYMORE. By the Hon. Geoffrey, Lord Rossington.
“Check this out,” she called to her sister.
Therese stood looking over her shoulder as Maeve flipped the pages.
The first page of the book was a self-congratulatory essay of how the first Lord Rossington, from Surrey, had acquired Tarrymore in 1859 from its previous owners, after being invited to a pheasant hunt a few years earlier.
The nobleman’s initial intent was for the estate to be a family retreat for hunting and fishing, but eventually, through his own sense of civic pride, he decided to permanently relocate to the Irish countryside.
Maeve was idly flipping pages, until she came to one that featured a grainy black-and-white photo of what looked like a daguerreotype of the lord’s wife, Lady Geraldine. “Ooh, look,” she said, jabbing the photo with her index finger. “Here’s our girl.”
According to a paragraph below the daguerreotype, Geraldine Bellentree Fitzhugh was the oldest daughter of Arthur Fitzhugh, Earl of Witchcombe, who’d made his fortune in the South African diamond mines.
It was Lady Geraldine, the book noted, who’d brought a portion of her father’s vast art collection to be hung at the family’s new estate in Ireland.
“I love it,” Therese chortled. “Lord Rossington married for money.”
“Diamond money,” Maeve added.
“Blood diamonds,” Therese agreed. “Which could buy a Turner, a Goya, a Vermeer, and then some.”
She continued to flip through the book’s pages, which were full of extravagant praise for the civic and cultural contributions the Rossingtons made to the community.
She stopped at a page that showed a slender, bespectacled man in formal evening wear, standing at the entrance to the Tarrymore manor house, making a bow to a tanned, silver-haired man in full military dress weighed down with ceremonial ribbons, sashes, and medals.
“Wow, here’s Lord Rossington welcoming Lord Mountbatten to a party,” Maeve said, squinting to read the tiny print of the photo caption.
“Why does the name Mountbatten ring a bell?” Therese asked, glancing down at the photo.
“Mountbatten was Prince Philip’s uncle—you know? The Prince Philip who was married to Queen Elizabeth?”
“Oh, right,” Therese said.
“He was killed in the late ’70s, when the IRA blew up his sailing yacht.”
“The IRA strikes again,” Therese murmured.
The door leading into the conference room opened, and the Goth girl stood in the doorway looking flustered. “Ladies, my gran just called and when I told her I’d let you in here, she blessed me out proper. I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave.”
“Five more minutes?” Therese wheedled. “We’re so close to finishing our research. Please?”
“Five and then out you go.” The girl stood, her hand on the doorknob. “And I’m to make sure you don’t take anything when you leave.”
“Harsh,” Maeve said, under her breath. She started turning the pages of the book faster, looking for anything related to the murder of Lady Delia.
“Wait, go back a page,” Therese said. “I think I saw something.”
It was a photograph of a newspaper clipping, with a headline that read BELOVED LOCAL PHILANTHROPIST FOUND SLAIN.
Maeve whipped out her phone and quickly snapped a photo of the clipping. She turned a page and saw that there was another clipping, and then another, and photographed those too.
“All right,” Goth girl announced. “Time’s up. Out you go.”