Page 82 of Road Trip
“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 roomwalls 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. ItisJohn Wayne. According to this, he and Maureen O’Hara visited Tarrymore in 1951, when they were filmingThe Quiet Manmovie 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, GeraldineBellentree 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.
