Oh Danny Boy (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #5)

“Daniel’s parents don’t exactly move in our social circle,” she said. “I think a chance meeting with them is hardly likely.”


On the long walk back into town I tried to think charitably about Miss Norton. I knew how I would have reacted if I’d found that my fiancé was keeping company with another woman. And she was a proud person. She could not have enjoyed having to admit that her engagement had ended in failure or having to endure the whispers and pitying glances. A strong motive for wanting to punish Daniel; and yet I had to think that her reaction when I gave her the news was genuine. I had startled her, I was sure. After a life of raising four young brothers, I had become good at knowing when someone was covering up the truth.

But of course that didn’t mean that no member of her family was involved in orchestrating Daniel’s downfall. Perhaps a doting parent or uncle had taken the law into his own hands to teach Daniel a lesson. I couldn’t think how I was going to find that out.

All that way for nothing. By the time I stumbled back into White Plains in the full heat of the afternoon, I was so hot and exhausted that I was almost in tears. After I had fortified myself with a glass of iced tea and a ham roll I felt a little better and made my way to the station to catch the train back to the city. The carriage was full. I sat in one of the few remaining seats and we lurched out of the station. It was fiendishly hot and the air that blew in through the half-open window was like a blast from an oven. No sooner had we left the station than the man opposite me took out a large cigar and lit it, sending noxious smoke in my direction.

I began to feel queasy and closed my eyes as the carriage swayed to and fro. I had never been sick on a train before. I had even crossed the Atlantic in a gale and not succumbed to seasickness. But today the train seemed to be running on square wheels. We were tossed violently from side to side. At last I could stand it no longer. I fought my way down the carriage and out onto the little platform at the back. There I was horribly sick.

As I stood there, feeling clammy all over, a wave of fear passed through me. Had the typhoid epidemic caught up with me after all? Or was it just something I had eaten? I had been poisoned once this summer and had no wish to repeat that experience in a hurry. In the fresh air I began to recover. I wondered if the effects of arsenic poisoning ever lingered. It would be almost a month since—

The world stood still. Almost a month since I had returned from Adare, and during that time I had not been visited by the normal female curse. I wasn’t the most worldly or experienced of young women, but even on the remote West Coast of Ireland, I had heard enough whispered tales to know what that meant. The sickness and weakness and emotional state were all explained in horrible clarity. I stood staring out as the countryside rushed past me. I was, to use the vernacular, in the family way.





NINE




I managed to make it home somehow although my mind was in such a state of turmoil that I found it hard to walk or even breathe. I had only felt this way once in my life before, and that was when I had seen Justin Hartley lying dead at my feet and knew that I had to flee from Ireland or be hanged. That terrible feeling of suffocation, of doom, of no way out. Above all I was mortified by my own weakness and seething with anger that fate had dealt me such a cruel blow. One night, one reckless, imprudent occasion, when Daniel and I had been trapped together in a storm and now this—a life in ruins. For that was what it would surely be. Oh, to be sure, Sid and Gus would rally round and maybe even find me a place to hide out during a pregnancy, but in the end I’d be a woman with an illegitimate child that I had no way of supporting.

Daniel would have to marry me. The words came into my head, making me almost laugh at the bitter irony. Daniel was in no position to marry anybody at the moment. I didn’t even know that I wanted to marry him, if he were free. There was a big difference between wanting to marry and being forced to marry. And yet society had no tolerance for fallen women. Some of those prostitutes I had met during my night in a jail cell had probably started off as good girls whose lives went wrong in this way.

As I turned the key and opened my front door, the first thing I saw was a letter in Daniel’s bold, black script lying on my doormat. The afternoon post had brought the answer to the note I had sent him yesterday. I tore it open.

Molly—as to retaining a lawyer or posting bail: my assets appear to have been frozen until it can be proven that they are not linked to gangland payoffs. The lawyer they have assigned me is either stupid or in the pay of my enemies. He wants me to plead guilty to the lesser charge of accepting a bribe and thereby take only a short prison sentence and dismissal from the police. He doesn’t seem to entertain the fact that I might be innocent. I am at my wit’s end, Molly. You are my one candle in this darkness. I’m relying on you. Don’t let me down.